I think the decisions you’ve made are like crap from a constipated iguana. Your mere existence is a waste of internal organs. Therefore, our policies should change.
Sincerely,
Tom
If that’s you, if your name is Tom and you wrote that letter, you may need ToneCheck, simultaneously one of the most necessary and obnoxious advancements in email technology since laughing out loud was shortened to three simple letters.
The basic idea behind ToneCheck is that people don’t know how to properly express themselves in writing and we need to help them. Often, it seems, people sound more angry on email than they actually are. One example is "understood" versus "understand". If you were to say, "You misunderstood," the inferred meaning is generally more aggressive than saying, "You misunderstand."
The idea of ToneCheck is valid enough. Each of us has received (and probably sent) a number of emails that were taken the wrong way. And, more likely than not, we know of a few people in each of our lives that would greatly benefit from a program that made sure they weren’t being complete jackasses before clicking SEND. On every email.
The unfortunate thing about ToneCheck is that it’s just another crutch in a line of instruments that hurt communication by helping communication. I don’t want to get all Grandpa Luddite – technology is ruining the way we interact with people, people should get off their BlackBerrys and look at where they are, stop texting while driving, call your Aunt instead of emailing her for Godsake, no one writes letters anymore and our children’s penmanship atrocious! However, ToneCheck is going to kill me and then kill all of you once I’m gone.
ToneCheck does not replace bad spelling (lazyness) or bad grammar (stupidity and laziness); it replaces common sense.
The example on the ToneCheck website is an email that reads: Bob, You should get off your pedestal and listen to your sales team. They do support you and will do what needs to get done. Sincerely, Mary.
ToneCheck has an angry face near the underlined portion. Why: to indicate that that portion of the letter conveys an angry tone.
No shit. I’d like to see Mary walk into Bob’s office and say that sentence kindly. It’s angry because it is intended to be angry, not because Mary is trying to take it easy on Bob. If that’s the case, Mary is a sociopath and we’ve a whole other postal-worker issue on our hands beyond the tone she’s taking in her intra-office memos.
Let’s keep it simple. We can tonecheck ourselves using techniques and technologies that we already use everyday anyway – a little decency and respect and common sense and, of course, a little smiley changes everything:
Dear Sir,
I think the decisions you’ve made are like crap from a constipated iguana :) Your mere existence is a waste of internal organs ;) Therefore, our policies should change… :-) :^) :-D
From the back of the audience, lost beneath angled lights and slightly shifting bodies, I listened to the comedian without laughing. A band was on the stage beside him and he referenced each member individually. That’s Hector Castro on the keyboard; he says he’s from Miami but everyone knows your last name, Hector, and everyone knows that 20 years ago you were on a Goodyear tire in the middle of the Caribbean, praying not to float to Cancun. The comedian did a pantomime of Hector praying on his defection raft. Our front man, Willy Jones; Willy is African American; move into the light Willy, no one can see you. Willy convulsed silently with laughter, his huge mouth opened and huge teeth glimmered. I expected the comedian to comment on the apparition-like appearance of Willy’s smile – but he moves on. And way back there on the drums and saxophone, we got Joe Miller and Tommy Hatsfield, the white guys. This band is like a dyslexic bus in 1961 Alabama.
I sat silently because everyone else was laughing. And not the uncomfortable, I-can’t-believe-he-said-that laughter, but genuine laughter. I wasn’t laughing because I was paying attention to why these jokes were funny and how they worked with this audience. (The comedian was astute, to be sure, but I think it’s worth mentioning, for my own critical reputation if for no other reason, that this guy wasn’t that funny or edgy; the jokes he had were, comparatively, incredibly tame.) Racism has been something of a style or a device of comedy forever, seen in two forms: the actual racism of blackface and minstrel shows and rants of Michael Richards that serves only hatred; and the friendly, ironic racism that serves equally to point out differences as it does to edify that those differences are petty.
One of the clearest and most recent examples of this took place during the appearance of the cast of the film "Grown Ups" on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Kimmel adroitly takes a racial thought and flips it soundly on its ear around the 1:30 mark of this clip:
In the last ten years, the friendly, ironic form of racism in comedy has lead the way in cautiously brining us closer together while undermining the litigious decades of political correctness that began sometime around "where's the beef?" At a delicate pace, even the backlash against political correctness has become passé – try creating a show called "Politically Incorrect" today and you’ll be met with, "Yes, but what makes it different?"
This begs the question: What is next for political correctness?, which I’ve wondered, inappropriately and aloud at times. While Kimmel and Chris Rock seem to be able to banter comfortably about black and white, Jon Stewart can take the same dry tone with Judaism, Ellen DeGeneres with homosexuality, Ricky Gervais with obesity and the mentally handicapped, and Sarah Silverman with just about anything she can get her greedy, JAP-y, whore-ish mouth on when it isn't replete with Asian cock, none of them seem capable of defining what the next step is in the fight against fear and political correctness.
At times answers sail from the oddest windows and mug you around the most surprising corners. This one came from Thomas "The Moustache" Friedman in today’s New York Times. The Moustache’s column was on the firing of CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr after she Tweeted her condolences for the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiite spiritual leader involved in the founding of Hezbollah.
"Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah," Nasr wrote. She was subsequently dismissed from CNN, a move that proves only that CNN is racist.
Freidman’s moustache noted, and rightly so, that a journalist should lose her job for "misreporting, for misquoting, for fabricating, for plagiarizing, for systemic bias," not for an innocuous text barely mourning the passing of a man whose life was complex enough to warrant defense by numerous American journalists for his stance on women’s rights and his repudiation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Friedman continued:
"What signal are we sending young people? Trim your sails, be politically correct, don’t say anything that will get you flamed by one constituency or another. And if you ever want a job in government, national journalism or as president of Harvard, play it safe and don’t take any intellectual chances that might offend someone. In the age of Google, when everything you say is forever searchable, the future belongs to those who leave no footprints."
The Moustache’s words (whether or not he meant them in this way) suggest that political correctness is not just passé, it is detrimental to our society. If we hide behind good manners, pretending there is nothing odd or different or interesting about each other, we run the risk of vitriolic internal attrition that will wear away at the guts of our culture until it implodes, probably violently.
The next step is an active fight against political correctness, while keeping up the conscious fight against prejudice, racism and all things Gibsonian. The next step is not trusting people who have no dissenting opinions nor appreciation for the comedic. The next step, my American friends, is boarding the dyslexic bus.
Ignatius J. Reilly was surprised to learn that the sailor prancing down Chartres Street was not a sailor at all.
"What?" Ignatius thundered. "Do you mean that he is impersonating a member of the armed forces of this country? ... This is extremely serious." Ignatius frowned and the red sateen scarf rode down on his hunting cap. "Every soldier and sailor that we see could simply be some mad decadent in disguise. My God! We may all be trapped in some horrible conspiracy. I knew that something like this was going to happen. The United States is probably totally defenseless!"
The comical reaction of John Toole Kennedy’s anti-hero in "A Confederacy of Dunces" could easily repeat and reverberate throughout the U.S. Armed Forces when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is finally repealed.
You mean he’s gay? My God! The United States is probably totally defenseless.
This week, the Pentagon set out to ask those defending the United States how they would feel to know that the country was totally defenseless. On Wednesday, they began emailing a survey, which contains more than 100 questions seeking views on the impact of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, to around 400,000 active duty and reserve troops.
The survey was evidently approved (in theory, anyway, if not question-by-question) by Sec. Robert Gates and President Barack Obama. Almost immediately, a few concerns have surfaced in light of the survey.
One of those: service men, no matter how thankful we are to them for their service, have never been a dependable compass when it comes to the implementation of policy. As one expert put it on CNN yesterday, those in the military were at first resistant to blacks and women serving on the frontlines, too.
On top of that, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which supports gays and lesbians serving openly, released a statement say that it cannot recommend that lesbian, gay, or bisexual service members fill out the survey – not that it recommended LGB (gonna leave transgender out of this one for hopefully obvious reasons) service members do not fill in hte blanks, but that the organization just couldn’t get behind something that might out gays or lesbians…even though the entire point of the organization is for gays and lesbians to be able to serve openly in the military. Sigh...
"There is no guarantee of privacy and (the Pentagon) has not agreed to provide immunity to service members whose privacy may be inadvertently violated or who inadvertently outs himself or herself," said Aubrey Sarvis, the group's executive director. "If a service member still wishes to participate, he or she should only do so in a manner that does not reveal sexual orientation."
If you’re a member of the military, don’t listen to either of the aforementioned reasons. Fill out the survey. Here’s why: you know Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is an absurd policy, and your answers don’t matter anyway. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed. This survey is the government’s way of placating critics, pretending to take your opinion under consideration simply so that they can later say they did. It’s like asking if you’d appreciate a blow job from Lara Logan; the answer is yes (unless you’re gay, then maybe Anderson Cooper), but that doesn’t mean that that answer won’t meet the e-shredder the moment it leaves your outbox.
As for the actual questions, the Pentagon is keeping the survey secret for now, but Military Times reviewed a draft copy: "[I]f the draft version is any guide, the general tone of the survey questions – developed by the independent research group Westat in cooperation with the Pentagon – leans toward the potential impact that repealing "don't ask, don't tell" might have on unit performance."
With that in mind, here are some possible sample questions for those who did not get the survey to consider:
How do you think morale would be affected were openly gay people to serve in the military?
How would readiness and willingness of troops be affected if their commander is thought to be gay or lesbian?
How would the repeal affect your spouse's, family's or "significant other's" attitude toward your continued military service?
Do you like cock?
Are you comfortable sharing a room, showering, etc. in warzones with someone who might be gay or lesbian?
Ironically, the major behavior change in male soldiers might be attenuation of gayness in the rooms and showers in warzones. They might stop grabbing each other’s asses and balls and calling each other faggot.
Or (shrug) that won’t stop and if that’s the case, if the law is repealed and men on the frontlines continue their usual homosexual/anti-homosexual antics (which are clearly posturing mechanisms to display their toughness), we just might find ourselves in the best possible situation: we are forced to be bone-core honest.
Gays and lesbians in the military would be required to continue to wear the warzone-thick skin they should wear in a freaking warzone anyway, and non-gay and lesbians would lose the pejorative; the same anti-gay comment they would have made with malice ten years ago, would not convey the same spite in an openly gay unit. Were they to make that comment in an openly gay military warzone with openly gay comrades (as I hope they would), morale would not be shattered, feelings would not be hurt, dissention would not descend. Quite the opposite. That kind of honesty and kidding would enmesh our men and women (psychologically, not physically), making them better friends, better soldiers, and a better team.
Maybe, in the end, everyone in the military would become gay. Wouldn’t that be nice. Ignatius thinks so: "The power-crazed leaders of the world would certainly be surprised to find that their military leaders and troops were only masquerading sodomites who were only too eager to meet the masquerading sodomite armies of other nations in order to have dances and balls and learn some foreign dance steps."
Over the weekend marking the 234th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thousands of patriots and parishioners sat to enjoy a game that was born around the same era, in one form or another, in the country from which the United States of America ratified a their declaration on that Thursday afternoon in July.
The game is baseball. The origins of the game are as oft and passionately debated as the origins of just about anything that evolves slowly, steadily from one incarnation to another with almost imperceptible change until it reaches its current, roid-ridden form. In 2005, David Block published a booked called "Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game" in which he suggested, based on certain historical evidence, that modern day baseball is a variant of an mid-eighteenth century British game called rounders – and that both games were descendents of English games of stoolball and "tut-ball."
Whether brought by the English or the Irish, or based on a French game from the 14th century, baseball has been with America since the beginning and has, like all great "American" loves, been slowly seduced into bed and kept as our own. In recent years, many have questioned the stamp "national pastime," saying baseball is less popular, slower, less characteristically "American" than, say, football. Baseball’s detractors discredit the game’s traditional place in our society, but they do so without warrant.
Baseball is America not because the game was with us in the beginning, but because the game has come to metaphorically define the American Way of Life – or, perhaps more accurately, the way American’s live their lives.
No other sport can claim metaphorical significance the way baseball can. Two weeks ago, a meeting in Hollywood was begun with, "I hear we’re going to hit a long ball today; what’s the first pitch." (We’re not talking soccer field here.) Similar clichés are used every day in business: swing and a miss, real pitchers’ duel, he really dropped the ball, two down in the bottom of the ninth, knocked it out of the park, he went down swinging, he was clutch.
Other sports can claim clichés that have spilled into our lives (third and long; puts up a prayer; putting from the rough), but none is as descriptive and universal as baseball. Even our high school romances are explained using baseball; and although the obscure meaning of the bases changes from generation to generation, a home run will always remain the same, ultimate goal.
(I don’t know if the British have these same wonderfully descriptive clichés revolving around cricket (he hit three wickets in one night?), but I suppose it’s possible.)
While baseball is America because the American zeitgeist is baseball, there is one overlooked cliché that I believe should be more often used in a positive context.
Last weekend, the New York Times published an article about a pair of economists that published a book based on 800 years of economic data. "Their handiwork," says the Times, "is contained in their recent best seller, ‘This Time Is Different,’ a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions."
The book and article extrapolate an interesting point – many of the disastrous decisions were between doing something and doing nothing. Most often, that something proves to be wrong. But, at times, the nothing is just as frowned upon, as in the still cooling case of Alan Greenspan.
When something is done, the approbation is hailed. But never is credit given to he who did nothing and was right in his decision.
That is of course with the exception of baseball. While basketball has "you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take" and football has the "hail mary" pass, baseball has "good eye" and "good look" and "don’t go chasing balls in the dirt."
With all the other baseball clichés floating around our lives, it may be wise to incorporate the "good look" every once in a while and appreciate the times we said no to Paul Wolfowitz when he suggested we invade Iraq; no to Bernie Madoff when he told us he had can’t-miss investment opportunity; no to Lindsay Lohan when she said she was OK to drive us to In-n-Out at 3am. By the next Fourth of July, I hope we’ve incorporated some more good looks into our lives. There’s a lot we can learn from baseball yet.
Last weekend, I was given a Viagra by one of my former coaches who is about 70 years old and, even in his earlier years, appeared in serious need of help in the bedroom. I had made the assumption soon after arriving at school that he was getting some help downstairs and so I started asking him to hook me up, thinking it would make me into some sort of superman. After nearly 10 years of begging, he bestowed a single pill upon me, advising that I would only need a half and that really the impact for me, at my age, would be gaining the ability to rebound like a seven-footer with a 45-inch…um…vertical.
Overly excited that I had in my possession a video-gameish second life, I only managed to hold on to it for four days before I chomped down on half and headed to Lois Lane’s.
To set the scene, I had never slept with this LL before… And, actually, short of some drunken texts, I had no reason to think she would even be interested. So… Not sure if I believed that Viagra would also give me some pervasive powers of persuasion that previously lay unrealized, dormant but waiting in my hypothalamus… But it didn’t.
A sad ending, I know. However, beyond the pit in my stomach, I gathered a couple key take-aways that I’d like to impart at this time to any concerned or curious comers:
First, a word of advice to anyone who might find himself in this situation – use Viagra on a guaranteed, known, one hundred and however many percent sure thing. Don’t waste it on a girl who might not go all the way, could be boring in bed, or may be interested in something other than making it an all night eff-fest. If you know you only got two tries, do some recon without the heavy artillery.
Secondly, if you are like me, you will learn that, unfortunately, you are in that group that has an adverse reaction to Viagra.
Approximately two hours after downing the pill, I got out of her bed feeling really, really, extremely, uncomfortably, agonizingly, stupid hot and needing to pee something horrible. My bladder issues proved to be the lesser of my concerns as it turned out. I had barely made it through the doorway of the bathroom when the heat I had felt in bed reached nuclear meltdown levels. My knees went out, and so did my lights, as I hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. Potatoes hopped up on Viagra.
Not sure how long I was out, but once I pulled my head through the fog and took stock of things, I realized that I no longer had a bladder issue. But I did have soaked boxers… In the name of cleanliness, I crawled into the shower but, truth be told, I didn’t care about the kidney liquid, I really just needed to let the sweet cold water rain down on me like a thunderstorm on a prairie fire. A prairie fire with a mean hardon.
Eventually, my body worked things out for itself and I toweled off and climbed back into bed with Miss L-squared, who, as best I can tell, was never the wiser.
Thirdly, and I wish my coach had told me this as well, please remember that some things are better left to the imagination.
While most late night television programming urinates carelessly near the electrical fence of ethics and good taste, late night programming on Fox News blatantly, sardonically shits directly in the ears of viewers before whipping its ass on their cotton blend sheets. The worst of all these shows is called "Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld." It’s described on Wikipedia as "Comedy/Satire/News parody" – problem is, it isn’t funny, satirical and calling it news parody is like calling the Ku Klux Klan civil rights parody.
Mercifully, "Red Eye" airs at 3am, which serves minimal viewers. However, the show still manages to reach an astounding 350,000 people each time it sullies the stratosphere en route to satellites – there are even those who Tivo the show, an egregious act that should be punished, in the words of Ignatius J. Reilly, with sever lashings.
Last night, beneath a haze of alcohol and various greasy substances that pain me today (well into the afternoon) I caught a good 10 minutes of the show as I flipped back and forth with a Rachel Maddow rerun. I remember nothing, not a word, of what was said on either show. Besides my alcohol-slicked retention, there is a reason for this.
A few years ago, the problem was that no one gave the news Murrow-style anymore; everyone editorialized, spun each story around and around, proved that every occurrence was simultaneously good, bad and irrelevant. Today that’s still prevalent, but we seem to have run into a new problem.
No one simply editorializes anymore. To get the news across today you must be outraged, indignant, beside yourself with disbelief at how abjectly stupid every single other person is, particularly those whose opinions run contrary to yours. Gutfeld, Maddow, Olbermann, Beck, O’Reilly. The only one not yelling at the rain is Larry King and that’s because a) he doesn’t know it’s raining and b) he’d bust a ventricle if his voice rose above mild bemusement.
I’m quite aware that most of the aforementioned shows are "entertainment" (those are heavy quotes), but they are not comedy and they are not scripted drama. Each show is certainly sanctioned in the personality of the host and that host’s ability to deliver news. Therefore, they might consider delivering the news in a way that allows an audience to actually comprehend their point, their words without overwhelming the point with indignation.
All I can think of while I stare at Greg Gutfeld is the increasingly deeper ravine between his squinty little eyes. I figure if he would lighten up a little, take a breath between paragraphs, the crease would clear up and I’d be able to understand why he thinks it’s humorous to use Sen. Robert Byrd for a joke the day he died.
As it stands, I have no idea what happened in the world yesterday because I was busy drinking and late night programming on Fox News is like the back page ads in a pornographic magazine – numbers for hookers, bargain blow jobs, grow your penis drugs – there is no way either leads to anything good.
This is a warning to everyone in a relationship, but mostly to girls in relationships: Don’t believe anything Orianthi has to tell you.
I’ve been driving around listening to an Orianthi song called "According to You" for the past month. This isn’t by choice; my car radio seems to be incapable of playing anything else, any other music or talk or beautiful, beautiful, soothing static.
The song petulantly decries the troubles of a lovelorn young woman; she is in the throes of an unsatisfying (perhaps bordering on abusive) relationship; she feels unloved, unappreciated, unwanted by her current lover. However, she meets someone that (ostensibly) loves, appreciates and worships her as she (ostensibly) deserves – don’t we all, ideally, I suppose, when it comes to the person with whom we’re closest. Instead of leaving the old and running off with the new, she decides tell the old, loudly and boldly that, look there is someone out there to appreciates me, so you should, too. Or I’m gonna go fuck him:
According to you, I’m stupid, I’m useless, I can’t do anything right/According to you, I'm difficult, hard to please, forever changing my mind/I'm a mess in a dress, can't show up on time/even if it would save my life/According to you/According to you.
But, according to him, I'm beautiful, incredible; he can't get me out of his head/According to him, I'm funny, irresistible, everything he ever wanted.
Which brings us to our lesson for the day. Go fuck this new guy, fine. Leave the abusive old guy, absolutely. But don’t do either because you think the new guy is going to be better than the old guy. Odds are – and I’ve done research on this – that the new guy is just as big of a douche fountain as the old guy.
Secondly, your logic is borderline absurd. Your currently boyfriend should appreciate you because some other random Joe Six Pack does? Should Julliard grant me a scholarship because my mom says I have the best arabesque since Anna Pavlova?
On top of that, complaining to your boyfriend is just proving his point, if not provoking him further. Stop it. If you want him to appreciate you more, stop changing your mind and start showing up on time. We both know what you really need to do is get nice and drunk and sleep with that other guy and leave this guy because (and I hate to get all Greg Behrendt here) it’s already over.
What happened exactly is never knowable. And, if by some aberration it is knowable, it is never conveyable. And, even if you can tell it just right, it’s never relatable. What we can know and convey and relate to are the events that transpire in the wake of what happened; those reactions occur at a pace that we can comprehend. While the flotilla attacked last week by Israeli commandos fades into memory, the responses to the attacks remain vivid and increasingly without context.
The response to the attack on the flotilla has been much more polarized than even the response to the recent attack by a North Korean submarine on a South Korean ship, an obvious act of war. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a strong response from other nations to the Korean incident; while she said reaction to the Gaza incident should be thoughtful and measured.
"I think the situation from our perspective is very difficult and requires careful, thoughtful responses from all concerned," said Clinton. "But we fully support the U.N. Security Council's action last night in issuing a presidential statement. And we will work to implement the intention that this presidential statement represents."
It has not been. The responses range from Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who made no excuses for the raid, indicating that it was just and that Israel would "continue to protect our civilians, we will continue to allow our soldiers to protect their lives, and the state of Israel will continue to practice its right for self-defense."
They range to the realism of Michael Chabon, a Jewish American writer who shook his head at the stupidity of his Israeli brethren in the op-ed of the New York Times: "Now, with the memory of the Mavi Marmara fresh in our minds, is the time for Jews to confront, at long last, the eternal truth of our stupidity as a people…Now is the moment to acknowledge that the 62-year history of Israel, like the history of the Jewish people and of the human race, has been from the beginning a record of glory and fiasco, triumph and error, greatness and meanness, charity and crime."
They range to the folly of veteran White House press member Helen Thomas whose muppet head said to a Flip cam last week that the flotilla raid was an example of why the Jewish people should "get the hell out of Palestine" and go home to Germany and Poland.
The responses here, the reactions are what matters. Maybe the commandos got out of control; maybe the flotilla for floatillaing a little too close to Gaza with a suspicious amount of weight on board; maybe those on board were murdered; or maybe those on board were planning an attack and were killed in self-defense. None of that really matters.
The incident itself can be covered up and glossed over and remembered incorrectly or remembered how we’d have preferred it happen. It’s there that we realize that these reactions are not effects, but causes for future incidents exactly like what happened off the shores of Gaza. Even if we’re not anti-Semitic octogenarian White House columnists, we should be careful how our legs jerk.
Then there was the oil spill that became the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. On April 20, an explosion killed eleven people on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. From there, things just seemed to get worse, if not more convoluted, in a bureaucratic (and now dead) swampland. Another explosion two days later took the rig to the bottom of the gulf; an investigation commenced on April 27; then a relief well was begun; Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar promised to restructure the Minerals Management Service that has apparently been corrupt and enabling negligent safety measures for years; two attempts to stop the leak failed; the smallest of the holes was plugged; the FDA approved and then reneged approval of an oil-cleansing chemical; a third attempt to plug the hole using dense mud was initiated, and we are presently waiting on the results that "look promising" after approximately 65.6 miles of Louisiana shoreline have already been impacted by oil.
Through all of that, it wasn’t until this week that people really began looking for someone to blame. For a month, it was enough that BP (formerly British Petroleum before a KFC-esque name contraction) was going to pay for all of the cleanup – a promise that remains after President Barack Obama’s news conference this morning. (Full transcription here.) However, now more and more, including traditionally leftist organizations like NPR and CNN, are raising the question, "Is this Obama’s Katrina?"
The question itself, with its implications, confused me the first time I heard Neal Conan of NPR pose it two days ago. Yesterday, Anderson Cooper, with raised eyebrow all a-gray, inquired the same. And this morning, Karl Rove answered in the Wall Street Journal with a yes as thick as the oil spewing from the well his friend’s administration approved.
"Could this be Mr. Obama's Katrina? It could be even worse," writes Rove. "The federal response to Katrina was governed by the 1988 Stafford Act, which says that in natural disasters on-shore states are in charge, not Washington… But BP's well was drilled in federal waters. Washington, not Louisiana, is in charge. This is Mr. Obama's responsibility."
The question and its implications are, after reading Rove’s most recent Katrina excuse, now beginning to frighten me. "Is this Obama’s Katrina?" inherently indicates that a) the BP oil spill cleanup is the federal government’s responsibility, b) the lack of regulation of the offshore oil drilling that was practiced by the Bush administration should have been restructured by the Obama administration, and c) the reaction of the federal government to Hurricane Katrina was insufficient.
Let’s begin by all agreeing that the cleanup should at least be overseen by the federal government. Well, that’s happening.
Now, let’s accept that we cannot go back in time and change the Bush administration’s policy on off-shore drilling, nor can we go back in time and beg the Obama administration to concentrate on deep-sea drilling safety measures instead of the war in Afghanistan or healthcare or getting the Olympics to Chicago.
Finally, in his answer, Rove finds the loophole he needs to make Katrina a state issue and the oil spill a federal issue (even though, again by implication, the phrase Obama's Katrina says federal disaster). Rove insinuates either that the federal government had no responsibility in reacting after Katrina (if so, what is the point of Federal Emergency Management Agency, and why was their involvement necessary), or that helping people off of roofs is commensurate to stopping a volatile eruption 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. Rove is admitting that Katrina was devastating and the reaction was egregious; he’s simply denying federal culpability, and that’s a happy place to be.
As Rove answers yes, this is Obama’s Katrina, he does so with a tacit slight-of-hand. He is not comparing Obama’s Katrina to Bush’s Katrina; in Rove’s mind there is no Bush’s Katrina.
But there was a Bush’s Katrina and it had only very little to do with a hurricane. Bush’s Katrina was the political fallout based on the public’s disgust with the administrations lack of response – but not just that, because Bush’s Katrina didn’t happen in a vacuum – it was the federal negligence (and continued denial of culpability) piled on to off every other incompetent decision made by the office of the President between 2001 and 2005. That is what incited the outrage that became Bush’s Katrina.
"Is this Obama’s Katrina?" suggests, through some absurd logic that this could be Obama’s Katrina as Bush's Katrina was Bush's Katrina. Not nearly enough incompetence has been displayed by Barack Obama or his team to make that possible. Regardless, it’s now apparent that we voted poorly; this disaster never would have happened if Sarah "Heartbeat Away" Palin were President. Drill. Baby. Drill.
I know a girl whom everybody knows. Sometimes I tease her about knowing everybody, but then she tells me that she doesn’t know everybody knows her and I say, okay, fair enough. You see, when she joined Facebook, she made a pledge to herself that she would only ask one hundred people to be her friend. This is a pledge she has, to her credit and to my continued amazement, stuck to, keeping requests under twenty; her friend list possesses a supernatural fecundity – even for online proliferation.
My teasing, even this indirect, erudite teasing, is warranted, but it also turns out to be entirely misguided.
Facebook has come under a great deal of scrutiny in the past month. The critiques have come from, among others, Congress and consumer groups that cased the Federal Trade Commission, in January, to write a letter saying the complaints raised "a number of concerns about Facebook's information sharing practices."
That din precipitated over the following five months. Today we find ourselves with a semi-official "Quit Facebook Day," organized by a website of which you’ll never guess the name (it’s QuitFacebook.com). The site currently has fewer participants than my aforementioned friend has "friends" on Facebook, plus, they’re going about this all wrong.
Quit Facebook Day calls for as many users as possible to leave the online networking site on May 31, 2010 in protest of the changes to privacy policies the company adopted in April. Those changes include, the "default settings on its social-networking platform to the detriment of a user," the "concept of an ‘open graph,’ which is intended to create a larger, more social Facebook community across the web, and "Community Pages, intended to provide information about various topics."
In an e-mail to Computerworld last Thursday morning, "a Facebook spokesman confirmed that the company will hold a meeting later today to discuss privacy issues, but he would not say whether executives are looking to make significant changes to the popular site's highly contentious privacy policy."
While they seemingly have not shares the notes of that meeting, Facebook added to their defense that the company gives "our users granular controls [that] enable each user to customize many individual settings in order to share, or protect, as much information as they feel comfortable with…We already enable users to exclude themselves from being indexed by search engines, and recently introduced granular data permissions for applications."
This is all true; I excluded myself from search engines last week. However, here is the resounding compliant with the privacy settings on Facebook: figuring them out is tougher than figuring out Macy Gray’s gender. In an NPR story two weeks ago, commentators and panel guests attested to the potential difficulties "deactivating" and the potential impossibilities "deleting" your Facebook account. One commentator concluded the story by announcing, "and you can find us on Twitter at…" (By the way, although he didn’t mention it, you can also find them on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/NPR.)
One participant on the NPR program explained, You can delete your account, but when you do so the site asks you if you’re sure and then tells you that you’ll never be able to talk to so-and-so again and then tells you that your aunt is really going to miss you."
At that point, you’re faced with a decision: Is contact with your Aunt Gretchen worth forfeiting your electronic privacy and personal data?
While deactivating your Facebook account will keep things on "hold and online," and while deleting your Facebook account will take things off the internet, neither will delete your personal information and web of connections from Facebook’s database(s). Any agency with enough power or money will be able to access information regarding your attachments and messages to those attachments for pretty much ever. Which means, next time you want to get the Jason Bourne out of here and wreak some international havoc, you’re screwed.
The only way to possibly beat Facebook at their own game is to do exactly what my friend who knows everyone, excuse me whom everyone knows, has done; accrue as many connections as possible. I admit it. She was right at I was wrong. If the very connected person has, according to Malcolm Gladwell, a social network of over one hundred people (even I have that on Facebook; the average seems to be around 400 on the networking site), the only way to keep your information private is to obfuscate, convolute and dilute your online network as much as possible. If you’re connected to 3,500 people and send messages rarely or somewhat equally to those people, there is absolutely no way to tell who is in your closest network. Thirty-five hundred doors are way too many leads, even for those sneaky bastards in Mossad. Trust me.
Therefore, instead of Quitting Facebook Day, I propose Nothing But Facebook Day (it’s a working title) in which we each sign up for the network (if we’ve not already) and spend a solid eight to ten hours requesting and accepting as many friends as possible. You don’t fight a behemoth with slings and arrows; you fight it with another behemoth. The only way we can do that is if we climb on each other’s shoulders. I’ll be on the bottom.
Adults love to point fingers in the never ending saga of children growing up too fast. Anyone and everyone (other than you) are to blame for the downfall of today’s youth. The Disney Channel, since its conception, has been a front-runner in the battle for the tween market so it is easy to name any star affiliated with the brand and pick and pick and pick away at their sparkly manufactured exteriors until *gasp* you find something not so sparkly. Case in point Miley Cyrus aka Hannah Montana. Not that I am a big, or even small, fan of any of the Cyrus clan, but there is that little part of me that wants to shake all the whiney grownups who blame her for their children’s problems.
Think about your kids. Are they perfect all day, every day?? The answer is NO, 150%. Now imagine that every time they left the house, and sometime while they were still inside the protection of your home, they were being videotaped and the worst of those tapes were being flashed across the newspaper and the top story on the evening news. The public would not think of your kid as the sweet charming child that you know she is. Now imagine people actually rooting for your kid to screw up and do something that makes her "less of a role model" only so they can shake their heads and *tisk-tisk* down to them.
With the invention of You Tube and cell phones with video cameras, it is easier and easier for people to invade the privacy of whomever they choose. Just this week Perez Hilton (gag) posted a video of five extremely talented girls (who cannot be over seven years old) doing a hip-hop dance to Beyoncé with, some might say, questionable dance moves and outfits for their age.
I am willing to bet that not one of these people criticizing the video has ever danced competitively, or had a daughter or son who dances competitively. If they had, they would understand that this video, which was filmed (illegally) at one of the most famous dance competitions in the nation, was not put on the internet by any of the kids trying to attract attention. They would also know that these young girls, and their parents, are so consumed with practice and training, not only for this hip-hop routine, but most likely for five or six equally difficult routines, that all they can see is how amazing these girls are and are not thinking "wow this is super sexy I hope some pedophile on the internet doesn’t see this and think nasty about my daughter" – because why would they think it was being (illegally) taped?
It’s hip-hop dance; get over it. The girls are not dancing this way because they saw Hannah Montana giving her 45-year-old producer a lap dance, they are dancing that way because hip-hop is an increasingly popular form of mainstream competitive dance – and they are good at it.
People will say that because (insert Disney star name here) is in the spotlight she should be careful of how he/she acts because kids are watching. Well, sure you can say that, but I can’t imagine what the public would say if they saw videos of me at 16, 17, 18 years old, or how hard and exhausting it would be to constantly defend my normal teenage behavior. How boring would life be if you didn't get to screw up in your teenage years and then laugh about it later?
The Moustache’s column was on the firing of CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr after she Tweeted her condolences for the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiite spiritual leader involved in the founding of Hezbollah..jpg "http://eleventhdraft.com/fck_files/Image/13-littlepretty-1763(1).jpg")
Which brings us to our lesson for the day. Go fuck this new guy, fine. Leave the abusive old guy, absolutely. But don’t do either because you think the new guy is going to be better than the old guy. Odds are – and I’ve done research on this – that the new guy is just as big of a douche fountain as the old guy.