Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

The Death of Journalism

I was just thinking about that Washington Post article I blogged about earlier this afternoon — the one about Governor Kaine’s new order prohibiting gun sales to people who’ve been involuntarily committed to inpatient or outpatient mental health treatment centers.

And I was thinking about the questions I asked — about whether this will include drug and alcohol rehab centers. Since far more people are involuntarily sent for treatment of drug and alcohol problems than for treatment of other mental illnesses, Kaine’s order has the potential to affect a whole bunch of people, no? All those hunters who like to have a few beers after work and who have maybe been required to undergo alcoholism treatment after their 3rd or 4th DUI, for example. What’s going to happen the next time they head in to Bubba’s Gun Shack to buy a new deer rifle?

And then I thought: Why didn’t the Washington Post’s reporter ask about those things? What kind of “reporting” is it when the reporter doesn’t even mention the potential an order has to affect a great number of people’s lives? Did this not even occur to him?

And that led me to think about a really fine episode of Bill Moyers Journal that recently aired on PBS. It was called “Buying The War” and it was largely about how, during the lead-up to the Iraq war, “big media” pretty much just printed whatever the government told them. A notable exception was reporters at the Knight-Ridder newspapers that largely served the middle of the country. Knight-Ridder was sold last year and has since, to a degree, been dismantled.

That’s probably just a coincidence, though.

At any rate, the idea behind Moyers show was the same thing Al Franken (in his great book The Truth (with jokes)) describes Tom Oliphant complaining about:

You know, we’ve put a million stories in our wastebaskets over the years, because they don’t…check…out. Today, we publish, or we broadcast, the mere fact of the accusation, regardless of whether it’s filled with helium. That’s what’s changed in our business. We serve as transmission belts for this stuff without ever inquiring into its accuracy.

Certainly, a reporter failing to ask what the governor’s new order will mean for people ordered by the courts into drug or alcohol treatment is of an entirely different magnitude than a reporter failing to ask where all those “weapons of mass destruction” went, but I think it’s still a symptom of a very lazy kind of reporting.

Anyone can report the mere facts. It takes a journalist to tell us what the facts mean.

Too Crazy For A Gun

Kaine Closes Va. Gun Sale Loophole – washingtonpost.com
Appearing alongside Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R), Kaine (D) said the order will help prevent people like Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, from legally obtaining firearms. Cho, who killed 32 people and himself, was able to purchase his guns even though a court had found him to be dangerously mentally ill.

Not exactly.

A court found that there was enough evidence that Cho might be a danger to himself or others that they ordered him to be involuntarily committed to a mental health facility so trained psychologists and/or psychiatrists could examine him and make the determination as to whether he was dangerously ill. As it happens, the doctors who examined in Cho in 2005 found that, at that time, he was not a danger to himself or others.

Maybe I’m too much of a stickler for details (NOT), but I think it’s worthwhile for people who report the news to actually report it accurately. The day a court can find someone to be mentally ill is the day we’re all in danger of being exported to a gulag somewhere in Siberia.

(But, hey… with the Bush administration in charge, that day may be coming more quickly that we’d ever have dreamed.)

Cho,23, was declared mentally ill in December 2005 after being evaluated at the New River Community Services in Blacksburg, causing some to argue he should have been covered under the law even if he received outpatient services.

This is idiotic. People aren’t “declared mentally ill” in the way this writer implies. In Cho’s case, it was the opinion of the doctors who examined him that he was mentally ill but it didn’t appear to them at that time that he was a danger to himself or others.

While I like the idea of fewer people buying weapons, I can’t imagine that Kaine’s new law will go very far.

How are they going to define “mentally ill” and “facility”? Are people who’ve been ordered into alcohol or drug treatment going to be prohibited from buying guns? I sure as hell hope so because FAR more homicides are committed by people who are drunk or have drug problems than by people, like Cho, who are severely mentally ill.

Female Bloggers

Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers – washingtonpost.com
Some female bloggers say their colleagues just need thicker skin. Columnist Michelle Malkin, who blogs about politics and culture, said she sympathizes with Sierra but has chided the bloggers expressing outrage now. “First, where have y’all been? For several years, the unhinged Internet underworld has been documented here,” she wrote, reposting a comment on her site that called for the “torture, rape, murder” of her family.

Report the serious threats to law enforcement, she urged. And above all: “Keep blogging. Don’t cut and run.”

Whoa! This is a very scary day — the day I agree with something Michelle Malkin has said! Malkin is absolutely right, though — and she has been on the receiving end of some of the vilest crap I’ve ever seen directed towards anyone, man or woman, on the internet.

In the grand scheme of the internet, I’m nobody. I’m probably less than nobody. I have, however, been online a lot longer than most women (about 15 years now) and I often write about controversial topics. Over the years I’ve been insulted many times and threatened a few times. My experience is that the best way of dealing with that kind of thing is to make it public.

Being online is a lot like driving a car. I think you can really tell a lot about a person by how they drive. If they’ve got a hidden angry and agressive thing going on, they’re going to be the kind of person who’s a real asshole behind the wheel — or in the comments section of your blog. You can never be 100% sure, of course, but odds are that a person who acts like a jerk when they’re driving or commenting isn’t going to intentionally do anything to you in real life. (Unfortunately, creepy behavior behind the wheel is a whole lot more dangerous than obnoxious blog-commenting.)

Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, “it’s been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men.”

As a former regular reader of Salon, I have to say that I haven’t seen that to be the case at all. I have, however, noted that Joan Walsh is a bit of a whiner at times so… I’m taking her claim with several grains of salt.

There, I got my gratuitous insult against a woman in. Do I get my prize now?

Illegal Immigrants Have Little Impact on US Economy or Jobs

Sebastian Mallaby – Lazy, Job-Stealing Immigrants? – washingtonpost.com
People say that immigrants cause wage losses even if they don’t cause job losses. Here the story is subtle: Some studies find no evidence that immigrants pull down wages, while others find that native-born high school dropouts lost as much as 9 percent of their earnings between 1980 and 2000 as a result of immigration. But — and here comes the sane scream — there’s no way that even a 9 percent wage loss can justify the policies that immigration hawks advocate.

Not only that, since the people these undocumented workers are competing with are primarily native-born high school dropouts, US citizens should welcome the presence of these immigrant-workers as providing a strong incentive for our own kids to stay in school and get a good education!

I’m only half-kidding, by the way.

A few nights ago my spouse and I watched an episode of Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit!” on Showtime where the dynamic duo focused on illegal immigration. They had a group of six illegal immigrants spend an entire day building a segment of fence — of the sort that is being built along our border with Mexico. (Not to worry, friends, the workers were paid for their labor.) Once the fence was built, the six split into three teams of two men each and competed to see who could get on the other side of the fence fastest. One team was to go over, one team was to go through, and one team was to go under. All three teams made it with little difficulty. The slowest — the team that went over the fence — took only about six minutes.

Now just how effective do you think that additional 700 miles of fencing is going to be, hmm? We’re spending how may billion dollars on this? To slow people down by six minutes — at most? People whose presence in our country has pretty much zero net effect on our economy or crime rates??

Brilliant.

I’d call this a Halliburton Moment ¹.

——-
1. Halliburton Moment is my special just-made-up name for government programs that are hugely expensive but don’t actually accomplish anything other than to make a lot of money for the contractor.

Boat Blogging

This evening’s blog entry comes to you from the Deltaville Yachting Center in lovely Deltaville, Virginia — right by the Chesapeake Bay.

At this very moment I am, in fact, on board our boat in the DYC marina. They have wireless internet! How cool is that? Pretty damn cool.

The picture above is of our boat’s “salon”. There’s Mark with his computer. Here’s a picture facing the other direction towards the “galley” and the “aft berth”. There’s also a “head” to the left but not in this picture. For those of you who haven’t been initiated into the strange world of nautical lingo: “salon” = livingroom, “galley”=kitchen, “aft berth”=back bedroom, “head”=bathroom.

It’s all pretty swell, as you might imagine. We went out onto the Chesapeake earlier today. We’ll spend the night on the boat tonight and then head back home to Fairfax tomorrow.

I really want to say some nice things about Deltaville Yachting Center.

We bought our boat through these folks and it’s where we’re keeping it. In the grand scheme of boating on the Chesapeake, we’re pretty small potatoes. There are lots of MUCH bigger and more expensive boats here at DYC. They have treated us so incredibly well here, though, you’d think we were million-dollar customers. The level of service has been amazing and wonderful. When our boat was still being built and after it had been delivered but was still awaiting the completion of some extra things we were having done, DYC would call us every week just to let us know what the status was. Their responsiveness, concern, and just plain kindness has been absolutely great. I just can’t say enough about how swell these folks are. They’ve created customers-for-life with us.

Anyway. So we’re here on the boat… computing, listening to the iPod with the external speaker system I got Mark for Christmas, drinking wine. Later on we’ll probably watch some episodes of “Lost” on ABC’s streaming video site.

Technology is good.

These pictures, by the way, were just taken using the built-in camera on my MacBook. We brought a digital camera and I have a bunch of other pictures on that, but we forgot the cable for downloading them to the computer. Oops.

Worlds Within Worlds

How Did the Universe Start? | Cosmic Variance
Most of us suffer under the vague impression — with our intuitions trained by classical general relativity and the innocent-sounding assumption that our local uniformity can be straightforwardly extrapolated across infinity — that the Big Bang singularity is a past boundary to the entire universe, one that must somehow be smoothed out to make sense of the pre-Bang universe. But the Bang isn’t all that different from future singularities, of the type we’re familiar with from black holes. We don’t really know what’s going on at black-hole singularities, either, but that doesn’t stop us from making sense of what happens from the outside. A black hole forms, settles down, Hawking-radiates, and eventually disappears entirely. Something quasi-singular goes on inside, but it’s just a passing phase, with the outside world going on its merry way.

The Big Bang could have very well been like that, but backwards in time. In other words, our observable patch of expanding universe could be some local region that has a singularity (or whatever quantum effects may resolve it) in the past, but is part of a larger space in which many past-going paths don’t hit that singularity.

Maybe our universe is just one tiny bubble within a vast ocean — an ocean which, itself, is on a planet in a galaxy in a universe which is just one tiny bubble within a vast ocean. And so on. Forever.

We simply have no way of knowing.

Moments like these just make me smile.

Condi Rice Spits In The Face Of The American People

Hill Subpoenas Approved for Rice, Other Bush Officials – washingtonpost.com
Rice, in Oslo for a meeting with NATO foreign ministers, said on Thursday she was not inclined to appear before the committee, saying her advice to the president as National Security Adviser was privileged, the Associated Press reported. She said that she had answered many of the same questions in her confirmation hearings for secretary of state, and said she would respond to this round of inquiry in writing — but not in person.

Excuse me? Just who the fuck does she think pays her salary? Hint: It’s not George W. Bush. It’s you and I, friends, and if my representatives in Congress want her to come in and answer some questions in person, then I think that’s exactly what she ought to do. I don’t care how many times she thinks she’s already answered these questions. She works for us — or, at least, she’s supposed to.

See? This is just more of the same kind of crap we’ve been getting from Alberto Gonzales — this “I’m not answerable to you people” bullshit. Well, I’ve got news for both of them. Yes they are too answerable to us (that is, to our representatives in Congress) and our Constitution was written specifically to ensure that. Yes, yes… I know there’s a level of privilege granted for communications between these people and the President — but not when there’s evidence of malfeasance. And there’s plenty of that.

God, these people piss me off.

That Chilling Effect

Respectful Insolence: Wiley & Sons: When “fair use” equals “no use”
Shelley, over at Retrospectacle posted a rather nice analysis of a paper that appeared in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture entitled Natural volatile treatments increase free-radical scavenging capacity of strawberries and blackberries. She was skeptical about news reports and press releases about the article, and did an analysis that showed that the paper did not show quite what the press was representing it as showing. In her post, she used a figure from the paper under the “fair use” doctrine to illustrate her point, and within a day received a letter from a lawyer threatening legal action if she did not immediately remove the figure.

People can be such pricks.

I’ve received threats of this kind twice.

The first time was after I wrote a couple of blog posts harshly criticizing the way a local company had treated me. What probably irritated them the most was that, at that time, the person running their own web site had apparently not yet learned the fine art of increasing ones Google ranking so, when a person would Google their company name, MY criticial blog post would come up on the first page. Heh, heh… and I got a LOT of hits from it which, as you might imagine, was pretty gratifying. Anyway, they had their lawyers write me a snotty letter threatening to sue me if I didn’t remove my posts immediately. I wrote my own letter back to the lawyers telling them that a) my blog posts were factually correct, b) I was fully entitled to publicly express my opinion of the company, and c) I was also fully entitled to encourage my fellow citizens to not do business with them. I did volunteer to remove a couple of sentences where I called the company “thieves”, saying that unsophisticated people might misunderstand that it was a figurative expression and that I wasn’t accusing the company of actually breaking the law. I made those very minor changes and I never heard from the lawyers again. And I still get LOTS AND LOTS of hits from Google and, surely, some of those people have chosen not to do business with that company because of what I wrote. Hurray! The little guy triumphs!

The other time I was threatened was pretty much just a joke. I mean… the guy was serious, but it was so ridiculous it never had me worried. I had written a post criticizing the “medical advice” (and I use the term VERY loosely) being offered for sale on a web site. Several months later, the owner of the site sent an email demanding that I remove my post and every reference to his site or he would sic his “team of lawyers” on me. As before, I responded with “No. And here’s why…” Though I did hear from that individual quite a few times afterwards via comments on my blog, no further threats of legal action were made. I get a lot of Google hits on that, too, by the way.

Anyway, I guess my whole point in writing this is to say that, first of all, be really careful that what you’ve written about an individual or a company doesn’t constitute defamation. You can find out more about that on the Electronic Frontier Foundation web site. Second, don’t allow letters from lawyers to freak you out. Lawyers are TRAINED to freak you out so you’ll back down. (Right, lawyer-buddies?) If you know you’re in the right and you’ve got the nerve for it and the time to spend, just write back to them and tell them why you won’t be complying with their request. Be polite. You don’t want to piss the lawyer off to the point where she develops a personal reason for wanting bother you because, even if you’re in the right, a lawyer on a vendetta can make your life very miserable indeed.

In the story I quoted up above, the blogger did remove the (portion of a) table she’d copied, even though she was pretty clearly making fair use of it. She has her own reasons for having done that. Maybe she just didn’t have time for the hassle and the point wasn’t important enough to her that she wanted to argue it. I’m just saying… don’t let the bastards scare you. If you’re sure you’re right, go ahead and tell them you won’t be obeying and why. Chances are that’s the last you’ll hear of it.

[Disclaimer: I'm fortunate to have my own "team of lawyers" whom I consult when in doubt about these things. It's always best to be ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY SURE you're in the right.]

Goodling Granted Immunity

Panel Grants Immunity to Gonzales Aide – washingtonpost.com
The House Judiciary Committee today overwhelmingly approved granting limited immunity from prosecution to a former top Justice Department aide in order to obtain her testimony in the investigation of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

Oooo! This ought to be interesting! I sure hope she’s got something to say that’s worth giving her immunity.

I was just reading the letter Goodling’s lawyers sent to Senator Leahy on March 26th — the letter advising the Judiciary Committee that Goodling would take the 5th if required to testify.

I’m a bit confused and maybe one of you law students out there who is actually studying the Constitution will clarify this for me.

I was under the impression that the 5th Amendment was to protect a person from self-incrimination. Yes? But the reason Goodling’s lawyers gives for why she’d be taking the 5th pretty much boil down to:

• The Committee has already decided that Goodling did something bad so they wouldn’t listen to her anyway.
• This is nothing but a show-trial for political purposes.
• One of the other people who testified lied about what Goodling did or didn’t know.

Now… I’m certainly no expert, but none of that really looks to me like a reason for needing protection against self-incrimination. Her lawyers claim that because of the “ambiguous” circumstances surrounding Ms Goodling’s role in this whole fiasco, she could be unfairly besmirched — just like that poor Scooter Libby fellow. (Honest. They actually use Scooter Libby as an example! Ha!)

I don’t have a problem with the Committee giving Goodling immunity. I mean… Monica Goodling? Who cares. She’s nobody. (Though, I’m sure her friends and family all love her to pieces. Even if she is a Republican. Maybe she’s over that now, though. We can only hope.)

What I wonder about is this: Can a person refuse to testify, citing the 5th Amendment as their rationale, and be thrown in jail for contempt if the judge or Committee or whatever finds their reason for taking the 5th to be…well…lame?

Blogging “The Iliad” – 70

As he spoke he felled Pisander from his chariot to the earth, smiting him on the chest with his spear, so that he lay face uppermost upon the ground. Hippolochus fled, but him too did Agamemnon smite; he cut off his hands and his head–which he sent rolling in among the crowd as though it were a ball.

Uh…yeah. Okay. Whatever.

There’s been a whole lot of smiting going on in The Iliad. Frankly, it’s a little dull. It was more interesting when Achilles and Agamemnon were arguing about women.

A person would have to be into that whole “warrior thing” to enjoy this stuff. For a tree-hugger like me, it’s just sort of boring and stupidly violent.

I’m determined to see it through to the end, though. Only…argh!…104 more episodes to go!