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Friday, August 12, 2005Asks Marcus:Wait. Aren't liberals supposed to be the civil ones who would never resort to crude mockery of the cherished beliefs of others?He's referring to the way the left caricatures Creationists and ID proponents. He raises a valid point, though those on the left can sensibly point out that there's a big difference between such horrors as thinking you're not descended from monkeys and charming cultural quirks like stoning rape victims and homosexuals. If the fundie right really wants to take on the gay rights lobby, they should convert to Islam, stone at will and see how long it takes them to get a "Profile in Courage" award. 
posted by gbarto at 8:09 PM I'm opposed to the death penalty, but... Police hunt for man who ran over car wash ducks CAMPBELL, Calif. - When managers of a local car wash arrived for work recently they were stunned to discover a gruesome scene - the mangled bodies of ten ducks, favorites of the community who lived in a nearby pond.I'm not an animal rights nut, and as my hamburger consumption indicates I don't place animal life above human life like some PETA types. But this kind of story really gets me. I realize that some people shoot up schools, churches, post offices and the like. And I agree it's terrible. But one has a reasonable expectation that the wackos in those cases have had a few run-ins with their fellow homo sapiens that may have fostered their behavior, however delusional and paranoid. But ducks? I don't even want to imagine the psychological profile for this guy. Did the Donald Duck at Disney molest him? Was a piece of bread ripped from his tiny hand at a crucial moment in the Oedipal phase? Or did he simply freak out and decide that mauling a few of God's fellow creatures was an acceptable thing to do? I don't know what his story is, or under what circumstances he tripped out. But I do know this: This is one guy I don't want to be around when he's in one of those moods. If grinding up ducks with your car fulfills some baser need, you need a little room to do some thinking in. For a long time. Padded or unpadded is a decision we'll leave to the professionals. By the way, I know these ducks. I watched them swimming around while the car got washed a few weeks ago. Walked by some of the survivors today - I work two buildings down. Utterly disgusting. Hope they catch the bastard and screw his head on good and straight, however hard they need to twist, before letting him loose on polite society again.
posted by gbarto at 7:44 PM Thursday, August 11, 2005The Happy Warrior:They [Islamist radicals or, as Hitchens calls them, Islamo-fascists] gave us no peace and we shouldn’t give them any. We can't live on the same planet as them and I'm glad because I don’t want to. I don’t want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murders and rapists and torturers and child abusers. Its them or me. I'm very happy about this because I know it will be them. It’s a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it's also a pleasure. I don’t regard it as a grim task at all.I'm not sure I'm so cheery about the prospect, but this seems about right to me. As long as Western movies, music, clothes and - most importantly - ideals about individualism exist, they will from time to time infect Islamic culture in the same way they infected Soviet Marxist culture. Islamofascism, like Marxism, relies on putting the community before the individual and its leaders before all. In the face of Western individualism, it cannot stand, because it has no good mechanism for allowing differences of opinion that may change the direction of society or the composition of its leadership. Because Marxism and Islamofascism are tools for maintaining old ideas, whereas Western democracy is a mechanism for peaceful, incremental change, the West will outpace its Islamofascist rivals, just as it outpaced the Marxists. Things will be ugly in the middle, but one day President Bush's assertion that Islamofascism, too, will land on the ashheap of history will prove as prescient as Reagan's denunciations of the Evil Empire. At this point, everyone who sought appeasement today will suddenly have known all along that Islamofascism was going to burn itself out, maybe sooner without the West fanning the flames. They say you can only count on two things, death and taxes. Let us add to this the appearance of useful idiots on the far left and far right whenever America stumbles into a just cause whose undertaking requires more than a month's effort.
posted by gbarto at 5:32 PM Man dies after 50 hours of computer games Haven't seen Sen. Clinton's statement on the latest gaming related horror yet. Next they'll want timers, as well as content ratings.
posted by gbarto at 5:04 PM Wednesday, August 10, 2005A few days ago, the TurkeyBlog went on an extended rant about Wendy's messing up his hamburger order (It was for a regular hamburger, for cryin' out loud!).He probably would have know better, had he read this: There are only two contexts, I suppose, where vulgarity really bothers me. I don't like the person who drops an expletive in relatively innocuous circumstances (bumper tapped in the parking lot, soda dropped on the sidewalk) because he's upset about something else.No f-bombs were dropped, but yeah, the reaction was a bit over the top. If you're like me, the Wendy's article made you mutter, "Stupid cashiers, can't they get anything right?" If you're like me in my better moments, you said, "All this for a piece of cheese? Must have missed a pill." I offer the above by way of admitting I'm not the best person to coach people on maintaining the public semblance of reasonableness in the face of adversity. Had I lost a loved one way before his or her time, I'd probably go overboard too. But... One of the most embarrassing things in the world is to make yourself an idiot on someone else's behalf because they figured out which buttons to push. Which is, sadly, what has happened to Cindy Sheehan, the woman who was prominently featured protesting outside President Bush's ranch the other day. Jeff Goldstein has the get sane side of the story here. He is right on in noting: I feel for this woman, I honestly do. But somebody close to her needs to take her aside and convince her that it’s time to grieve in private and to honor her son’s memory. Instead, this poor grieving woman is taking solace—solace I believe she’ll later come to regret—from the worst type of hyperpartisan frauds, professional Bush-bashers and wannabe-Vietnam-era protestors whose hatred for the President and his foreign policy runs so deepthat they’re willing to adopt Ms. Sheehan like some sort of morbid mascot of convenience and exploit her pain—and her son’s death—in the most cynical and public way imaginable.So, prayers for Ms. Sheehan, and all the other grieving family and friends of those who have died in Iraq. We should honor their suffering and try to understand their pain. At the same time, we should be careful in assessing their policy statements, holding neither them nor ourselves to notions formed in the crucible of shock, anger and lingering grief. To do so would be to dishonor the greatest part of those they mourn - the lives they led, as opposed to the too soon ending of those lives. It would also make as much sense as putting the TurkeyBlog in charge of a fast food restaurant five minutes after they messed up his order.
posted by gbarto at 1:10 PM Be sure to visit Day by Day and Click4Cathy, Chris's sister.
posted by gbarto at 12:52 PM Monday, August 08, 2005That's customer service!I visited the Wendy's in Sunnyvale today. As is my custom, I ordered a Junior Hamburger, a nice afternoon snack. Said the cashier, "That's $1.07." As a regular consumer of Junior Hamburgers, I was surprised: I always pay with a dollar. I asked if they'd changed the price for a Junior Hamburger. "It says $1.07." "For a Junior Hamburger." At this point, the cashier looked at me as though I were touched in the head. I rustled around for a few pennies, paid and took my receipt. Sure enough, the receipt indicated a Junior Cheeseburger. And sure enough, they cheerily handed me a Junior Cheeseburger. I handed it back: "I can't eat this. It has cheese. That's why I ordered a hamburger." The girl looked around helplessly and gestured at the cashier. He was busy. She threw the cheeseburger away and made a hamburger, which she handed to me with a nervous nod. There were no spoken apologies. And, of course, no one gave any attention to the fact that I had been overcharged after trying multiple times to make sure I was being charged for what I was ordered. Very impressive. I sat down and filled out a customer comment card - there's one on every table. Afterwards, I looked for the drop box. None was in evidence. It may have been there, but there was certainly nothing like the "Tell us how we're doing" displays you see in other restaurants. Turning over the card, however, I found the mailing address for the franchise. There was also a little box in one corner. It read, "Postage Required. Post Office will not deliver without proper postage." I could, of course, spring for the postage. But I think I know just how interested Wendy's of Santa Clara Inc. is in my feedback. If they want me to buy a stamp to let them know they dinged me for a dime and I'm unhappy, they can forget it. If Wendy's of Santa Clara happens upon this website, they can account for one of doubtless many items that were pitched for no apparent reason while their fine cashier did a fine job upselling the burgers and making sure he didn't miss any details about his coworker's weekend. If they don't too bad for them. They'll just have to wonder, in that case, why Wendy's is increasingly identified as being another fast food chain kind of like Jack in the Box. P.S. Except that Jack's has cleaner restrooms. P.P.S. In the wake of the finger mess, I'd tried to go to Wendy's more, out of sympathy. That's done.
posted by gbarto at 5:20 PM Sunday, August 07, 2005I see the Brits got the Russian sub cut free. Glad to see it. But there's a bigger story here, and it's one that the media are actually picking up on.Couple interesting bits in the Australian story (and elsewhere): The sudden success of British rescue experts was in marked contrast to several futile efforts by Russian ships to haul up both the mini-sub and the cables in which it was entangled.This Times narrative is far less cheery, focusing on how the Russian sub got stranded, how Russian authorities dealt with it, and where that places the Russian navy: With American and British rescue services arriving from distant points on the globe, the accident underscored anew the decline of Russia's military. Once feared and respected, it has deteriorated sharply since the late Soviet period.Meanwhile, AOL has an AP story: Russian Sailors Survive Submarine Scare Crew of Seven Trapped for Days at the Bottom of the Sea By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, AP
I haven't been able to find a link, but wanted to mention it because it includes this graf: The new crisis has been highly embarrassing for Russia, which will hold an unprecedented joint military exercise with China later this month, including the use of submarines to settle an imaginary conflict in a foreign land. In the exercise, Russia is to field a naval squadron and 17 long-haul aircraft.A few days ago, I wrote about the new Russian-Chinese cooperation, springboarding off a bit by Stephen Green. It's the first thing I mentioned when reading about Russian calls for help from the US, UK and Japan. So... The bad news for Russia and China continues. It's not enough that all around them democracies are springing up. Not bad enough that at some future date they may show up on a liberation list. What's really rough for the autocrats and totalitarians in power now is that at some level they realize the game is up. The Russians and Chinese announce joint exercises. It's a bold statement, suggesting that the superpower rivalries may reemerge. Will their plans to change the landscape succeed? But when a Russian sub gets in trouble, do the Russians call their new Chinese friends? Of course not. They call the people with the know-how and technology to actually do the job. The Brits, who seem to be better at loading their equipment than us, got there first, but it was clear from the start that an Anglosphere nation was going to fix this if anyone could. And therein lies the dilemma: These obnoxious free societies seem to be better at creating and digging up the money for this stuff. The Russians have spent several years failing to develop equipment and procedures for these situations in the wake of the Kirsk disaster. So they had to settle for a routine British operation instead. In Stranger and a Strange Land, the character Jubal Harshaw recalls forming a club with his best friend. The club voted unanimously that its members could refer to their mothers as "Crosspatch." Jubal ruefully notes that this didn't work out so well. Russo-Chinese efforts to reestablish themselves as players are not unlike the "Crosspatch decision": There's a worrying capacity for mischief there, as the two plan out how they're going to be forces to be reckoned with. But for the moment, at least, the Russian sub disaster has reminded us who the grown-ups are.
posted by gbarto at 10:07 AM |
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