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An Angry Blog of Peace Descends on San Francisco
may2k4
Butta kid, butta for days.
Daylight is breaking to the East, which is as it should be. It if was breaking from the West, either I'd be getting loose in the noggin, or We would have some serious issues. As it is, I'm tappin' this nonsense from an airplane seat, roughly the size of something you stick a rowdy kid in when after a tantrum in elementary school...a stress position. But I have a window seat, which doesn't help my sleep on this particular red-eye from Frisco to Flint (Memorial Day Weekend family business), but it gives me a killer view of a cloudless orange to indigo sunrise quite stunning in a way that lets me know my place. Nothing like being 35,000 feet high with noise-cancellation headphones and aggressive music coming through to set the agenda.
The mp3's of mid-nineties hip-hop makes it a little more peculiar, but right now, that's the kind of familiarity I need. Familiarity of course can be another word for stale.
Nothing captures the essence of stale like air travel. I've yet to see an airport or a commercial airplane with any real character to speak of. They all seem to be designed by indifferent eunuchs with business degrees...who screw around with architecture to suck a little slice of our soul away every time we step through the sliding doors between the curb and the ticket counter.
"...and we coming to the wake, to make sure the cryin' and commotion ain't no mo*******in' fake"
Leave it to Biggie to keep me awake and interject a little soul into my air travel experience. Airport designers have no use for good hip-hop and they prolly think that the whole of hip-hop artists should be tied together with a big rust-proof chain and pitched into the San Francisco Bay as an anchor-base for SFO's next runway expansion. And when IS Dido's next album going to be released?
My friend Balke reminded me of the irony involved in naming a major airport after Ronald Reagan, who fired the air-traffic controllers. By that logic, and knowing our public servants, it's only a matter of time before the North Slope of Alaska is declared George W. Bush National Park...with petrol rainbows and mutant Caribou included with the price of admission.
Maybe we're fools to expect anything better.
selah -k
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RIAA (go to hell, please)
from DeepC (PhD):
43 million americans in May 2002 downloaded songs off of Napster servers. Since these are MP3 (a lossy encoding scheme), these songs, wherever they have migrated, have unique digital "fingerprints". What a lot of people don't know is that RIAA through "spiders" and a forensic method known as the DR5 "hash" took snapshots of all the servers' content. Therefore, if your copy of a song is compared to their hash to have originally come from the Napster server, you could have the nightmare of defending your "suspected piracy"? OUTRAGEOUS!!! (BTW the statute of limitations on the DMCA is 10 years).
and, since the RIAA doesn't want to spend their cash on legal stuff, they're asking taxpayers to help out. again, from DeepC (PhD):
A proposal that the Senate may vote on as early as next week would let federal prosecutors file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers, with fines reaching tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The so-called Pirate Act is raising alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer firms, who have been eyeing the recording industry's lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer users with trepidation. The Justice Department, they say, could be far more ambitious.
The Pirate Act represents the latest legislative priority for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its allies, who collectively argue that dramatic action is necessary to prevent file-swapping networks from continuing to blossom in popularity.
"We view this as a key component of an enforcement package," RIAA lobbyist Mitch Glazier said Tuesday. "If you're going to try to make sure that you have effective deterrence, then one of the tools you'll need is to make sure that prosecutors have flexibility."
Talk about economic vigor
If once upon a time you told me that a twice-a-century stock market crash would create one of the mildest recessions of the century...I'd reply that, perhaps, you're a babbling fool. If, on top of the bubble-burst, you said we'd have to absorb a terrorist outrage smack on top of financial and military landmarks...all without an economic panic, I'd say, 'shoot, you must be wasted. let me call ya a cab.'
But it happened. Again, I'm no fan of Bush, and he should not be re-elected because he has driven a shiv between us and the world, which is just not cool. However, don't bitch too much about his economic policies. We're pretty damn lucky we didn't fall into a major recession with deflation and ~15% percent unemployment. Actually, that probably doesn't have as much to do with Bush's policies as it does with the resilience of the American worker and entrepreneur. In fact, income disparities have widened like the Abu Gharib prison scandal. Hell, sorry, I was trying to give our Pres a left-handed compliment but deeper thought shot it all to pieces.
Okay, Bush's economic policies were better than Hoover's.
But then again....
selah -k
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Corporate media reeks. Journalists are not doctors or engineers. Worse, publishers are not altruistic. Neither of the aforementioned entities will choose to strive for objective truth over pandering. This is fine, and it's expected by anyone with a reasonable grasp on human nature. It is not up to the media outlet to provide objective truth to the masses. It won't happen, because people are just not wired that way. It is up to us, the consumer-- individually weak, an almighty Leviathan united, to vary our media sources all the time, and from that, distill the information presented with basic critical thinking skills that, hopefully, we had mastered before our last essay test of freshman English.
This may be the best Iraqi blog going right now: www.iraqthemodel.com
I know, I know, it's an optimistic blog, maybe too optimistic; but ask yourself, please, if it is further from the truth than Al Jazeera or Baghdad Burning, the latter a beautifully written Iraqi blog with a more jaundiced, and, for all most of us know, a more accurate, view of our clustered endeavors in Iraq.
Check these sites out. Don't put much stock into what CNN, FOX, or the NY Times dishes out. Many journalists tend to stay away from truly dangerous situations, though they of course write otherwise. It's best to get the story from the locals...those who have nowhere else to go.
Selah
- k
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Here's what I like to ask Bay Guardian clones:
'What is your skill set?'
The responses are almost always stuffed with bitter references to 'the system' that conveys nothing...with a few notable exceptions, like Chomsky, who is not Bay Area per se, but might as well be. Oh, and the whiners are all writers. Great. So were Stalin and Mao.
So cheers to balance and moderation. We're a long ways from either right now, but we'll get there eventually, maybe in time for our grandchildren to have a golden 90s of their own with their own OJ, their own PC, their own Seinfeld, and their own petty White House intern scandal...which is oh so insignificant next to the edifice of lies and bullshit as policy we see today. But to hell with all that because we're coming to our senses and we'll rise above. California is of course leading the way, by example.
Say what you want about our Governator and Frisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, but these cats are seriously kicking ass the right way and I'm on the bandwagon, even though at first I was not excited to see either take the reins...won't be the last time I was wrong about something.
Newsom has shown to be a political ace by seizing massive ground on the left with the gay marriage issue and Care not Cash modifications. He's also let businessmen know that he understands what it takes to grow the regional economy, AND he's always popping up in Hunter's Point, working with locals who had probably forgotten what a senior politician looked like, all while reshaping the SFPD and placing a wise and hungry lady at it's helm. My God, what is there not to like!?
When Schwarzenegger slid into Sacramento, everyone outside of the Bay Area and the north half of LA county was itching to give Gray Davis the boot. Some people decried the process, but let me remind everyone of something: it was Gray Davis vs. Bill Simon before the recall...what kind of death-choice by hanging or electrocution is THAT? Davis was at the helm during a succession of blunders, natural and made-made, that knee-capped California. We so needed a change. To be offered a half-bright rightist ideologue like Bill Simon was a kick in the jewels no one appreciated. So what if Arnold became the ultimate opportunist in a void that no organized party structure could have given him?
It's working.
Business confidence is growing, prudent and vital bond measures and budget plans have been passed, and face it, the man knows how to unite politicians and create grudging good will in the statehouse. We need that, and we need to see that there is a different kind of Republican than the Manifest Destiny Jesus Freak End-Gamers currently running the executive branch. If Arnold somehow snags the White House there will be no one in his cabinet as radioactive and fundamentally wrong as John Ashcroft.
Both Newsom and Schwarzenegger (and man, I never thought I'd need to type that name on a regular basis) are moderates in their way. Newsom, in the context of Frisconess, has many many local pols to his left, and Arnold is a socially liberal eco-friendly anti-tax guy in the same ballpark as Clinton. In fact, if you think about, the two have many political similarities. Clinton, of course, was a moderate.
So I say to the Bay Guardian radical: you won't make it better by bitching about it to your choir. All that does is make your sorry ass feel good about your stupid decision-making while the folks you need to convince think you're an idiot. As we see in Washington, that skill-scarce mindset carries a short shelf-life, about four years.
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My Flint homeboy is stirring it up again. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is being deified at Cannes, and will probably open coast to coast on the 4th of July. That's a wonderful way to set the tone for the campaign season. Even though Michael Moore is a heavy-heeled drama queen, and his political vision is impossible to implement because it defies human nature, I'm on his side. It really pains me to even think it.
That's where Dubbya has taken me. I voted Poppa Bush in 88. I'm more conservative than 70-80 percent of my friends...course I'm living in Frisco. But what I'm saying is that in normal times I could in no way get behind the messaging of Michael Moore and his uber left fellow travelers, the entertainment value is another matter. But this year is different, the pendulum needs a mighty push.
Dubbya has got to go. Seriously. I'm gonna vote Republican again some day, I'm sure of it, but not for this clown.
Iraq is a cluster because of poor administration planning. The aforementioned sentence can fan out to at least fifty damning points; led by the troop shortage situation, the looting situation, the terrorist situation, the government sanctioned prison rape system-- that scandal's going to blow up into a beauty.
The environment: Kyoto; encouraging tight oil supplies which benefits...c'mon guess; privatizing parkland; etc.
The economy: our national infrastructure, highway system, electricity grid, and urban public schools continue to fall apart...this is exactly the kind of thing representative government is supposed to fix. How about keeping a few bucks away from Lockheed Martin and trying instead to encourage microgrid proliferation based on fuel cell technology so we can stop worrying about this oil bullshit.
And by the way, a show of hands, who thinks there will be more terrorists on the planet tomorrow morning than on the morning of September 10 2001?
I hate being on the same side as Michael Moore. He is a douchebag and a crybaby, and most everyone who still lives in Flint thinks he's an idiot. But Dubbya is special...not evil, just special.
ps: Listen to Fennesz.
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I just paid twenty bucks for two meals-worth of granola organic chow...beans, peppers, a half-pound of free range chicken and a some pasta-- made from unbleached flour. Two Banquet TV dinners with rough approximations of the aforementioned cost ~4 bucks at the local Safeway.
For most of the 20th century, whole-grain foods and whatnot were the eats of peasants. Now, check out a Bay Area Whole Foods, or any of our farmer's markets...not too many peasants out there eating the simple organic foods. It's cheaper for the financially strapped and or the health agnostic to load up on foods laced with pesticides and stewed in MSG's.
Human evolution has indeed taken some strange turns when the chosen choose to be slim and faithful to food that's never seen a can or a processing plant. Plutocrats of the Jazz Age looked like total hell...sweaty, bulbous, gin-blossomed heart patients. No more.
This is a symptom of something that will eventually separate classes of humans further... slicing another unneeded gash into the utopian notion of innate human equality. What that something is I'm having a tough time naming concisely, but it has to too with better food, better health, better looks, better shape, better mates...and after a few generations...well, let's say there will be some HUGE differences between those akin to yoga-practicing computer-programming health nuts, and the Wal-Mart nation.
I wonder how we'll deal with the outcomes? If history is any indicator, not too well. In the meantime, maybe it's time to put off those outcomes and stop marketing crap to people who have no cultural resources outside of television, radio, and the cineplex. I love my gourmet peasant food. Everyone should have the opportunity to enjoy it.
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So it's come down to snuff films. The images at Abu Ghraib depicting a few of our soldiers doing some rather heinous things to Iraqi prisoners could only be answered by our thoughtful enemy with a snuff film.
You show us Iraqi with leash around neck, We show you American with sword going through neck.
These sad, stupid, petty, lost, infantile assholes. What to do? The redneck Marine axiom of "Kill'em All...Let God Sort Them Out" sounds about right during the furious flashes of anger that have periodically coursed through me since the towers went down. But that mindset is wrong on practically every count...so it's best not to go there.
Most Iraqis are appalled; both with the sex and snuff videos being filmed on location without permission AND with the way we've handled the occupation. They are also coming to the realization, en masse, that we're a much better option than the jihadists.
It's gonna get pretty weird pretty soon, and someone will be taping it all. There will be more of this garbage on TV and streaming across the internet, because there is a market for it. It is what it is.
Selah. -K
ps: San Francisco has been sunny and peaceful. The hiking has been good, and summer fruits are beginning to appear from the valley.
psII: Y'all gotta stop buying the same short-sleeved striped shirts. It looks like the City is in uniform when I head to work in the morning...and we're supposed to be above that sort of conformity. Right?
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1.) Remind your mom what she means to you.
2.) From the MESOPOTAMIAN (Iraqi Blog):
Hi Friends,
Just to say Hellow and to let you know that I am still around. This latest fiasco smells to me. It smells really bad. Abuses there seems to have been, but who took the photos, and the timing, isn't it too convenient? But you must know this: All this has not shaken my support for the liberation one little bit, nor my absolute conviction of the justice and nobility of the "Project". If some of you have seen fit to appologize to us about the behaviour of some of your "scum"; we must also appologize to you for the behaviour of so many of our "scum".
Salaam
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Last week, our highly profitable company rounded up a mishmash of engineers, marketing, creative types, and middle managers for three days of project management training. Many projects thus ground to a halt while we absorbed the new skinny on how to avoid gridlock...a worthy sacrifice since our company needs better project management chops like our mayor needs a hair consultant.
The seminars were all fine and good, with new ideas and formulas imparted to all, their details far too mundane to recite here. When it was all over for the week, I returned to my cube, thinking about my backlog and wondering how new insights into resource management would make everything cool. I was aghast to see, on my desktop screen, a reminder pop up for our quarterly division meeting, to start in fifteen minutes.
I wanted to skip the damn thing and address my inbox, packed with messages with red exclamation points on the left side of the headers. But a colleague sold the meeting as a great reckoning...when our leaders would give the 'keep your chin up' speech and publicly dismiss all who contributed to the gridlock and sense of frustration that arises from spending three weeks getting buy-in from five departments before being informed that your development resources had just been booked for a year by a different division. After that happens a few times, people start sending hate mail. The nice hate mail starts by asking 'why haven't you clueless tools allocated resources for projects that've been approved for a whole mo********in' year!?"
Excellent. If this is going to be the great chaos speech, I wanna watch heads roll, even if it's mine. We're a hard-working optimistic outfit, but damn-it, sometimes there's no substitute for a little bit of fear-mongering. The circle will tighten and we'll all be better for it. On the way to the meeting, I felt something akin to an adrenaline surge.
Our senior VP merrily walked to the podium, said our margins were kicking ass, and that he was off to Australia the next morning to haggle about business stuff...oh, and that there was wine and cheese being set outside our screening/meeting room for gleeful consumption. Selah.
It was like Alf saying 'no problem' to Willie, with the house on fire and no running water for blocks. I was curious about the disconnect. Surely our top veep could acknowledge at a podium what everyone mutters between disorganized meetings, as important deskwork slips into the abyss.
After the division meeting, I found out that our project management guru, the one who had instructed our seminars, conducted a survey with our division management. Mr. Project Consultant asked division managers, from junior group leaders through the senior veep, about 150 questions regarding the company, its direction, functions, vision, manpower attributes...pretty comprehensive stuff. Each survey upon completion was scored between 0 (this company is screwed and doomed unless we right the ship pronto) and 100 (we are riding high on a wave of cash and content productive workers with not a cloud in sight).
a sample of survey results:
engineering manager one - 25 (somewhere between doom and nightmarish)
engineering director one - 20 (pretty close to doom)
marketing manager one - 15 (at doom's door)
a division veep - 90 (we rock. cristal and hookers for everyone...mailroom too. wtf!)
The disconnect is interesting because everyone from lowest plebe to almost every director knows that people are going insane from the workload and the knowledge that there may be no end in sight. However, the top of our dysfunctional pyramid seems oblivious. The oblivious ones, or maybe pretend-oblivious, could get away with it because our company is chock full of folk who own a house in the Bay Area. Nothing tethers you to your cube like a fat mortgage payment. And after all, it's only work. No one is breaking rocks in their cubes, so being overworked simply means a lot doesn't get finished, but no one starves or catches a beating either, becuase ninety-percent of management knows what's going on...it's the tippy top ten percent that causes the grinch-face to proliferate.
So here's the rub, if you grow convinced that your top leaders have not one clue what you're doing, and what you're up against, loyalty falls through the floor, which lowers quality, which means things don't get done right and have to be done again, and the gridlock begins to look permanent, no matter how many project management seminars are presented. At this point, the fear-mongering option becomes a veep's best friend...the only one left.
We see a similar disconnect in Washington today. There are differences of course. My company is packed with meritocratic egghead solution providers who believe in making things work...which is why it probably will work, temporary gridlock be damned. Conversely, the Bush Administration is packed with legions of truth-crushing secrecy freaks who treat anyone and everyone outside their privileged circle like morons...which is one reason why their big project looks ripe for failure.
-K
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Last month, while dodging protesters and police barricades in and around mid Market, a friend referred to the Bay Area, somewhat derisively, as the People's Republic...with San Francisco as it's capital. Folks in Berkeley see this as a badge of honor, and legions of Wal-Mart aficionados across the nation would agree that we're a bunch of Commie heathens, but our brand of liberalism doesn't even sniff where these folks think it lives.
A true 'People's Republic' by historical standards at least, denotes one of many militarily fake-strong angry countries that stifled individualism and innovation at every turn. That ain't us by a mile. But we're well on the way to forgetting all that Communist nonsense. Their numbers have dwindled overseas due to purges, famines, and embracing capitalism. And their numbers here have dwindled because no one likes to admit that they used to back a loser. China still goes by a People's Republic moniker, but that's fading with their increasing bling-power. China's crazy-ass stepchild, North Korea, calls itself the Democratic People's Republic, though there hasn't been an election in ages, people starve for bomb-building, and there is no 'Republic' in any context Plato might recognize...just a crazy old man in a Mao jacket with magically bad hair and a yen for Hollywood.
A People's Republic of any stripe tends to be divorced from reality, and in that sense, the slur sorta fits San Francisco. From massive protests for and against scores of boutique causes, to Halloween in the Castro, to Junkies pooping into the UN Plaza fountains (oh the irony), San Francisco is out there like a mountaintop camper on a bag of mushrooms.
We like it that way. The real world is an overcrowded, dark, and frightening place, and we'd just as soon not look at it with a critical eye because it's too depressing. No one eats as well as we do, nor has the scenery, the funds, the friends, and the opportunities. We live better than any collective on the planet, certainly better than any hitherto official 'People's Republic'. Such truths are tough for the fair-minded to withstand without feeling compelled to join the Peace Corps...which is a bigger commitment than marching down Market Street, so instead we embrace our strange liberalism, which is more about what you do as opposed to what you are...christians and conservatives aside. Again, it seems to work. This Blog will record posts from all across our festering planet from various massive sack contributors...but we'll will never forget that the Bay Area, with it's manifold issues, is the spot on the map we forever wish our darts to land.
-K