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:


It’s real, and I’m a huge tool. The Alice’s Bucket List blog is located at http://alicepyne.blogspot.com/, where the cruelly afflicted girl writes touchingly about her situation and her feelings about it.

What really brought the guilt was reading the other items from her bucket list in the right-hand sidebar of her front page. They’re mostly quite simple, modest wishes: to have her hair done (“if they can do anything with it”). Go to Cadbury World and pig out on chocolate. A photo shoot with four of her friends. “Make everyone sign up to be a bone marrow donor.” Design a mug to sell for charity. “A private cinema party for me and my BFFs.” Get a back massage. Have a nice picture taken with her dog.

Damn it — what’s wrong with me? So she wanted to trend on twitter. Why not? What’s the harm? Why didn’t I stop to think for a few seconds, and hopefully realize that there could be a person on the other end of all this? Yep… look at me go, shooting my blogging mouth off without a care in the world.

At least my lack of influence paid off:

What that little graph means is that about 3:30PM Pacific Time, 1.43% of all tweets being written on twitter contained the keyword “alicebucketlist”. So for the purposes of Alice’s list, that’s at least one down and… I can’t tell how many to go.

Alice, if by some chance you end up reading this: I’m sorry. If it makes any difference, I do think I’ve learned something from this… at least, I hope I have.

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. “Is this another satirical sendup of the ludicrous extremity of Republican obstructionism? Is rape the asteroid in this joke? …NO?!? Oh my God. Get me some comic cushioning, stat!”

A legitimate case is often made that there are certain things that cannot be joked about, and that rape is one of them, because rape is not funny. I agree — with the last clause. Rape, in and of itself, is no laughing matter. I respectfully disagree, however, with the statement as a whole. There are times when even things as terrible as rape must be joked about, lest we lose our humanity.

I didn’t even laugh at the above clip when I watched it, but I did find it funny. So funny, in fact, that it kept me from breaking down into unabated primal protest. Losing my shit, as it were. And that, I think, may be the very definition of “pretty goddamned funny.”

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?

Whatever. Never mind, …mind.

You and your blog decided to take the summer off?

Pfft!… It was hardly a decision.

Just another one of your lackadaisical month-long pauses then, huh?

Oh SHUT UP, I’m tired of your judgmental shit! As if you didn’t already know the whole story, too!

Hey, judging you is what I do. It’s judging others that’s uncool — judging yourself is all good.

Since it’s obvious that you’re not going to give the benefit of context, I guess I’ll have to fill it in.

Oh-kay. Commence building your excuse.

“Excuse,” yeah right. You say “potato,” I… say “potato.”

BO-ring…

I had to spend four out of six weeks beginning June 23 up in Northern California, where a family member was seriously ill. I made two round-trips from L.A. in the car, both of them embarked upon at the drop of a hat. Feel bad for saying I was a negligent blogger yet?

A little… well actually, no. I don’t really have feelings, I just cause you to have them.

Fine, then dig this: amidst all that preoccupation and stress I still managed to chip in two posts, one each on July 15 and 16. Suck on that, inner critic!

Impressive. But are you going to leave us all hanging about what happened to the person-

My family member who was sick is OK now. Still a little way to go to be fully recovered, but much, much better.

Good. So we can move on to hearing how you account for the time between August 4th and now.

My “account,” as you condescendingly put it, is the not-terribly-interesting story of technical snafus caused by my current web host, Lunarpages, finally upgrading its baseline package to PHP 5. I’d tried several times previously to do the optional upgrade to PHP 5, and each time it broke the blog. I tried calling Lunarpages Support at least twice; both times consisted of extensive troubleshooting and ended in the support person telling me, “I don’t know why none of these things I’ve tried have worked, so the problem has to be with your .htaccess file. You have to figure it out yourself.” Yesterday, after many hours of mucking about, I finally did get the site unfucked and running with PHP 5. The problem had not been my .htaccess file — the problem was Lunarpages’s php.ini file. Thank you very little, douchebags.

…Hmmwhat? Oh, oops, I started dozing somewhere after the first PHP-whatever upgrade version thing. Are you done?

Yeah- …no wait, actually, I’m not. I’m going to talk about how this opens the blog up for HTML 5 and what the implications are. So do me a favor and go back to sleep.

You got it. [drifting off] …zzzzzzz…

Eeexcellent. Stay just like that.

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.

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…?

CLARKE: Yes. What the Obama Administration is saying, and what the Bush people said before that, is, “The private sector doesn’t want the government defending it. The private sector doesn’t want the government telling it what to do. Therefore we will have, sort of, vague guidelines that suggest what the electric power grid should do, but we won’t really go out and do anything.” And if an attack happens, the government has no ability to stand up and do anything about saving the power grid.

GROSS: Why not?

CLARKE: Because of this philosophy that the government shouldn’t be defending the private sector, and a belief that the private sector doesn’t want to be defended by the government. Now, I think that belief is wrong. When I talk to CEO’s in the private sector, they say, “Heck, this is why I pay my taxes!” No one would have said in World War II, to U.S. Steel, “You’ve got some big steel factories in Pittsburgh. If the Nazi bombers come over, you’d better have some of your own guns to shoot them down.”

Sure, the CEO’s want their systems to be protected by the government — hell, I want our infrastructure protected by the government. Clarke’s only mistake here is to whom he ascribes the belief in this ludicrous no-defense philosophy: that mindset comes from the knee-jerk conservative teabaggers and the politicians on that bandwagon. The Obama White House is apparently too scared of being called “Big Government” or being accused of “taking over” private industry by crowds of morons carrying misspelled signs with Lipton teabags stapled to them.

photo: Flickr/Pargon

Terry Gross finished out the interview with a further query to Clarke regarding the current foaming-at-the-mouth political atmosphere. She pointed out that the day they were taping the interview (April 19) was the anniversary of the starting of the American Revolution with the battles of Lexington and Concord, but more ominously, also the anniversary of the end of the siege at Waco and of the Oklahoma City bombing. She asked Clarke what his feelings were about there being, as they spoke, several well-publicized anti-government rallies taking place, including one in Virginia with a pro-second-amendment emphasis to which attendees were urged to bring their guns.

CLARKE: Most of us who own guns are perfectly normal human beings who have those guns for legitimate reasons. But there is a small percentage of people who own guns that I find very scary, and they are the ideological remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, and the ideological remnants of the John Birch Society.

Throughout our history we’ve had right-wing people who say they don’t like the U.S. Government, they want to take down the U.S. Government, they think violence against the U.S. Government is OK. Since the election of Barack Obama these people have grown in volume, and I think they’ve grown in number. We have to remember, when we worry about Al-Qaida and foreign threats, that the second-largest and second-most destructive terrorist attack in our history, inside our borders, was done by these people. American, extreme right-wing, anti-government, violent people.

I think the United States has a serious threat today from those people, because legitimate public officials are egging them on. Legitimate public officials who are conservative, and who are Republican, aren’t criticizing them, or aren’t criticizing them enough. We need to de-legitimize these people, or we will have another Oklahoma City.