Category Archives: News & Media

The world around us… and the stupid things that are happening in it…

Burnt…

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I’m not a particularly pious man. I don’t think I can remember the last time I was in a church that didn’t involve a wedding or a funeral. I don’t think that makes me a bad person and I still think of myself, nominally, as a Christian. At least that’s how I was raised. Even if I were a hard core, mainstream Christian I can’t imagine a scenario where someone burning a Bible would result in me and my closest friends taking to the street and demanding execution for the guys who lit the flame. As a matter of principle, I’m opposed to book burning in whatever form it takes. Destroying knowledge is never good for the upward swing of humanity. Still, I think it’s time for our Afghan friends to take a deep breath and think for a minute before they decided this is an issue worth dying and killing for. I’m not a theologian or anything, but I’m pretty sure that God or Allah, or whoever you’re busy praying to doesn’t actually live between the covers of the Bible or Koran. At the end of the day it’s just a book – a collection of highly processed pieces of dead trees. You can no more destroy a system of beliefs contained in a copy of one of these books than you can destroy Kellogs by setting fire to the box of Corn Flakes I have sitting on top of my refrigerator.

Was it a mistake? Maybe. Was it stupid? Absolutely. Is it worth killing over? Yeah, not to much. I guess I just don’t have the mindset to be an extremist. Some things are worth fighting and dying for… To my way of thinking, though, anything I can buy from Amazon and have shipped to my house overnight doesn’t qualify for that level of importance.

To whom much is given…

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Because of talent in some particular field, some people are set above all others. It happens in all walks of life: politics, sports, academics, and yes, especially in the entertainment industry. Maybe it’s crass to say this, but I have a hard time finding sympathy for those who achieve these heights and then actively try to undo their success through bad behavior, drug abuse, and general hard living. While I can be empathetic to family and friends who have lost someone, I can’t get on board with efforts to lionize that person by choosing to ignore the decisions that lead them inexorably towards untimely death. Ultimately, we all live and die by the decisions we make. I’m less sympathetic when a so-called celebrity falls to their own bad decisions than I am for the tweekers on any street in West Baltimore. They, at least, didn’t have much of a choice to begin with.

So yeah, while the news channels are screaming that this is a big deal, all I’ve managed to see is a someone who was given the world and decided to throw it all away. Maybe it is a situation worthy of our collective sympathy, but I’m just not feeling it.

Illusion…

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I can see from the outcry that’s been consuming the world wide interwebs this afternoon that Google must have done something that someone, somewhere decided was evil. Yawn. So what? Google is a multi-billion dollar company working hard to build additional value for its shareholders. Google might own and operate file sharing and storage sites, a ridiculously reliable (and free) email service, blogging platforms, online productivity tools, social media and gaming sites, and its own phone company, but don’t think for a minute that any of those things are really Google’s main business line. They provide all of these things at no monetary cost to the consumer because they are, ultimately, in the sales and marketing business. Their business model involves nothing more scandalous than matching up buyers and sellers for just about any product or service you or I can imagine. Instead of the targeted billboards and newspaper inserts of yesteryear, they use giant server farms and targeted web ads, but it’s really just using a modern means to achieve an age-old end.

From what I’ve been able to gather, sometime a month or two from now, all of us that use Google will be opreating under a new privacy policy that covers every site under their corporate umberella. Personally, I think that kind of cross-platform fusion is precisely what the internet is supposed to be about. Why shouldn’t my experience with Gmail, YouTube, Picasa, and the rest of the Google family of sites be exactly the same instead of each having its own, slightly different take on privacy. If nothing else, the new universal policy will let us all know precisely the position Google is taking. Then we can make an informed decision about whether we accept that policy or not.

If it turns out I can’t live with the new privacy policy, as big as they are, Google isn’t the only game in town. I’m pretty sure I could still dredge up the password from my old Hotmal account if I really had to. Then again, they’re a free service run by another conglomerate who’s trying to sell stuff to me too. Maybe it would be better if I just bought my own mailserver and managed all my own correspondence through JeffMail.com. Alternatively, I could find a company with a privacy policy I believe in and pay them cold, hard cash to provide me all the services that Google wraps up under one umbrella. None of those things seems very likely to happen, though. Instead, I’ll click “accept” when given the opportunity and continue my life without giving it much more thought.

The internet isn’t your house. What we’re doing here isn’t happening behind closed doors, especially when we’re not the ones who own the servers, routers, and other equipment involved in bringing the world together electronically. We certainly have an expectation that companies will make diligent efforts to protect our personally identifiable information like social security and credit card numbers or our account passwords, but expecting an ironclad veil of privacy surrounding our online habits and interaction is, in a phrase, dumber than dog shit. Here’s some helpful advice from your kindly Uncle Jeff: If you don’t want people to find out what you’re up to, don’t do it online. I promise that Google, Facebook, the deposed Nigerian prince, your long lost cousin from Dipshitistan, and possibly the CIA are watching.

State of the Union…

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In the strictest possible sense, the state of the Union, is peachy. It’s not like we have states threatening to join up with Canada or Mexico or anything. We’re in the middle of a presidential election cycle where if the incumbent is turned out of office we’ll most likely see yet another peaceful transition of executive authority. Considering world demographics, even the least among us is doing better than the large majority of everyone else on the planet. We survived our capital city being sacked. We survived a brutal civil war and then fought in the war to end all wars before getting pulled into the war after that. In between these wars, we survived finical panics and Great Depressions, pestilence, and famine. Despite it all, we’re still here and managed to cure contagious diseases, send a man to the moon, and connect the world with nothing more than electrons. Keep in mind, we did all those things in our free time when we weren’t occupied dealing with the big stuff. That’s my big picture thinking about the state of the Union, anyway.

If you distill the state of the Union down to the question of whether you’re better off now than you were four years ago, the response probably isn’t as positive. There are plenty of people who can’t find work, can’t buy or sell a house, and at best have spent the last four or five years treading water at best and being pulled under at worst. It’s not an easy time for America and it’s not an easy time to be American. It’s easy to be an optimist when Wall Street only goes higher and unemployment runs at 3%. It’s a hell of a lot harder to be an optimist when you can’t find a job or you’re going to bed hungry at night.

So, you ask, what’s really the state of the Union? Well, it’s probably somewhere between the two extremes. That’s where reality tends to live. It’s neither as strong nor as weak as the pundits and politicos make it out to be. The United States, warts and all, is still the shining example of how to be a republic. Local, State, and Federal governments fight one another. Political parties fight with everyone. Even the separate branches of the same government are locked in Byzantine conflict. Somehow we muddle through without veering too far left or too far right. Dysfunctional as it is, the process is still a wonder to behold. With financial crisis spreading through Europe, our lifeblood oil flowing from the Middle East, and the supply chain for our consumer goods that stretches all over Asia, we Americans are once again learning that we have to engage with the world – the whole world. The future, and a far stronger Union, lie in the direction of cooperation, consensus, and international competition. It’s a hard lesson, but one well worth learning.

Big Mac knew…

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This country use to know what to do with subversives, malcontents, and other undesirable elements who set up shop in our cities and made trouble for people just trying to do their jobs. One thing’s for sure, 80 years ago, we didn’t just turn off the electricity and hope they’d go away on their own.

On July 28th 1932, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by a column of Renault tanks commanded by Major George S. Patton, formed up on Pennsylvania Avenue. Thousands of people left work to line the street and watch. The protestors, who believed the troops were marching in support of their cause, cheered until Patton’s cavalry charged their position. After the cavalry charge, the infantry fixed bayonets and under cover of vomit-inducing gas, cleared the protestors from their makeshift camp on Anacostia Flats. Big Mac had plenty of faults, but he knew how to get a job done.

I’d give real money to see General Odierno and Colonel Allen go to work cleaning up the parks, town squares, and centers of commerce that have already been tied up for too long. If the Occupy Wall Street crowd that claims to be “peacefully” demonstrating continues breaking into public and private property, committing arson, vandalism, and violent acts, they need to be put down as the collection of common criminals that they seem bent on being. The 1st Amendment protection of free speech doesn’t mean we should allow a small subset of people to cause chaos on the streets of American cities.

We use to know the line between legitimate protest and creating a public nuisance. It’s a pity we’ve forgotten where that line is while we’ve been busy coddling everyone and telling them that they’re special and important.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, that’s what annoys Jeff this week.

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Regardless of what you call it, when you creditors agree to write off 50% of your existing debt you are, by definition in default. Call it a haircut. Call it a Pontiac. It’s a default. Period. End of story. Fortunately, the world is polite enough to call it something different in the hopes that no one will notice and in the process they can prevent the European Union from flinging itself apart. When the rest of the world goes to all this trouble, the polite thing to do would be to say thank you and then go on about the business of trying to salvage your national economy. But that’s not your style is it, Greece. Oh no. You’re going to ask you voters, who have already demonstrated their inability to face reality, vote on the idea as a national referendum. Seriously? Are you trying to make a name for yourself as the go-to country for dysfunctional government? As a citizen of the United States, I thought we had a lock on that one, but you’re making a damned good run at it.

Look, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us have to take our share of the bitter, bitter austerity medicine. Yes, it sucks being the one stuck going first but that was just the luck of the draw. Could have happened to any of a dozen debtor nations. We can kick and scream that it’s not fair until we’re all blue in the face, but guess what… the universe doesn’t care about fair. We can do the hard things now, while we still have some options, or we can wait a while and then spend the next two decades just reacting to things that could have been avoided if we’d have taken action sooner.

Justice…

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For the most part, I’m a fan of the rule of law. In a civilized world, the dispassionate delivery of justice is just the normal way of things. Libya, for the time being, is most decidedly not part of the civilized world. Being in the midst of a revolution tends to preclude a country from practicing some of the niceties. That’s why I’m a little confused by the talking heads and news readers who seem to think the Libyan revolutionaries should have paused during a running firefight to swear out an arrest warrant for their recently deposed head of state.

Frankly, I’m more than a little surprised he wasn’t more badly mauled than he was. The guy had been torturing his own people for more than four decades. Does anyone really expect them to sit tight and wait for the gendarmerie to take their former dictator into custody? We’re not talking about your run of the mill serial killer here. After you’ve spent a lifetime blowing airliners out of the sky, harboring terrorists, and committing a laundry list of war crimes, I think this is a fine example of someone to whom the usual rules need not apply.

Personally, I haven’t lost any sleep because he will never see the inside of The Hague. Trying a lunatic like Gaddafi for “crimes” makes the atrocities he committed seem entirely too trivial. Being gunned down in the dirt and then left to rot in an underpowered deep freeze seems like an altogether more fitting end for a sadistic madman. The only shame is that they can’t find a way to revive him and do it again. Sic semper tyrannis.

I learned it from watching you…

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If the story I just saw run across the local news channel is to be believed, apparently one of the most insidious challenges facing young girls this year will be a new Barbie doll that has *gasp* tattoos. Apparently this 7 inch tall bit of plastic is causing an uproar among parents who have nothing better to do with their day than complain about plastic dolls. If you’re worried about her dolly turning your little princess into a pink haired, spike heel wearing skank, here’s some advice from kindly Uncle Jeff: don’t buy your kid the $50 doll with the tattoos. It really is that easy. I mean it’s not like the toy companies are part of an international conspiracy to lure your children into the clutches of the world’s tattoo artists. Or are they?

Take it from me, mom and dad, no amount of parental fretting over tattoos are going to keep your little darling from getting one once they’ve decided to do it. And I’m pretty comfortable in saying they won’t be doing it because of a doll they saw when they were five years old. If they’re like just about every other 18 year old with fresh ink, they’re doing it because they know it will make you crazy. So here’s a thought… try not making such a big deal out of the little stuff and maybe you can head off the worst of that teenaged rebellious streak you’re doing your best to create.

Shame…

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Last night, a member of the United States Congress stood in front of a campaign fundraiser in New York City and told the crowd that “The country is ripe for a true revolution.” Worse yet, he had the unmitigated gall to use this call to revolt as nothing more than an applause line. I suggest you study your history, Mr. Paul. Revolutions are brutal affairs. Look to our own Civil War and War for Independence as your examples. Look to France’s Reign of Terror as a guide if the fields of Antietam, Shiloh, Lexington, and Bunker Hill aren’t bloody enough for you.

Words, Congressman Paul, are important. How we use them is important. The meaning we convey, whether intentionally provoking or simply aimed at garnering easy applause, is important. And by God, sir, when you as use your status as a duly elected member of Congress to call for revolution against the government of the United States, you’ve saved us all the trouble of deciding and branded yourself a traitor.

We had our revolution, Congressman, and with it we secured the right to replace our government through legal means. As a twice failed candidate for president, you’ve not garnered the support of enough of your own party to even be the nominee, let alone convince half the electorate at large that your ideas are right. No sir, we don’t need a revolution. What we do need is to get back to the spirit and intent of the revolution we fought to win our independence. I’ve been a capital “R” Republican for most of my adult life, but I’ve been a lowercase “r” republican for much longer. The founders gave us all the tools we need cure what ails this nation. We must fix the foundation, but you want to tear down the whole house and then set the rubble alight. You may couch your rhetoric in populism, but a call to revolution, intentional or otherwise, is a supreme act of cowardice from a man who’s run out of legitimate ideas. Shame! Shame!

Don’t ask, don’t tell… Don’t care…

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After seeing the media has gone it’s usual level of overboard spinning up the talking heads on today’s repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, I just can’t resist the temptation to wade into the issue just this once. One of the reasons I’ve so often parted company with my Republican brethren is that as a rule I tend to be just a hair to the right of hopelessly liberal on most social issues (at least the ones that don’t involve throwing good money after bad). Some people will tell you repealing don’t ask, don’t tell is a matter of social justice. Maybe it is, but since I’m not a social justice theorist, that argument is pretty much academic to me… fun to argue, but mostly an abstraction.

As a conservative (and I mean old school, personal liberty loving conservatism here), I believe in the maximum amount of individual freedom consistant with maintaining public order. The government that can tell a lesbian she can’t fly a helicopter is just as capable of telling me that I can’t do my job for no other reason than I happen to like women too. I’ve always felt common cause with the lesbian community that way. As I’ve admitted before, government does a few things really well, but it’s got a piss poor track record at legislating it’s own particular version of morality. If I don’t want Uncle to make decisions for me about who I can like, love, or fornicate with, that means I’ve got a duty to keep him from making those decisions for anyone else. That’s just the way the social contract works, gang. An assault on freedom anywhere is an assault on freedom everywhere.

Personally, I think this is all a good sign that we’re getting over our collective puritanical hangups about sex. It’s only taken 400 years. Don’t ask, don’t tell is history… But I wonder why anyone cared in the first place.