The Phantom Menace, Ground Zero Edition
Seems we have been underestimating the dimensions of the Ground Zero Jihad Victory Mosque:
The planned “ultra-mosque” will be a staggering 5,600ft tall – more than five times higher than the tallest building on Earth – and will be capped with an immense dome of highly-polished solid gold, carefully positioned to bounce sunlight directly toward the pavement, where it will blind pedestrians and fry small dogs. The main structure will be delimited by 600 minarets, each shaped like an upraised middle finger, and housing a powerful amplifier: when synchronised, their combined sonic might will be capable of relaying the muezzin’s call to prayer at such deafening volume, it will be clearly audible in the Afghan mountains, where thousands of terrorists are poised to celebrate by running around with scarves over their faces, firing AK-47s into the sky and yelling whatever the foreign word for “victory” is.
No, not really, but Brooker makes the salient point very well:
Perhaps spatial reality functions differently on the other side of the Atlantic, but here in London, something that is “two minutes’ walk and round a corner” from something else isn’t actually “in” the same place at all. I once had a poo in a pub about two minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace. I was not subsequently arrested and charged with crapping directly onto the Queen’s pillow. That’s how “distance” works in Britain. It’s also how distance works in America, of course, but some people are currently pretending it doesn’t, for daft political ends.
There is no longer anything resembling coherence in modern politics.
Philip Selznick, 1919-2010
Philip Selznick is dead:
Selznick was considered a founder of the institutional perspective in organization theory.
“He showed that organizations are living institutions imbued with cultural and informal characteristics that can constrain and also enhance rationality,” said Lauren Edelman, associate dean of Berkeley Law’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and a professor of law and sociology.
Evidence of the Imminent Approach of the Apocalypse
Uncle Ray used to keep on his coffee table an envelope bearing the legend “Evidence of the Imminent Approach of the Apocalypse”. He used it to keep news clippings of this sort:
Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes is warning voters that Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s policies, particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are “converting Denver into a United Nations community.”
“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes told about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in Centennial.
Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”
“This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms,” Maes said.
He added: “These aren’t just warm, fuzzy ideas from the mayor. These are very specific strategies that are dictated to us by this United Nations program that mayors have signed on to.”
This week’s polling shows Maes ahead of his opponent 43% to 39%. The primary election is next Tuesday.
The decision
In the last week, our debate stretched on. What would Scuzzi say, if he could, I asked; as he rested on Jane’s shoulder, what did those sad, amber-green eyes convey? Help me to my end? Or let me live, until I let go on my own? His suffering was evident, but so, too, the family’s anguish. I saw, finally, that I risked becoming something I had come to loathe in years spent in places ruled by ideology — a man capable of placing principle, tortured or otherwise, before kindness, common sense, and the common good.
- NYT
dear clusterflock
When I choose to work with a new client, part of my evaluation process is to determine whether the potential client is emotionally healthy. What I am trying to do is weed out screamers, sociopaths, passive-aggressives, control freaks, and other typics of toxic behaviors. This isn’t intended as arrogance but rather a way to increase the likelihood of a mutually beneficial partnership (by the way, I think it’s quite legitimate and even necessary for a client to require the same of me). It’s a standard that’s increasingly useful in social life as well.
Here’s the problem: I am making this decision on little more than intuition. If you were to apply this same standard in any facet of your life, what one question would you ask to discern whether another person is emotionally healthy?
The Dark Side
White men can’t jump and black men can’t swim…
…but it’s not quite because of race:
Our approach is to study phenotypic (somatotypic) differences … which we consider to have been historically misclassified as racial characteristics. These differences represent consequences of still not well-understood variable environmental stimuli for survival fitness in different parts of the globe during thousands of years of habitation. Our study does not advance the notion of race, now recognized as a social construct, as opposed to a biological construct. We acknowledge the wide phenotypic and genotypic diversity among the so-called racial types.
The “social construct vs. biological construct” approach, though deceptively simple, could be profoundly important in advancing how we think about race and gender.
Your honor, the word you are looking for is “clusterflock”
“By prohibiting all ‘patently offensive” references to sex, sexual organs, and excretion without giving adequate guidance as to what ‘patently offensive’ means, the FCC effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive,” Judge Pooler wrote.
- Law.com
Carl Safina on TEDxOilSpill
This talk is unsettling but important to contemplate. Safina’s main point is that the situation in the Gulf is not at all an accident, but rather a systemic failure of government. One of many money quotes:
Personally, I think that the dispersants are a major strategy to hide the body, because we put the murderer in charge of the crime scene.
We discussed here whether we were smart enough to understand all those big words the president was throwing at us, but Safina seems pretty sure we weren’t meant to.
Political movement out of context
“I am disinclined to take lectures on racial sensitivity from a group that insists on calling black people, ‘Colored,’” Mark Williams, national spokesman of the Tea Party Express, told CNN.
Not the tack I would have taken, but I suppose compromise has fallen out of favor.
Is there any reason I shouldn’t sport this?
Something Swearengen should have said…
… but it was actually Cy Tolliver:
Sayin’ questions in that tone and pointin’ your finger at me will get you told to fuck yourself.
Ask Swearengen
Dear Al,
I am at this moment sitting in the first-class compartment on a flight across the American continent. There is good wi-fi and good drink, but also a number of people for whom I have no patience. What think ye?
Faux Richard Branson
- – -
Dick,
Sometimes I wish we could just hit ‘em over the head, rob ‘em, and throw their bodies in the creek.
Superciliously,
Al
Indefensible Position: books are better in digital form
Using the iBooks and Kindle apps on the iPad, I am rediscovering a love of reading that had been in remission for a while. I still like paper, but in the past couple of weeks I have read the following:
- Breakpoint
- The Scorpion’s Gate
- Shit My Dad Says
- War
- Game Change
- Medium Raw
I may be missing a couple. The digital form such as it is today has made me feel like a boy again. That’s my heresy for the day.
Ask Swearengen
Dear Al,When you find yourself in the Costco picking up whiskey and canned peaches, what do you do when you get in the self-checkout line and find yourself behind some hoople-head who don’t know how to use it?Onanistic in OK- – -
Dear Self-Stroker,
I’ll tell you this, son, you can mark my words, Crazy Horse went into Little Bighorn, bought his people one good, long-term ass-fucking. You do not want to be a dirt-worshipping heathen from this fucking point forward. Pardon my French.
Love,
Al
Moose
Branded, but not for life
In just a couple of hours, a number of cattle brands–some in the same families for over a century–are set to expire:
Cattle branding’s still the way to mark ownership of livestock in the West. But July 1st is the last hurrah for several thousand Colorado brands. It’s the final deadline for Coloradans to pay the fee that gives them the rights to their brand, so we figured it would be a good time to check in with Rick Wahlert. He’s the director of Brand Inspection for the Department of Agriculture. Wahlert spoke to Zachary Barr, and he began by talking about his memories of branding cattle on his family’s ranch in northeastern Colorado.
The spy who swayed me
Possibly treasonous, but I believe I have a better understanding of what might persuade me to provide information.
The Cupertino cockblock
Apple’s memo to store employees about iPhone 4 reception problems:
1. Keep all of the positioning statements in the BN handy – your tone when delivering this information is important.
a. The iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped. Our testing shows that iPhone 4’s overall antenna performance is better than iPhone 3GS.
b. Gripping almost any mobile phone in certain places will reduce its reception. This is true of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, and many other phones we have tested. It is a fact of life in the wireless world.
c. If you are experiencing this on your iPhone 3GS, avoid covering the bottom-right side with your hand.
d. If you are experiencing this on your iPhone 4, avoid covering the black strip in the lower-left corner of the metal band.
e. The use of a case or Bumper that is made out of rubber or plastic may improve wireless performance by keeping your hand from directly covering these areas.
2. Do not perform warranty service. Use the positioning above for any customer questions or concerns.
3. Don’t forget YOU STILL NEED to probe and troubleshoot. If a customer calls about their reception while the phone is sitting on a table (not being held) it is not the metal band.
4. ONLY escalate if the issue exists when the phone is not held AND you cannot resolve it.
5. We ARE NOT appeasing customers with free bumpers – DON’T promise a free bumper to customers.
Sounds like tomdouchery to me.
Apostrophes and media
This one’s for Cindy:
I’ve taught college writing classes for a long time, and after computers came in, I began to see peculiar stuff on papers that I hadn’t seen before: obvious missing commas and apostrophes, when I was sure most of those students knew better. It dawned on me that they were doing all their work on-screen, where it’s hard to see punctuation. I began to lecture them about proofing on paper, although, at first, I didn’t make much headway. They were unused to dealing with paper until the final draft, and they’d been taught never to make hand corrections on the printout. They edited on-screen and handed in the hard copy without a glance.
Ask Swearengen
Dear Al,
My favorite blog recently had some discussion about Alcoholics Anonymous and alternatives. I am curious about your thoughts on such groups. My roommate just left the house with a Holy Bible tucked under his arm, telling me that he and his sponsor were “on our way to a meeting”. I am distrustful of these meetings, preferring to sit on the sofa with my cat under one arm and a bottle of Ten High Whiskey under the other while watching M*A*S*H re-runs. Should I think about trying a meeting?
Shit-faced and Skeptical
—
Dear Shit-faced,
“On our way” means they’re getting drunk and blown in some saloon in Cheyenne and running their mouths about the big fuckin’ filibustering expedition they’re being commissioned for under the command of the famous Hawkeye; the laziest, most shit-faced whore-mongering cocksucker to ever piss my money away!
Al
Maiming’s what I prefer. Psychologically.
In a pre-election missive to Gordon Brown on his Cameron strategy, the (sadly) fictional Malcolm Tucker simultaneously addresses American health care, the $25 meth baby, and the membership of clusterflock:
In the final week we’ve got to promote in the public imagination the role of the odd, the pimply, and the cerebral. The people who are going to take away your child and exchange it for a voucher, give you a slot-operated hospital bed and get you to swipe your credit card as you’re heaved on the air ambulance. And other actually very brilliant ideas.
indeed.
“The fact that one was a writer could be relied upon to explain the most curious extravagances.”
- Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios
What I imagine the values of clusterflock to be
Yesterday I asked a serious question about something I’m very interested in: how would we describe the culture of clusterflock? The post didn’t get much traction, at least for the question itself. That’s no big deal–as Cindy said in channeling Bad Santa, “they can’t all be winners”.
That said, though, I’m still pretty curious. If culture comprises values and norms, what might those be? To satisfy my curiosity (this may be technical onanism, by the way), I started scribbling out what I thought some of the values might be, on the assumption that the norms would probably match up to them. Here’s what I came up with for what I imagine some of the values of clusterflock to be:
- Participation
- Honesty
- Inclusion
- Integrity
- Creativity
- Humor
- Respect
- Sense of intelligence (walt)
- Sense of curiosity (walt)
- Seeking (CeCe)
- Mutual affection despite differences (CeCe and Sheila)
- Collaboration (fuz)
- Love for language (Luke)
- Loyalty (Daryl)
- Maturity (Cindy)
- Thoughtfulness (Cindy)
What do you think? Hits? Misses?
UPDATE: This is a fascinating list for me given that it communicates so much about who we are and who we think we are. Once they’re back, I’d be interested in what the travelers think.
Quote that is chilling me to the bone
“To have a child is to give fate a hostage.”
- JFK
