June 2008

i can’t bear to actually read it today, the headlines alone meet every known minimum daily stupidity intake requirement.

“diplo debt parked at $18M” — this fight has been ongoing since the seventies. diplomats ostensibly here on United Nations business just leave their cars wherever and however and refuse to pay the tickets. (they also claim diplomatic immunity when charged with crimes such as rape, and are deported rather than tried.) here’s a headline for you: “New York to UN: Get the Fuck Out!” go build a headquarters in iowa or montana, some state that has a lot of room for you to park your cars and fewer citizens for you sons of bitches to be raping (apologies to all law-abiding UNizites, but if you can’t keep your cronies in line, then you will have to share in the consequence of their tomfoolery).

“go chasing waterfalls” talks about using art in “a call for revitalization of areas that have been underutilized”. i’ve got news for you: new york city doesn’t HAVE any underutilized areas. for chrissake, there isn’t even enough room for the ambassador of darfur to park his limo! the art project itself, a collection of four manmade waterfalls spouting away in the east river, seems interesting and beautiful … and somewhat useless. it cost millions of dollars to put this watershow together, while the city is busily cutting back on services such as sanitation and rat-population control because we’re running out of money. an overcrowded city that can’t hire enough cops because their starting wage is less than that of an administrative assistant shouldn’t be throwing this kind of money around in a misguided effort to further overutilize its underserved resources.

one article is slyly entitled “mta hands pried from E-ZPass” - and how they restrained themselves from saying “cold dead hands” i couldn’t tell you, but one of the board members fighting the loss of this illegal (and undeserved) perk dropped dead of a heart attack the other day. i’m not sure, but i think the dead guy was the one who had eight (8! count ‘em!) free E-ZPass tags assigned to him. eight tags in exchange for an allegedly unpaid board position, when the toll for the verrazzano bridge alone is nine bucks a pop. meanwhile, the MTA has the nerve to criticize the media for making much of the free passes, and (according to chairman dale hemmerdinger) (no, i didn’t not make that name up) served to take “the focus off the other issues facing the MTA, which are how we’re going to fund megaprojects and continue funding service for eight and half million new yorkers.” in other words, it’s such a relatively small amount of money (a “postage stamp on a football field,” as board member warren dolny characterized it) that the taxpayers have some nerve even mentioning it. meanwhile, just one of mr. dolny’s passes accounted for more than $3600 in tolls in one 12-month period.

there are 88 of these passes in circulation. and if dolny’s tag is any example, this sleazy under-the-table deal cost new yorkers $316,800 per year.

if that’s a postage stamp, how big is the damn field?

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our food supply is seriously compromised. three times in the last two weeks I’ve been slammed with the SPLS*, one instance bad enough to seriously compromise my father’s day visit with dear old dad. in each case I’d eaten salad the evening before in a decent restaurant.

(*Screaming Projectile Liquid Shits)

in a recent article on alternet, allison kilkenny writes:

In 2007, a California produce company recalled bagged fresh spinach after a sample tested positive for salmonella. Nearly a year before, an outbreak of E. coli in fresh spinach killed three people and sickened 200. The recent tomato salmonella outbreak has affected at least 145 people, resulting in 23 hospitalizations, and many believe water contamination is the cause of the affected tomatoes.

It’s not the veggies that are to blame. The problem is the meat. Salmonella is an animal pathogen, so it doesn’t originate from tomatoes. Most experts agree that the bacteria probably come from groundwater contaminated with animal feces.

You read that right: Cow shit is in your tomatoes.

and it’s getting there via the aquifer, at the exact same moment that many large US cities are signing a pledge against buying bottled water.

these days my apocalyptic daymares are a combination of hurricanes, earthquakes, lightning
storms (such as several hundred this week that set half of california on fire), and an exodus of terrified pedestrians fleeing the cities in a world that’s run out of gas.

you are here:

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…is that they need to fit, like a decent pair of sneakers. or underwear. when they don’t fit, they rub the skin off of you and let everybody see all that ugly, bloody, raw, red pulsating shit underneath.

as in this exchange on YouTube, responding to keith olbermann’s announcement that walmart had, at long last, done the right thing in the debbie shanks case (reformatted in reverse-chron order for clarity):

WellSpokenNegro

I love walmart. Fuck CNN!

IPOMonster

Keith Olbermann has yet to have a guest on his show who isn’t obliged to kiss his ass, and all you can come up with is that O’Reilly interrupts guests?

<snip>

Liberals are cowards and pacifists. Olbermann highlights these traits…

WellSpokenNegro

LMAO! Goot one!

stillheretoday

You need to change your you tube name, from WellSpokenNegro, to i speak ghetto, and i guess, we all here on you tube, need to get ready for the change, if Obama wins, from hello, when you call somebody, to who-dis.

WellSpokenNegro

I am black and prout!

stillheretoday

I have a life, because i’m not a zombie bitch like you, who shops at walmart. What does walmart do for negros, or America, thats good. I do know that walmart sends money to China. And that China, has already killed over 10 million baby girls, because of there one-child policy.

clearly, WellSpokenNegro does not have a WellChosenScreenName but one that is so pathetically wrong for him that it’s almost comical, though this exchange as a whole is anything but funny. StillHereToday, who seems to have a certain amount of political/global awareness, notices the spelling errors and goes straight to the racist toolkit and quotes a line out of Boyz N The Hood while invoking obama.

both of these YouTubers may well be americans of voting age. what a terrifying thought.

but at least we have keith olbermann! when his producer at Countdown asked why, in his latest Special Comment, he had to tell george bush to “shut the hell up”, keith replied that it’s because he’s can’t tell him to shut the FUCK up on television. go keith! in this latest (and greatest) indictment, he shreds GWB’s pathetic “golfing would show disrespect to the murdered soldiers” statments:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=Qvz9jyf4gUk]

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it was discouraging, in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back sort of a way, to settle my stuff on the Starbuck’s microtable and realize that i’d forgotten to request a staycup. (staycups are real cups, made of glass or pottery or whatever it is that those big old off-white coffee cups are made of, to be returned to the barrista when emptied, rather than dispatched to the landfill with a million other chlorine-bleached go-cups.)

if i were really serious about greening myself i wouldn’t be in starbuck’s at all, of course, i know that. but i do love sunday mornings with the horrid new york times and a cup of coffee that i didn’t have to brew for myself. it’s the type of thing that a long-time-single person learns to rely on, to look forward to, almost like having breakfast delivered to you in bed. anyway, this morning i forgot to specify a staycup (which usually has to be explained and is never, under any circumstances, offered or suggested).

i can see from my Con Ed bill that i am honoring my commitment to green, though:according to yesterday’s bill, i used only one-third as much electricity as i did during the same period last year. i admit to having been an energy slob — the computer (including DSL modem and wireless router) left on night and day along with the living room exhaust fan, incandescent bulbs in every socket… well, i’m having no more of that, and i am very proud of the progress i’ve made. i mean, one-third less! and i wasn’t even out of town during the month. allow me a pat on the back, unnecessary go-cup and all.

even the times is in synch with me today, with a small front-page story about an upscale zero-emission home just built in santa monica. this house is completely off the grid, generates all of its own power, is almost entirely made of recycled materials, and is selling for (hold on to your seats!) 2.8 million dollars. it’s a green trophy home, something like a hybrid rolls royce (maybe not yet, but mark my word the day is nigh).

one step at a time i am reducing my carbon footprint. this gives me something to take pride in, some small measure of hope in what feels like an increasingly hopeless world. the fact that it’s ongoing, not a one-shot deal but many different choices that i must consciously make throughout my day, is changing my life and my consciousness in unexpected ways. i very rarely forget to bring my own bag to the supermarket when shopping. if i forget the bag but only buy a few things, i’ll tuck them under my arm for the block-long walk to my apartment.  i am trying to catch up with germany, which is rapidly becoming the world’s greenest state.

i’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front these past couple of weeks. my trusty desktop computer has been in hospice for about a month, and what with mercurcy retrograde, dell needed weeks to ship the laptop replacement that i ordered in may. finally it has arrived, and i’ve spent a couple of max stress days xferring all (i hope) my links and docs and settings over to the new system. it’s another element of my greening, this laptop, as it uses far less power than a desktop/monitor combination (i am not using a docking station nor external monitor, and so expect to see my electric usage continue to plummet, air conditioner notwithstanding.)

i tried to make the switch to mac. i really really tried. i love the mac, i do, it is a delightful little personality of a machine. but i may be in the realm of old dogs at this point, not very good at learning new things, so i will focus for now on my greenlife, and maybe take another look at converting to the religions of apple a bit more down the line. (that goddam delete key that works backwards! i just can’t get used to that — anybody know a hack?)

in the meantime, i am going to get myself a copy of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, to get me back on consistent track with my blogging!

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the campaign has been around for awhile, but these days it seems like every other bus carries an ad larger than most nyc apartments that proclaims:

and what, if anything, came of all this telling? certainly no terrorist plots were foiled, nary a bomb was defused, the lid wasn’t put back on the poison gas cannister moments before a bevy of tired midtown commuters streamed into the subway-car-cum-narrowly-averted-coffin.

a few years ago, at the most absurd height of the government-induced anti-terrorist panic, someone called 911 during the morning rush hour to report a suspicious unattended brown paper bag on a subway platform. NYPD’s riot and bomb control squads responded promptly, the subway line was shut down, the would-be passengers shooed out into the street, where they would be safe (even if terribly late for work).

the bag contained a half-eaten sandwich.

last summer, there was nearly a riot at the post office in my neighborhood when one of the postal clerks, apparently obeying the letter of the law (if not the spirit of brotherly love), saw an unattended briefcase leaning on the wall beside the PO boxes and, without making any kind of an announcement, threw it out the door and into the late harlem afternoon sunlight, where it did not sit for long. when the owner, a slight and elderly black man who apparently couldn’t hold the briefcase while wrangling his package through the bulletproof pulldown window, finished his business and turned to pick up the bag, it was gone. really gone — not only from the nearby wall where he had set it down, but also from the street where the clerk had flung it. wallet, house keys, important papers… personally, i’m not setting any bag of mine down anywhere in public unless it’s touching some part of my body: one foot slung through the shoulder strap, squeezed between my knees, on top of a foot or right in my lap. the old gent was reckless with his bag, but if he should have been concerned about the possibility of it being stolen, he certainly should NOT have been worried about it being thrown into the street like a sack of garbage.

the real problem with both of these stories, ridiculous (and funny!) as they may be, is that this is precisely how the government wants us to live these days — afraid of and suspicious of absolutely everything. spend half an hour on the subway and you’ll hear at least two fear announcements — the ubiquitous and utterly tiresome “if you see something, say something” chestnut paired with various reminders to keep your bags close and your eyes open at all times, be alert to danger at every moment.

but actions speak far louder than words, and if the MTA had a real concern i guess they’d pry those lazy-ass clerks out of the token booths and get them inspecting the stations. they’d arm the conductors and block the ends of stations so that not everybody who feels like it can stroll down onto the tracks at any given moment. (a woman was raped on the subway tracks a couple of weeks ago, just yanked off the station and down into the dark. everybody must have been so busy looking for unattended sandwich bags that they didn’t notice the son of a bitch dragging her off the platform.)

token clerks haven’t had a job to do since the MTA stopped making tokens a few years ago. they don’t sell metrocards, they don’t make change for the metrocard machine. they allegedly give directions, but as the booths are flanked by massive (and massively detailed) subway maps, no one has much to ask them. apparently, they are not allowed to read — this, i have to believe, as believing that none of them WANT to read, that they actually prefer sitting in their little fluorescent-lit booth, hands folded primly on the counter, gazing off into the distance, is too disheartening.

but that’s all the evidence i need that “see something, say something” is a load of bull.

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both, i suppose. i actually shed a few for hillary yesterday, reading the inevitable postmortems on this fine, 100-degree june morning; felt just like the late august dog days of my childhood. today will be more of the same, another record-breaking day in what i predict will become a record-breaking month, just as last october was the hottest ever recorded in nyc history, just a year and change after our record-breaking snowfalls.

not that we’re trying to show off or anything. DC broke records in february, when it hit 73 degrees, and vegas did it with 104 in may.

I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE INTERESTING to get an idea of what average temperatures were back in the day, say a hundred years ago, but i couldn’t find that. NASA states the warming in terms of temperature increase over time, which is not the same as telling me how hot it was on 6/9/1957 (or 6/9/1857 while we’re at it). after quite a bit of digging, i found currrent “averages” (though no information on how those averages were determined), but even for these i had to scroll down and select the averages and records tab on that page — and they’re only available for the present day.

i’m no conspiracy theorist (the government is far too incompetent to execute any meaningful conspiracies) but i did find the fact that the only way you can get this information is to pay a LOT of money for it somewhat daunting. the climate change psychology blog is excellent, but even they don’t seem to have the old-time records that i would have expected to easily find in the public domain that is the internet.

OR IS THE INTERNET REALLY A PUBLIC DOMAIN? according to bill moyers it isn’t. free speech, both in print and online, is narrowing every day, not because of any conspiracy but because the media has largely rolled over and played dead in the face of corporate and governmental pressure.

getting back to hillary (i know, you were wondering when i’d work her back in), the the nutcracker doll is a perfect example of inappropriate journalistic silence — the same kind of silence i have found this morning, in my search for some pretty basic information on how regional temperatures in the US have changed over time. i’m sorry, but endless articles that amount to “hot enough for you?” and “drink plenty of water” simply aren’t enough. the planet is going down in flames and all we get from the so-called mainstream media is an unfunny version of denis leary’s asshole.

WE ARE NOT WITHOUT POWER IN THIS BATTLE, despite the size of today’s media conglomerates and the ignorant fascists in the white house. but we need to keep the pressure on. do not remain silent in the face of journalistic silence — blog, shout, write letters to the editor, make calls to congress. join the elecronic frontiers foundation (EFF), which has been working for years to keep speech free on the web.

and don’t count on me to inspire you. instead. let 40 minutes with the brilliant and fearless bill moyers do that, as it did so very well for me:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/Y0r71L7cojE&hl=en]

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Once again, abortion opponents reveal their disregard for life after birth.

read more | digg story

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yazmany arboleda, a 27-year-old artist from miami, was questioned by police on wednesday about the exhibit he was attempting to set up on west 22nd street. he had rented the vacant storefront to mount a show of his own work for a two-day run.

what do the police care about an art exhibit? nothing. in this case, they only cared about its name: the assassination of hillary clinton / the assassination of barack obama.

arboleda went voluntarily to the stationhouse for questioning, which he characterized as “an interrogation”, and was subsequently released without charges.

I’VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU, YAZ: when the NYPD interrogates you (and they do still interrogate people), you’re NOT walking out a free man. you will be charged with something (typically resisting arrest) and bundled off to central booking, where they take away your shoelaces and your belt and cuff your hands behind you until it’s time to see the judge.

WAS ALL THIS QUESTIONING NECESSARY? of course not. but it was an extremely predictable knee-jerk reaction by cops on the beat. “what? they’re having assassinations over there? holy shit, joey, better call for backup!” it’s common knowledge that NYPD street cops are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer — the sharpest knives don’t take jobs that start at $35k, they go to work in westchester, or for the FBI. it’s getting harder and harder for the new york city police department to find ANYBODY willing to do the job; there hasn’t been a full class of rookies in several years now, and a cop shortage is an eventual reality here unless something changes fairly soon. but i digress.

THE ART ITSELF HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ASSASSINATION — arboleda is quite insistent about that when talking to reporters, and it’s pretty clear that he’s never talked to reporters so much in his life. it’s also pretty clear that the opportunity to talk to reporters is the only reason the show is titled this way. he explains that the work is about character assassination. i can’t quite see how a giant painting of hillary’s face sheds much light on the character assassination that she surely has, over her career, been subject to, but then i am not very knowledgeable about modern art so perhaps there is a connection. however, if that’s truly the subject, why not title the show “the character assassination of…”? because then the cops won’t come and “interrogate” you and your name won’t be in the papers two days running, that’s why.

I AM ALL ABOUT FREE SPEECH AND FREEDOM OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION, and the genuine controversy that is often sparked thereby. but this show is neither genuine NOR controversial: it is a blatant example of an artist who manipulated public fears and police ignorance in order to get himself a bully pulpit, and i have no respect at all for such capers: politicans do this kind of crap all the time, with their bullshit photo-ops; i don’t tolerate it from them and i see no reason why i should tolerate it from this young man just because he conducted his p/r campaign under the umbrella of modern art.

that’s why i say yazmany arboleda is full of shit — and not the kind that chris ofili uses, either.

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yesterday, this appeared in the associated press:

DUJIANGYAN, China - Chinese police dragged away more than 100 parents Tuesday while
they were protesting the deaths of their children in poorly constructed
schools that collapsed in last month’s earthquake.

(full article)

couldn’t happen here? maybe not yet (though there were some chilling stories early in the iraq war, where weeping parents were hauled off their freshly delivered cold-boys-in-boxes, when the military suddenly declared their KIA coffin lading area to be off-limits).

but we have gotten to this point:

Thirty-four people were convicted yesterday of misdemeanor charges stemming from a demonstration at the Supreme Court in January in which they decried conditions at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Judge Wendell P. Gardner Jr. said the demonstrators violated the law by protesting at the plaza of the Supreme Court, where such activities are banned. He rejected arguments that they were practicing free speech when they marched to the plaza, despite warnings from police, carrying banners and wearing T-shirts saying “Shut down Guantanamo.”

(full article)

the U.S. government is only a step or two behind the chinese government in terms of civil rights violations. and gaining a little more ground every day.

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