why isn’t there a columnist, much less a candidate, with the guts to ask the tough questions?
how many members of the current administration have been arrested for drunk driving, or for other crimes?
what exactly happened to the records of those arrests?
how exactly is it that entire years are missing and unaccounted for in the president’s biography, years in which he claims to have been serving in the military? how exactly is it that a man can just not show up for a year, miss a flight physical, and there are no consequences?
how exactly does one explain how this president got into, much less out of yale and harvard, considering he’s obviously an ignoramus.
why is it that reporters know all this, but are afraid to put it in writing, finding all kinds of excuses, like needing multiple official sources, when the truth is they know they will be punished for crossing the politically powerful?
we suffer a terrible attack in large part through their own negligence and incompetence, and yet they wrap themselves in the flag, fill themselves full of jesus, and claim their own failures as excuses to extend their tyranny, their real agenda is to screw the working man, screw the poor, throw the hard earned gains of the civil rights movement out the window

impugning the honor of an injured veteran — that’s just what you might expect from someone who’s only
experience with military service is wearing the uniform. someone who never earned an honest dime in his life,
he doesn’t even know what the hell it means.
they don’t know what it means to be shot at. to sit in a foxhole in the jungle or out in the open in the cold
desert night with bombs exploding around you and you just hope to hell the assholes back in washington know
what the hell they’re doing. and you don’t even allow yourself to think that they’re a bunch of greedy,
selfish assholes who don’t give a damn about you, they just have these ideas that they’re trying to prove,
these fucking ideologies, for christ’s sake.
there’s no character, no honor, only the insider-outsider distinction of the fucking spoiled, privileged,
self-indulgent frat-rats who run the goddamned world. you know the type. and that’s what we have, the
georgetown, yale and harvard graduates, children of wealth, and as for you poor working class bastards who’re
getting shot at right now? know this: they don’t give a damn about you. they mouth all the words, wrap
themselves in the flag, without guilt or compunction. they lie so well, because they actually believe it
themselves. but deep down, all they really care about is their own pansy asses. they don’t know it
themselves, because they’ve never actually been tested out there, they’ve never sweated the rent, or struggled
to pay the damn doctor. they don’t even know what it means! they think if you’re poor, that its some kind of
character flaw. believe it! its like they’re living in some alternate reality.
they actually believe horse shit like: “business success not only requires but also rewards virtuous behavior.”
(for help translating the “code” also see: lakoff)
they’re the kind of folks who’ll push you out of the lifeboat in a pinch. and they’re doing just that. don’t
believe me, take a look at the effect their domestic policies have been having on the working class and the
poor. just making sure the trusts are well funded, and killing the inheritance tax, that is their priority.
not to worry about your poor sick grandmother, or your unemployed brother-in-law. fuck them! believe it!
is it really that hard to get your head around it, do you really want a C student running the world? and
that’s actually being generous, the worthless bastard never even would have gotten into those ivy league
schools much less got out of them, if it weren’t for the powerful influence of his family name, and his old
man’s money. everyone who was there knows it. but they’re afraid to say anything about it, because he’s one
of the club. how fucking scary is that? pity the more deserving but less well-connected bastard who’s place
he took there (not to mention in the air national guard), somebody who would have actually attended classes
and learned something or somebody who would have actually taken their goddamned flight physical or got court
martialed, because that’s what they’d do to you and me, but not to him and his kind.
but the point is, he doesn’t even know the difference, he and his kind live in another goddamned world, the
bastards, and its like they know our language but we normally can’t decode theirs.
and he puts on this good ‘ol boy act and is almost proud he don’t know shit. what the fuck is that about? is
he a clever right wing ideologue, a scion of a mafia-like family with connections to obscure and shady
international conspiracies, or a brush clearing, horse riding cowboy from central texas?
please, God! they never even heard of him in Crawford, Texas before the 2000 campaign. just like Reagan, its
all a stage act. they don’t give a shit, they even hire actors to play the roles. the guy on the screen has
a role, and he plays it. the perqs are good, you’ve got to admit it. get it? but he’s not the guy making
the call. so there’s no contradiction, there’s just more to the game than is apparent.
ref:
http://slate.msn.com//?id=2100064,
http://blogs.salon.com/0002542/,
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_05_09.php#002940

re: the topic a priori — I presume you saw last sunday’s nyt magazine.
a good image of two fat old tweedledee-tweedledum type functioning alcoholics masquerading as journalists bracketing a cute sex-in-the-capitol-city obsessed blogger going by the handle wonkette, who for her part, appears to be focused entirely on washington cocktail party gossip. though she once carefully protected her anonymity, its long since been compromised along with her content, and appearing on the cover of nytmag it appears she has gone to the other extreme. characteristically, the print media is running about a year behind.
now while there are thousands of folks out there ‘blogging their spleen’ to the purely hypothetically interested, (see http://www.globeofblogs.com/?x=topic), there are a few who function essentially as columnists and have quite a bit of good insight. a lot of these folks are essentially doing it in their spare time, and giving the pros a run for their money.
its actually a return to a purer form of “journalism” when you think about it, as in “individuals writing in their journals”. its really a leap forward for journalism, although you have to sift through a lot of noise to get to the good stuff.
yet the theme of the nyt piece seemed to be ‘you can’t trust those bloggers, because they don’t conform to the unwritten code of journalistic ethics, like we professionals do.’
wow, no need to parse that one out too closely, I hope.
as for “the good stuff,” my favorite political blog du jour is http://talkingpointsmemo.com/.
he’s got an interesting take on last night’s debates, that sounds like someone who’s living in the real world, not wrapped up in the cocoon like some of these so-called journalists [[20040929190100]] seem to be.
another one that I like is the daily prospect [[ http://www.prospect.org articleId=8691]]
you know from time to time they actually tell me stuff I didn’t know. I wonder if you were aware of this:
“First things first: John Kerry is significantly taller than George W. Bush. But last night, millions of unknowing Americans tuned in and saw a split-screen image of the pair looking exactly the same height.
…
Leave it to FOX News to distort the truth. The network was charged with camera control for the entire media during the debate tonight, so no matter which network you watched it on, the cameras were run by FOX’s crew. ”
go figure. I guess they just wanted to be “fair and balanced” with respect to the height issue.

overheard on the net:
when we talk about these conspiracies, say between certain media outlets being the tools of certain interests, some practical questions come to mind:
> how do these people coordinate their signals? do they check with their controllers? do they have a newsletter?
in a way, yes. that’s how elite journalists work. …much of it is done very simply, and not at all surreptitiously, say over tennis, golf, or drinks… whatever.
> what do you mean, ‘elite journalists’?
there’s more to it than just a matter of always sourcing the political/economic establishment (by which we mean masquerading the establishment position as “independent news”).
the elite journalists also share a common culture with the political/economic elite. for starters, in the top echelon, they’re very wealthy. either as a cause or an effect, they share similar points of view, life-styles;
they share similar concerns with the stock market, private schools for their children and the high price of nannies (and the servant problem more generally), etc.
but there’s both more and less to it than that. its as simple as a high school clique. there’s continual direct and indirect social interaction, at various parties and events, and of course, through the gossip mill.
> Chomsky argues that outlets like New York Times are tools of the ruling elite.
sort of. the few remaining leading papers out there are really anachronisms, and constitute a category in themselves. many more people get their ideas of world events from jay leno say, than papers like the post or the times…
these peculiar, public and untrusted channels serve primarily as vehicles through which members of the club send messages to each other in code.
but to your point, in many ways the top editors of these papers (and even more obviously the publishers of these papers, and the producers of tv news shows) aren’t so much tools of the elite, they are _part_ of that elite.
often people point to cases where there are apparent and sometimes real splits over policy issues between certain parts of the political establishment and certain parts of the media establishment, and say: “see. this proves that the government doesn’t control the media”
but what these represent are relatively rare splits _within_ the elite itself. some inside sources leak one side of the story, other inside sources leak another side. and there’s no reason to think that there’s only two factions. like the real world, there are at least as many sides in this game as there are people playing it.
(e.g. when the NYT split with Johnson over the Vietnam war (even about tactics and strategy) and when it split with Nixon over Watergate, that represented a pretty explicit split in the US ruling class.)

on http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/07/25/0329226.shtml Cliff wrote:
“What do you do if your productivity drops to two lines of code a day, and you just sit and stare at the code and feel like you don’t know how to do it anymore?…”
this is just like something I’ve been going through for a while. and it has been troubling me.
there’s this long thread on the topic, with some good advice, like take a break, drink more caffeinated beverages, and one poster writes:
The c0der cocktail: (use at your own risk)
——————————————-
Once Daily:
*5-HTP – 100mg
*Vitamin/Mineral supplement
With a meal: (3 times daily)
*DHEA – 25mg
*Ginko Biloba – 80mg – 24%GF
*One of:
– Ephedrine – 20mg
– Adderall/Ritalin – 1 dose
– Ginseng – 2 doses
Another writes:
Give yourself some credit: you are probably not some lazy lowlife.
There are easier ways to make a living than this. So what’s the
problem? I have no idea, but you do.
There’s obviously SOMETHING that’s actively preventing you from
focusing properly on the job at hand, and you probably know what it
is.
this is good, and true and important to consider..
my own take is that there’s at least two aspects to the problem.
lots of respondents to the original posting focused on one aspect — the psychological and technical aspect — and ways to address those issues.
the second aspect of this problem rests on the structural basis of the work. is it a personal project for fun, research or perhaps life-long learning? is it work in which you hold equity? is it work for hire? paid by the hour, by the job or salaried?
the reason this is important is that in the case where the work is being done for a personal project, or for a business enterprise in which you hold significant equity, there is no ethical dilemma. you will be rewarded to the extent the work done is valued by whoever you need to sell it to. no more, no less. the problem will take as long as it takes, or you may just drop it in favor of some other more interesting task, perhaps returning when you are ready. you are free.
but in the case of work for hire, there is a business ethics question around one’s failure to provide services (or at least inefficiency and delay). the implicit contract between employer and employee rests on the concept of programming work being some sort of “labor” and the exchange analogous to buying and selling a commodity in some sense.
but obviously in cases like this, the thought product is different in some important way from any commodity in general and conventional labor in particular. there is a creative element, and it is a deficiency of the work-for-hire employment model that creates the ethical dilemma.
if the problem is simply that you don’t know what you’re doing, then get trained up fast! on your own time, thank you! this career requires life-long learning. there is no shame in that, as long as you do nothing under false pretences. if you just can’t get trained, for whatever reason, consider changing careers.
there is also this gray area called marketing. individuals selling their skills are no different from any other vendors, and are entitled to emphasize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. we don’t have to like it in any objective sense, that’s just the way business works, and there’s nothing wrong in that. but when you find yourself in a bind, unable to deliver work already promised, then I guess you have some fast talking to do, there’s no two ways around it.

our thought for today, is “what exactly are property rights? where do they come from? what are their limits?”
its prompted by a passage I discovered in howard zinn’s “a people’s history of the united states” where he’s talking about let’s say the rise and fall of the IWW. if you don’t know this story already, please stop reading right now, and find out. its an education, let me tell you. its the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say that you can’t even begin to have a conversation with folks about the nature of our nation, what really happened, not the fairy tales they tell you in high school history.
in this passage, a fellow is incarcerated, given bread and water for three months, and finally sentenced to life in prison, basically for making a speech.
yes, this is America, ca. 1912.
in his speech the fellow was alleged to have said “to hell with the courts, I have seen their justice.”
that was basically his indictment. he was charged with inciting to riot, and imprisoned.
in his defense, he denied the allegation, saying he hadn’t said that in his original speech, but after three months in jail, he affirms the thought. “to hell with you,” he says to the judge, “I have seen your justice.”
not the most able defense, I think, but what do you want from an anarchist?
he goes on to say (more or less), “you have invented this right, this property right, which supercedes all other rights, the right to free speech, the right to assemble, the right to the pursuit of happiness. because the greedy, wealthy are not satisfied with their wealth, their rapacious appetite will not be satisfied until they own everything, they control everyone. this is why we fight their wars, this is why we rot in their prisons, this is why we slave in their mines and their fields.”
so this brought to mind the question, “are property rights even mentioned in the constitution?” I don’t think so. that’s interesting, because our anarchist friend does have a point. on the other hand the specific enumeration of rights in the constitution is not intended to exclude other rights not mentioned. but that’s sufficiently vague as to be subject to very wide interpretation.
property rights are a fundamental aspect of what’s called english common law, in turn derived from roman law. so they may be assumed, in some sense, without need for enumeration. but in this era, where let’s say there’s conflict between the good of the people and the property rights of a few, the precise nature and bounds of these rights are in need of examination.