OCT 2K5

Dubbya Taps Alito for Associate Justice on SCOTUS, Tells Left To Go Hump A Garden Hose

Personally, I would have preferred a woman to replace Sandra Day O'Connor up on the High Court, but for shear entertainment value, piss-n-vinegar fusillades, and maybe a scat fight or two, it's tough to beat Bush's inspired pick of Judge Samuel Alito. Because we live in a conservative nation, and the Senate understands and represents this, Alito will win confirmation without filibuster. I'm predicting 62-38.

Sam Alito is supremely qualified on paper, has already won unanimous Senate support for his current post on the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, and has the dry affable demeanor of your favorite dentist. With Alito on the bench, the Supreme Court will finally march in line with bible-thumping mainstream America. From that, what concerns me, and concerns millions of other folks, is how Sam Alito looks at a woman's right to choose abortion. I'll run through my stance first.

I've always been pro-choice, and I suspect I'll always be pro choice. What a woman does to her body and to her fetus, up until said fetus reaches viability, is up to her and her alone. She should not be legally bound to consult her husband or in the case of teens, parents. I'm also for legalizing drugs on much the same grounds...that what we do to our bodies is up to us, not to be regulated by politicians or judges, that my friends is called a right to privacy. Of course there are consequences to this abundance of freedom, but in succeeding and failing through our own decisions we build stronger individual character, and through that, societal character. I'm in favor of gay marriage and the right-to-die with dignity. This is basic small "l" Libertarianism, and for me, it's a happy place.

It also means that I favor more power to the states and a more strict reading of the Constitution. Ideally, a woman's right to choose would have been settled long ago through the legislature, but knowing at we do the lack of firm content available in the spines of most politicians, the abortion debate has yet to be settled properly. Being an Agnostic, my views on the Constitution and social issues are not informed one whit by monotheistic religion. I approve of certain moral standards that make a society strong-- be kind, don't kill, don't hump the neighbors wife...or the neighbors dog-- but do not believe that these morals were sent to us from an omnipotent being to some dude standing on a Middle East mountaintop who may or may not have been bent on ergot.

Much of what we see parading as conservatism and judicial restraint is in fact merely a continuous push to legislate and codify Christianity deeper into legal Americana. Back to Sam Alito.

If confirmed, Judge Alito will be the 5th Catholic on the Supreme Court. That worries me, because Catholicism is bad theater-- it's set pieces and scripts never change despite the forward march of time. It's not that I'm dissing the notion of faith, I am however, totally thumbs-south on the idea that you can legislate it or more importantly divine the true meaning of anything thru the ether and punish others, weaker than you, who might not share your views. Catholics have a very long history at this kind of thing, and it continues today with The Churches refusal to ordain female priests or even accept gays, let alone let them marry. In the end, I must question why anyone would stay committed to such a backwards and scarring branch of worship.

Sam Alito is vaunted as a man of judicial restraint, firm but fair, and all in all a superior jurist. He is also, simply, an old-school Catholic. Like Scalia, Alito wishes Roe v. Wade to be overturned not because of it's nebulous grounding in the constitution, which is a valid position, but because Alito does not believe in a woman's right to chose prima facie, regardless of legal grounding. If you are of that conviction, meaning of the anti-abortion camp, everything else is a means to the end of making abortions illegal. Sadly, as smart and savvy as Alito is, I can not support such a nominee.

By the way, it's 2005. There are other way to express one's spirituality and sense of faith than by following archaic and dogmatic screeds. Unfortunately, I am of a minority opinion and maybe I should be glad that no one has burned me at the stake.

Typical Bush, when backed into a corner, solidify the wing-nut base and alienate half the country. Nothing speaks louder of a person's character than the friends that person keeps.

- k

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For Liberals: From the Miers into the Fire

Harriet Miers won't be sitting on the Supreme Court. She's withdrawn her nomination, after some careful prodding from folks who've been in and under D.C. long enough to know nothing but being careful. We derive many truths from this mini-fiasco, but the one caught in my head right this moment, and maybe it's only because the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, is that liberals ought to be poopin in their hemp drawers.

Here's why.

Now President Bush is going to push through a hard-right ideologue, and he, she, or it, is going to be confirmed- 55-45, or thereabouts, since Republicans have a majority in the Senate. Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned. Race-based, as opposed to class-based, affirmative action will be wiped out. Hell, we might even see Miranda overturned. At any rate, the Warren court is going to seem like a whole different reality...something Orwell might have scribbled about while bent on a fistful of peyote buttons, compared to what the next 20 years will bring. Being a Federalist, I think several components of this sea change are for the longterm good of the country.

When the conservative establishment moaned and wailed about Bush allowing another stealth Souter-type justice ascending to the Big Bench, Democrats should have banded together and realized that Miers was the best they were going to get from Bush-- a nice lady and a good lawyer who is malleable on Constitutional Law issues, and therefore subject to persuasion. Miers would have, in the end, been another center-swing vote. Conservatives knew this. That's why they freaked out.

This wasn't about Ms. Miers lack of judicial experience or attendant paper trail, but Conservatives know that Bush has more than a few Populist organs in his Conservative body-- look at his domestic spending record (medicare, no child left behind, farm subsidies, church-based social welfare) for crying out loud. Conservative and Libertarian types hate this. Like Bush, Harriet Miers believed that Government could and should be a tool for social engineering, like Democrats. As a Supreme Court justice, Harriet Miers would have sustained affirmative action. Like Bush, she wouldn't have actively done anything to overturn Roe v. Wade. Anyway, that Miers differed with Liberals on the KIND of social engineering to endorse is/was moot. The Supreme Court doesn't write policy.

Man, this is going to be fun to watch. I'm picturing an emasculated Ted Kennedy demanding better answers from a Janice Rogers Brown or Michael Luttig on issues of abortion and affirmative action and getting nothing but condensation. I suggest reading up on the judicial philosophies of Antonin Scalia if you want to know where this is all heading. The withdrawal of Harriet Miers' nomination may go down in history as the death-knell of judicial activism ...which means that it's actually on the people to see the laws we want written by Congress, not enacted by judicial fiat. It's going to mean a lot of things, some of which I'll expand on later.

Kudos to the left...y'all never let me down.

- k

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Bugs

Throw up more cameras around the world and we'll need more talking heads to explain it all. Between Plame-gate, natural disasters, and Paris Hilton's newest trick, we lose sight of what's really important. Immediate. Too much information weighs us down, and no information at all makes us weightless. Glass-half-something, something.

I wonder if things were this complicated during our Western Dark Age? I'm speaking of Medieval times, not the Bush monarchy. Feed yourself and the fams and avoid the Black Plague and you've had a successful week. More than likely you couldn't read, and if you could, you were too poor to purchase your very own copy of the Latin bible...which the local Priest would frown on you having anyway lest you pick up a little Latin on your own and infer different meanings in them Holy Scriptures apart from what the clergyfolk had been preaching between public witch burnings.

Simple times indeed. Two tenants of living: Stay alive and follow authority (failing to follow authority tamped down your ability to stay alive). Leeches makes good medicine. Fleas don't transmit plague, sin does. But if I'm a cobbler in 1350 Venice and notice that the clergy are keeling over at pace with everyone else, I have to start wondering about concepts of divine order or even if Mr. Horn n Hooves has bum-rushed the big white castle like Attila had done to Rome so many moons before. There were no cameras, no reporters, and no true sense of terra interdependency. The world was flat, suffering was noble, and my cobbling business is tanking what with all these feet becoming stiff, black, and cold...great, more rats running around the shop. Where is that damned cat?

The bacterium Yersinia pestis spread by fleas to rats and humans...and to other creatures, we can safely assume. We learned much later that the Plague came to us from East Asia, where the locals had, over generations, developed some immunity to this scourge. Being that the Plague is a bacteria, it mutates much more slowly than a virus. Even before the age of antibiotics, once a human's immune system figured out how to defeat a particular bacterium, that ability was there to stay, and would likely be passed down to offspring...since those with lesser immune systems weren't having kids, being that they were dead and whatnot. Anyway, irony of ironies, nearly 150 years before Europeans took their bugs over to the Americas to clean the natives out from that joint, merchants and traders and raiders from further East did the same thing to Europeans. Jared Diamond writes well about these interconnections and more in Guns, Germs, and Steel (The Fate of Human Societies).

Amazing how quickly and easily disease could spread from one end of the world to the other, long before aviation and modern globalization. Nowadays, even though we've fastened a grip on the lethality of bacteria, primarily through sanitation and antibiotics, viral infections continue to kick our ass. Insidious little bastards, viruses are. They are not really alive, since on their own they can not reproduce. However, they have the internal software to replicate endlessly inside a host. I've always hated freeloaders, especially those who reproduce endlessly on my dime.

From smallpox to AIDS, viral infections have killed more people than all wars, everywhere, across all of human history, put together. We develop vaccines to crush them and they mutate into novel forms. Viral infections don't always lay waste to us. The common cold, herpes, and thousands of benign strains of these primordial replicators are floating around us right now. Others, formerly deadly, like Polio, have not mutated and are still beaten down by known vaccines. All in all, chances are better than even that your immune system recognizes a virus for what it is as soon as the bugger starts to take over the reproduction machinery of a cell or two inside your body. White blood cells ride in with fire and vengance against the triffling invaders and that's usually all she wrote for the virus.

But occasionally you get a virus with real gusto, like the Spanish Flu, aforementioned AIDS virus, or the H5N1 Avian Influenza virus. Touted by medical folk everywhere as the next big pandemic, H5N1 is currently a very nasty bug that can move from infected poultry to humans, but not from humans to humans. Luckily for us, because viruses are specialized to one or another segment of the animal and plant kingdom, pandemics of any sort are, thankfully, rare. It's when a genus or species specific bug jumps from one place in the animal kingdom to another, where the new hosts have little if any immune defenses (since said defenses have not seen that particular strain nor any that looked like it), the body counts get ridiculous.

Experts have already come out and said that the H5N1 is going to kick our asses. It's not a question of if, but when. This strain of bird flu, already lethal to humans, must only mutate to a point where it can pass from human to human. Viruses, by the way, can cover a 100,000,000 years of evolution in a month or two. They mutate fast. On the plus, lethal outbreaks tend to burn themselves out in under a year because viruses that kill their hosts too quick have a hard time anchoring themselves in the sea of life. Kinda like suicide bombers.

Dang, I'd sat down to write an album review or maybe gloat about the Lion's 13-10 triumph over Cleveland yesterday, and all this dark stuff be comes out my noggin instead.

At any rate, get your Tamiflu now. I hear it works better than leeches or curses, but I can't guarantee it, you know, for legal reasons.

- k

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20oct05

Lions 2k5

"Joey Harrington will be a fine NFL quarterback...someplace else" - Drew Sharp

I think the same could be said for Mooch and everyone else associated with Detroit's abysmal offense. Last Sunday's roll-over against Carolina sealed the deal in iron...the Detroit Lions' offense has brought underachievement to new lows, from the gutter to the sewer, and if they had the motivation, they'd dig further towards the core of the earth...and then we'd bury the trifling bastards post-haste. Detroit had three chances in the final period to score something, anything, against Carolina and seal the victory, one made possible by the Lions' overworked and stand-up defense. No dice. Call me picky, but I figure if you spend 6 no.1 picks in 5 years on offensive talent, then maybe the offense ought to man up and play up to its price. Instead, I'm only convinced that Charles Rogers is very generous with his weed.

You may or may not have noticed, but I've not spewed a word yet about the 2005 edition of my Detroit Lions. It's not that I've stopped paying attention, though sometimes I think the Angry Kittens have stopped playing football. Let me amend that; the Defense is pretty damned good this year, and come to think of it, they weren't too bad last year either, so it's merely the Offense that has stopped playing. I was going to wait till the first game of the season came and went before laying bare my predictions for the 2k5 Lions, who, in July and on paper, looked like an offensive juggernaut ...pedigrees at every turn. 6 no.1 picks for the 30th ranked offense in the NFL? Shit, you could switch offenses with the Calgary freakin' Stampede and do better than that.

Joey 'Blue Skies' Harrington is catching most of the heat for the Lion's offensive suck-a-tude, but 10 good to great players fronted by a good coach can mask the deficiencies of one mediocre quarterback, and no matter what anyone says about Joey, he's not a bad quarterback, just a mediocre one. There's a difference. Mediocre quarterbacks have played on a few Super Bowl champions-- Doug Williams, Trent Dilfer, Brad Johnson -- and as recently as 2002.

In my irrational moments, I throw up my hands during any given Lions game and groan that the Lions stink because they're the Lions. At least that's what I was left with after the Chicago Bears debacle on Week 2. A rebuilding team themselves, the 2k5 Bears looked like the '85 Bears against the Lions, maneuvering past Detroit's sorry-assed O-line like Mongols around the stone pillars of Ancient Rome. Joey threw four interceptions, and when he wasn't tossing balls to opponents, or at the feet of his receivers, Roy Williams and Charles Rogers made no attempts to even disguise the fact that they were short-arming the ball or running the wrong routes.

I also sometimes think that maybe the Lions stink because they represent Detroit, and more than that, they are Detroit's most important sports team. Look, we love the fact that the Pistons and Red Wings have won titles in recent memory, but it doesn't mean the same thing as the Lions winning. This is football country, first and foremost. The Lions have oscillated between mediocre and Gawd-awful for so long, like the City of Detroit, that I have to wonder if maybe the Lions are somehow Detroit's karmic output file.

Metaphysical angst aside, what exactly is wrong with the Lions this time?

Offensive Line: These guys suck. They've sucked for years. The sucked after they wasted a no.1 on Jeff Backus, and they sucked after they acquired former all-pro Damien Woody-- who, by the way, now blames forces besides his lame-ass crew for Detroit's offensive ineptitude. Dude, you suck. Your line sucks. Until you can make a hole for Kevin Jones or protect Joey long enough to dump a 3-yard pass before getting creamed by an entire unmolested defensive line, shut your f**king face. Seriously. Detroit's Offensive Line is so freaking horrendous that the opposition's linebackers get to play back on every play because opposing coaches know for sure that a rush of three or four men is enough to shoot through the line and shred Joey or whoever he hands the ball to.

Running Backs: Kevin Jones is supposed to be the man, the workhorse. He has the talent, but I've noticed that he's losing the drive. Can't be having that. Sweetness and O.J. played behind some of the sorriest O-lines of all time. The Bears of the late 70s were every bit the offensive basket cases that the Lions are now. But Walter Payton still brought it, week in and week out. He had one huge season after another with no support. Kevin Jones has that kind of talent, but maybe not that kind of heart. Artose Pinner, conversely, has the heart in the face of adversity, but not the talent to carry the load. Classic Lions.

Receivers: Roy Williams has been running bad routes and short-arming the ball. Charles Rogers can't put the bong down. Mike Williams is perpetually late for meetings. They have all started pointing fingers at the quarterback.

Quarterback: Joey Harrington is not the bees knees, but he doesn't suck like his teammates would have us believe either. He's prolly on the way out of Detroit because no one believes in him any more, mainly, because he was brought into an impossible situation. For almost 50 years, Detroit has been a Coaching and QB graveyard. This will be Mooch's last job as an NFL head coach, but I almost hope that Joey catches on with a decent team, with a decent system...a team with less baggage, and has a few good seasons. He's a good guy, and he doesn't deserve what he's been handed.

btw: Who drafted these people? And why was he just given an extension?

Yeah, Detroit.

Because these are the Lions, I expect them to beat Cleveland by 3 touchdowns this weekend...just to keep the tease alive. Kinda like how GM's employee discount masked the systemic failures of a dying company. There is a symmetry to it all.

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Aphex Delphi

Listening to Aphex Twin's DrukQs at 7:30 in the a.m. Why do I do it? This is the kind of stuff that makes you reach for the rope, not the best way to start a day unless you're planning for it to be your last. Most folks don't go bout their business that way. I sure don't. Besides, if I going to Kevorkian myself, I think the prelude soundtrack would be something like Ricky Martin or April Levigne...just to push me along. No, I'm kidding. I suspect that the only way I'd ever cross paths with that aural garbage would be under pain of torture. Richard D. James is a messy character, composing music about the Kevorkian method, dead relatives, and the most grimy and twisted nuggets of our human experience, and sometimes he does it to the most gorgeous drum patterns and melodies on the planet. Good sense of humor, too. Meaning, twisted. Pretty good for a laptop rocker, though the cool crowd isn't supposed to acknowledge the IDM thing right now--- it's about the 'live' man, the lush, gimmie the spaz folk and the yelping frontmen with faux sincerity.' And I like some of that stuff too, but when the Great Magnet writes the last chapter of our strange planet's history, Richard James and his Aphex Twin moniker will be mentioned. Godfather of IDM? Godfather of Glitch? Distilling the essence of D&B? check, check, and check. Dude is way more than ambient elevator pissings....

Once and future General Motors spin-off, Delphi, has filed for bankruptcy. The UAW has reacted in a predictable way; they are planning to strike. Man o man, what a cluster. Me and 10,000 other folks have penned between 10 and 20-thousand coherent sentences about the slow death of people-powered manufacturing in America. Here's a good one. Yet the Unions don't listen, and worse, they bullshit their constituients...like all politicians I suppose. I guess the workers who go from $25 an hour to $6 and hour don't listen, or maybe they can't listen, as in 'la la la, this ain't happenin' this ain't happenin'.

"What? It's a jungle out there? Oy shit on a stick, bro. You mean I need to rely on myself? No one will look after me as well as myself? I need to understand that companies exist to make profits first? Aw come on, I thought we were socialist, man. I'm an honest guy. Where have all the flowers gone?

Or, as Charlie Brown once said: "How can we lose when we're so sincere?"

Delphi has been bleeding money since it spun off from a wheezing GM in 1999, which is one reason GM let the damn thing spin off in the first place. Because of its high wages for unskilled labor and a black hole of current and legacy health-care costs, it costs Delphi roughly twice as much to make air-conditioning units, oil coolers, and condensers as it costs for global competitors. Globalization is the path we've chosen, if the last five elections are any indication, and if someplace else can do it just as well and much cheaper, then they will, and our Wal-Mart culture will buy the cheaper product. And I'm gonna just let THAT irony sit there on its own.

In theory, the fallout from globalization shouldn't be such a big issue for us. Because of globalization's evolution, innovation and smarts tend to be rewarded in wealthy free market countries. Millions of Americans make great money working in jobs that did not exist twenty years ago. That's how the game works. All those manufacturing plants cropping up overseas need to be stocked with ever-improving robotics and QA systems...stuff that we still put together. Services and content-related product are omnipresent and growing in need and complexity. For message therapists, animators, web salespeople, and programmers of every kind, this country is still a land of opportunity. Professional pooper-scoopers are but a circus and parade-route novelty because cars release fuel in a different manner than horses, and when we went from horses to cars, folks were displaced. The smart ones learned how to fix cars. The rest wound up on Mid Market.

The people who run Delphi understand all this. Manufacturing in America is generally too expensive, so we must either turn to other industries or embrace isolation. From what I read of history, isolation seems like a bad road. The endgame is always lots of war, and we have plenty enough war right now as it is.

Some people just can not cope with a changing world. That's too bad. It means a lot of unnecessary pain, crime, and all the bullshit anguish, personal and social, that comes from millions of people feeling left out. I've said before that government needs to be more adamant about retraining folks who've seen their jobs sent across the oceans, because there are many opportunities out there if one is willing to do the work. Anyone can score a college loan or grant, and here in Michigan, displaced workers are eligible for free retraining in an in-demand field. But it seems that millions instead would rather sink with their UAW-economics as the rest of the world surges forward.

I had a discussion with a neighbor not long ago about these things, and when I explained my points, about how first-world modern economies work, and about the requirements of adaptability, she simply shrugged and said, "Lots of people just aren't that smart."

Suppose that's getting to the root of it, then.

- k

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6oct05

More Torture

The Senate has just voted, 90 - 9, to forbid the cruel and inhumane treatment of enemy combatants. Bush, to his eternal damnation, has threatened to veto the bill. So I gotta get this off my chest:

For five-plus years, I've taken plenty of grief from my more liberal friends for denouncing Bush only as an ignorant fratboy but not as an indecent human being. Well, this whole torture debacle has changed my thinking about Bush. It's one thing to find out the your DoD was allowing torture on your watch and under your nose, but without your permission, and it's quite another thing to actively support such treatment.

Although it's tough to trust polls, my informal surveys around these parts indicates that Middle America if fine with torturing enemy combatants in general and dem crazy ragheads in particular. 'They' blew our buildings up and if we gotta shock every nutsack from Cairo to Tehran to get an arm around this craziness then turn up the generators. We are Americans, bitch, don't trifle with us. If that kind of thinking is indeed the case for our courses of action, then Bush is merely expressing the desire of the American people, kinda how Bush being in office expresses to the Universe that America lusts for its own downfall.

So the words come hard on topics like these because I can not understand how we let things get so out of control, like the pensioner who blows his monthly check every month at the slot machines and then bitches loud and hard about the high prices of prescription drugs. How is it that we are a land of 300 million supremely ignorant provincial snack-food junkies who think that by virtue of being born on a certain piece of land that we can act like grazing animals with our copious resources and scorn others with the misfortune of being born in shithole countries, and in fact, scorn anyone for not being an American. What does that have to do with the torture debate, you might ask? Everything.

One of our biggest issues right now is that we think we're better than everyone else not by virtue of what we do, but who we are. In short, too many Americans take credit for other people's labors. Prolly why we're so crazy about sports. Anyway, you start thinking that you're better than another race, another culture, etc., things like leveling their cities and torturing their inhabitants don't seem so bad. Been operating this way for ages. Dehumanize, then strip off the eyelids...slowly...slowly. My time in the Midwest has taught me that this country has become about the land, not about the idea. The reason Americans in general are okay with torturing Iraqi insurgents or Taliban crazies is that our idea of being better is now based on our notion of having more shit to throw around the house and yard.

The Senate, because they are a rather educated if not dainty and sometimes senile bunch, understands the idea of what it is to be an American. It means that we behave in a better way. We don't torture people, for one thing. We stick to our word. Our abundance of power means we are slow to anger and patient and generous in helping others. Yes, there are times when we must project power onto others, and that is an awful responsibility, and because of it, we must always take the high road in doing so, because should the world internalize that we do our think for our land and not our idea, then we've lost the morality war, or at least stalemated. Most but not all of our soldiers understand this, many evangelicals understand this, and most everyone living on the coasts understand this.

Sen. John McCain certainly gets it:

I don’t mourn the loss of any terrorist’s life nor do I care if in the course of serving their ignoble cause they suffer great harm. They have pledged their lives to the intentional destruction of innocent lives, and they have earned their terrible punishment in this life and the next.

What I do regret, what I do mourn, and what I do care very much about is what we lose, what we -- the American serviceman and woman and the great nation they defend at the risk of their lives – what we lose when by official policy or by official negligence – we allow, confuse or encourage our soldiers to forget that best sense of ourselves, our greatest strength – that we are different and better than our enemies; that we fight for an idea – not a tribe, not a land, not a king, not a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion – but for an idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.

But tens of millions just don't get it, and George W. Bush speaks for them. The horror ...exterminate the brutes.

- k

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