(in)humanity

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Update: I Have Failed as a Member of Society

June 8, 2011 | 2 comments

As you may already know, in my previous post I reacted to a tweet I’d noticed, which said

A 15 year old girl who has terminal cancer wants to trend on twitter, let’s make that wish come true!! #alicebucketlist Pls RT

…leading to my statement that we have failed as a society. I intended this partly as comic hyperbole, but not entirely.

It simply struck me as silly that being a trending topic on twitter would be a worthwhile aspiration. Is that how low the celebrity status bar has been set? What kind of fulfillment would that provide? Does anybody think that in 30 or 40 years we’ll be sitting around reminiscing about the great twitter memes of yesteryear?

Plus, I figured, it’s probably not even for real. The very mention of a youngster with terminal cancer raised in me a set of red flags normally reserved for chain email hoaxes. I half expected the end of the tweet to tell me to DM all my followers.

Turns out it was even simpler than that — I’m just a cynical asshole:
Read the rest of this entry »


Rape With an R

February 3, 2011 | Comment

Over the last year or two, my most oft-considered theme on this blog may well be the vital necessity of humor to cope with the world around us. As the adage goes, sometimes there are no words — no literal words, that is. No direct response. There is first the intermediary of wit, whose words are oblique enough to make the matter minimally tolerable. Without this humorous buffer, my unfiltered response would be nothing but screams of rage and despair. That might be cathartic for me, but it would definitely not be constructive. To put it another way: if you ask me a ridiculous question, you’ll get a ridiculous answer.

Titian-Lucretia

“Sorry Lucretia, no way is that covered.
I mean… you were already naked.”

For the last decade plus, the agenda and tone of the exchange in Washington (or as I call it, our national miscourse) has been set by the Republicans, largely via their hyper-successful media arm at FOX News.1 As the feckless Democrats stood by, the effective GOP creed has degenerated from Bush-era exclusionism (“We are the party of patriotism; we don’t work with Democrats for the same reason we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) to reactionary, teabagger-style xenophobia (“If it has Obama-cooties on it, KILL IT!”).

Yesterday, the trusty comedy filter The Onion produced what struck me as a perfectly timed all-purpose riposte, headlined “Republicans Vote to Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed for Earth.” Unfortunately, it turns out that even this wasn’t quite enough to address the day’s most egregious Obama-phobic extreme: the new GOP majority in the House, as part of their absurdly childish insistence on a do-over of the health care reform act, have declared it necessary to redefine the crime of rape.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I wondered. Read the rest of this entry »


Don’t Say It: A One-Man Dialogue

August 23, 2010 | 1 comment

Don’t say it.

But you-

Don’t even say it, because I know.

[in unison]
Oh my God, I thought you had quit blogging! Oh my God, I thought you had quit blogging!


Told you I knew.

Of course you knew, we’re the same person. What, you think you’re cool because you can read your own mind?

Read the rest of this entry »


Cameraphone Follies: Dirty Sign in Irvine

June 14, 2010 | Comment

clean-dirt-wanted

The mindset represented by this sign is what I mean when I refer to the Orange County city of Irvine as a soulless, planned-community hellscape. If I hadn’t spent 90% of my waking hours at the area’s one oasis of culture, the UCI Fine Arts village, I’d never have stayed there for four years.

Full disclosure: I took this picture in 1993, a little bit before the advent of the cameraphone. Still, I think any reasonable person will agree that it qualifies as a folly. This little roadside want ad stayed up for at least a week or two, which gave me plenty of time to remember to throw my camera in my bag before the next time I drove by.


No Government Takeover of Public Safety!

April 24, 2010 | Permalink

You remember Richard Clarke. He was the counter-terrorism adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and (briefly) George W. Bush. He’s the guy who implored the second Bush Administration in January of 2001 to keep a close eye on Al Qaeda, and move forward with measures to that effect which were still in place from the recently departed Clinton administration. In response, the Bush administration blew off Clarke’s warnings and demoted him to non-cabinet level status.

Richard-Clarke

photo: Aude/Wikimedia Commons

He was later made Special Adviser to the President on cybersecurity, but resigned from the G.W. Bush administration in 2003. A year later Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission; the Bush White House, knowing that his testimony would reveal their fuck-ups, undertook one of their trademark Karl Rove-style campaigns of character assassination. Some would disagree, but I believe an objective eye would conclude that the smear tactics damaged the Bush administration’s credibility far more than Clarke’s.

These days, Clarke runs a security consulting firm and serves as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This past Monday he was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, principally about his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.1 After describing the serious threat posed by internet-based attacks, Clarke had this to say about the present state of our defenses against such attacks:

CLARKE: …Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and those railroads and the banks? The Obama Administration’s answer pretty much is, “You’re on your own.” [The Pentagon's] Cyber Command will defend our military. Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today. But everybody else will have to do their own defense.

That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.

GROSS: When you’re saying everybody else is on their own, does that include the electricity grid, the power grid, banking…? Read the rest of this entry »


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