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May 09 2008

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Have we gone mad?

Posted on Jun 5th, 2006 at 7:41 pm by Jonathan

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the following are not national landmarks or icons and thus need not be protected by the War of Terrorism:

The Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the United Nations, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Metropolitan Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, New York City Hall, the New York Public Library, Times Square, the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, the Commodities Exchange and all but four of New York's banking trusts.

As such, they feel New York is receiving entirely too much in anti-terrorism funding and will thus cut funding by 40%.

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The Punk and the Hipster

Posted on Jan 9th, 2006 at 10:38 pm by Jonathan

I have a friend back on campus at my old school rant to me about the current political situation and how we need to "get to the streets" and rouse up the populace, emphasizing the act of getting them to read "alternative media," as the current mainstream media is as corrupt as can be. And while I can't deny that, yes, the world is fucked up and our administration doubly so, and we barely hear about it because our media's so deep up our leader's ass they might as well be a second liver, "getting to the streets" is rather vague and "alternative media," in the form of political websites and newspapers, tend to be viewed - if viewed at all - as factually spurious and elitist.

Hell, that's probably the definition of the Ranters' Network. After all, I don't need credentials to spew to you this drivel, but you need a computer with an internet connection to read it.

But anyway, down here in the real world, getting "to the streets" either requires comfortable-enough finances to afford one free time to spread their message, or enough impoverishment of options as to require it. And the first is solicitation, and the second gets bloody surprisingly fast. That, and nobody reads the alternative media unless they're part of the alternative media. I mean, who but activist college students reads indymedia.org and mediamatters.org? Hell, it's no use even linking them because you're either not going to read them now or ever, or you already have them bookmarked for frequent perusal.

Of course, there's also the point to be made that the groundswell of support for the type of grassroots activism my friend was trying to spur didn't even make it to the next town, as the student activists, being without cars, couldn't even get that far. And I haven't seen a copy of the Workers' Vanguard for sale outside of an anti-war protest. The movement will not grow that way.

If I had to develop an system under which I could categorize my own generation - with all the oversimplification and glossy generalizations implied - I'd choose a bipolar mode between two archetypes I'd call the Punk and the Hipster.

The defining charactistic of Punk music, and vicariously its culture, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that it recognizes the existence of a problem in society, but it is vague as to the nature of that problem as well as the methods upon which to rectify it. In other words, Punk music is ranting put to three chords, and Punk culture is rebellious and potentially dangerous, but against what and where is somewhat muddled. But, of course, the importance is the ire and the earnestness, and if there's any criticism of Punkdom, it's that said punk is always looking at others and guaging whether or not they're Punk enough.

On the other hand, the Hipster tends to define himself by the complete lack of said ire, and instead achieves his being through cool sardonicism. The general definition - and, again, this is just what I ken - is one who defines himself through absurd kitschy purchases as a way to protest members of mainstream consumerdom, who define themselves by what they purchase. But this somewhat round-about and cynical self-deprecating manner lends itself to odd circumstances: If a punk would wear a t-shirt emblazened with a controversial political figure as a way to protest mainstreamdom, a hipster would wear a t-shirt emblazened with a guy nobody recognizes as a way to mock the punk as well as usurp his role vis mainstreamdom.

Also, while the punk believes in the importance of Punk and scrutinizes the purveyors of the creed, so to speak, the hipster openly mocks Hipsterdom. 'Course, the hipster doesn't think he's Hipster, unless he's really self-deprecatory, but think of himself as Indie or Bohemian, as he rejects both the mainstream and the outspoken counterstream of the Punk. But bohemians can't afford to define themselves by purchases, ironic or otherwise, and both the Hipster and the Punk as I define them today are relatively educated and, economy notwithstanding, on similar ground economically. I tend to categorize most people into Hipster, but then again, probably so do they.

Now, if I were to categorize my friend as a part of class A: The Punk, then my mocking their somewhat misguided earnestness, I believe, would have been an act of scrutinizing their being Punk enough, as You Gotta Have a Plan, Man, and Those Are Just Words... right. Or maybe I'm just too cool and sardonic for that. I dunno. I think of myself a punk, and while I want my friend to succeed I know such a plan is doomed to failure without heavy reform, and that is a process not very likely to happen. So, perhaps I'm a mix of the two - looking half-assedly for a solution to a problem that I'm unwittingly helping to maintain. Perhaps my friend is, too, in presenting a lifestyle and image that is every bit the phase people go through in college - complete with its own anti-fashion! - yet believing every word of it while in it.

So, perhaps as a viable system of categorization, my system already falls apart, as neither of my two categorical archetypes has any answer as to rectifying the problem of society, and only one of them is actively looking for it. But then again, the Democrats don't even have a plan, and most of humanity's not working to better society anyway. After all, this consumerism thing is quite labor-intensive, and has to be run by somebody.

So maybe I extend the categorization a bit, and add the Bohemian and the Leader, the former neither being culture nor counter-culture, but a pure alternative, and the latter a somewhat mythical being that has to exist somewhere because obviously such a creature has materialized before, right? But the thing is, I can't name anyone in my generation that fits either of those - possibly because types like that don't go to Cornell, possibly because they don't exist as such in my generation, at least in considerable numbers. I can't find terribly much of an underclass vibe, in which the former would hide and the latter draw upon, even in class-conscious New York - everyone tends to think of themselves as middle class (or at least in a transitory state leading to middle class) and thus part of the designation, in varying degrees, of the first two categorizations I've listed. I even live in a musician enclave in the middle of an ethnic neighborhood known for its drugs and dog- and cock-fights. But it could be the housing boom that's hiding such. If it is, I'm sure the dynamic I've been describing can and will change quite fast.

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Bias on Campus

Posted on Dec 26th, 2005 at 2:13 am by Jonathan

It's like Legally Blonde, except disturbingly sad and rife with the muckraking we've come to expect with... well, everything today.

Anyway, the NY Times once again pulls up the Students-lobby-against-their-professors-because-they're-intimidated-by-opinions... thing... where conservative students (Why are there such beings?) learn that they can get their professors fired because their professors dare use up valuable class time exhibiting the existence of an opinion! And, of course, as three quarters of all college academes are liberal, they can call upon their ranking Republicans, who are subjugated and ghettoed in their tiny bastions known as the government and the media, to right this situation.

Enter David Horowitz (Hey, I remember this guy! He went and made a big stink when I was in Cornell, because he had to come to the aid of some professor fuck named Jeremy Rabkin, who invited Ann Coulter to bait students for a couple of hours and then express shock at the fact that they bit back. I should mention that I had the extreme dishonor of having known and lived in the same dorm as Prof. Rabkin's son, who made a name of himself leading just about every counter-protest on campus.), who seems to be after, if not censoring liberal professors, flooding colleges with conservative ones... which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like Affirmative Action for asshats.

So his general strategy seems to be to get acts passed that allow governments to bypass professors' tenure and conveniently censure those that are too liberal, which of course overlooks two important things:

1) Why we should have professor tenure. This isn't so much that important in primary and secondary schools, as during that time you aren't generally teaching kids what's going on in the world as you are their ability to think critically. With that skill they can go to college and learn what's going on. Of course, that being said, if students can simply win any disagreement with their professors by getting them fired, just what are they learning and what have they learned? That takes a bit of skilled ignorance, and if it's successful (as students of the Middle Eastern Studies department in Columbia University have found this past year), then, damn it, we need safeguards.

2) Why so many professors are liberal. It's more than just a dearth of conservatives going for PhDs, though there is that. It may very well be that the current archive of knowledge just favors liberalism. I mean, it may just be that we're right. You can give Bush as many benefits of the doubt as you want, but all evidence points to We're Fucked.

Of course, it's still a whole bunch of scientists against a really polished media machine, who knows how to make things seem 'fair' when what they're doing is pulling points that have been refuted a long, long time ago and that we've since moved on from. Intelligent Design doesn't deserve equal floor time in the great debate - hell, it doesn't deserve a debate - the cold snap we've been having doesn't refute global warming, and the fact that Bush insists we're winning the day doesn't mean that we're not in another Vietnam.

As per the first sentence, and on a more sophomoric note, someone on the Times clearly has a bit of a sense of humor, as this is the picture they ran in their article today of one of the irate and politically active conservative students:

and, I must say, I've never seen such a movie Stepford Wife in all my time on campus.

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Things that make you go Hmm...

Posted on Dec 25th, 2005 at 6:08 pm by Jonathan

Everybody knows the internet is really just a overwrought world of voyeurism and exhibitionism, at least from a social standpoint, but damn if this isn't disturbing.

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The Economy We Live In

Posted on Dec 24th, 2005 at 2:37 am by Jonathan

As many qualms as I have with the Times, it just makes me wonder about the Daily News: Since when was it okay to lead the front page headline with an opinion piece? "We All Lost." Oh, c'mon. Trying to out-do the Post in yellow journalism? It can't be done!

Interesting quotes from the Times - two of the last four paragraphs in this article - basically spell it out:

"Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly called the strikers greedy. "The public says, 'I don't want to pay more taxes and I don't get these kind of benefits,' " he said yesterday. "You have no idea how many e-mails I got, 'I don't make that kind of money. I don't have those kinds of pension benefits. Why are people striking?'"

...

"Nationwide, 90 percent of public-sector workers have traditional benefit plans - known as defined-benefit plans because retirees receive a defined amount each month- while just 20 percent of private-sector workers do. In 1960, 40 percent of private-sector workers were in traditional pension plans. One reason for the disparity: 36.4 percent of government employees belong to unions while just 7.9 percent of private-sector workers do."

...which kinda says it all, really.

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Results?

Posted on Dec 22nd, 2005 at 6:59 pm by Jonathan

So Toussaint has essentially called off the subway strike and returned to the table amidst repeated threats and complaints from just about all quarters, and Pataki gets to save face and put another gold star on his lapel as he goes to fuck up some other New England state.

The news keeps going on about how the local 100's finally returned to "sanity," and continues to question irate Bridge-and-Tunnellers over their opinions of the situation. Comedically, or just sadly, they usually fall under one of two headings:

1) "Sure, I support them for one day, because everybody loves a day off, but damn, man! I gotta go to work this week! My shopping schedule's all fucked up, now!"

Because, in a perfect world, protests, strikes, riots, revolts, revolutions, and wars would all happen according to a strict schedule, with mind to the least amount of disruption to the general public possible.

2) "How dare those pampered babies cry and bitch over health care premiums and a pension plan! I don't have a pension and I pay for my health care out of my pocket! Why should I support these lazy pussies?"

Because if state employees don't get benefits, nobody does. And just because this economic system has worked hard to undo every major step in labor rights in the last 70 years doesn't mean that we should take it sitting down.

The Village Voice continues a rather (I want to say shrill, but that's an op-ed word big newspapers use to belittle opposing opinions) err, robust campaign of whistle-blowing as to the New York Times' coverage of the latest issues, and have been ripping into them of late as to just how many times certain opinions get aired about the strike - down to word-counting Bloomberg and Pataki quotes, compared to Toussaint counter-quotes, or the number of un-bylined opinion pieces demanding that the union stand down and reduce its "unreasonable" demands, et al - and comparing its bias to the coverage of Bloomberg's campaign against Ferrer in the last election.

While the Times' rhetoric isn't as extremist as, say, the Post's "You Rats" headline, it's still pretty one-sided, leading me to wonder as to the limits of journalistic integrity when seeking out quotes and viewpoints on these issues.

Of course, it's not like I'm fair and balanced here, and for all I know - since the mainstream media is quite in opposition to the view I'm touting - I'm in a small minority of people who actually wanted to see the union keep striking until they got their demands, sufficiently vilified Pataki and Bloomie, and defended one of the release-valves, so to speak, of democracy.

Then again, I still want to see Bush and Cheney impeached and jailed for an illegal war, repeated and explicit breach of conduct for their respective offices, and contempt for the democratic process. But I'm crazy like that.

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Political Maneuvering

Posted on Dec 22nd, 2005 at 2:24 am by Jonathan

Concerning the strike, now Pataki has drawn a line that serves only to exacerbate the situation: He has demanded that the TWU must end their strike before negotiations can continue with the state's MTA. This puts pressure on the unioners - Toussaint, the leader, can come back with his hat in hand. But, if the union comes back now it merely proves that the state has the power to force them to capitulate, which means that the best that can come out of this is a possible inquiry as to the wrongful nature of the Taylor Law. That, of course, is unlikely with Pataki still as governor. When faced with this the union's face-saving choice would be to risk continuing striking in the hopes that they will maintain public support and garner fines up to the point of ridiculousness, and thus force the MTA and Pataki to compromise (and even give the unioners amnesty) lest they and Bloomberg be faced with political deathtraps - either in bankrupting tens of thousands of state employees, or allowing the city to grind to a halt out of pure stubbornness over what the Voice reports as merely $20 million in pensions.

To put it simply, Pataki's ultimatum will only serve to prolong the strike.

The MTA has actually taken out television ads asking that the unioners return to work, and Bloomberg has gone further in his tack from calling them "thuggish" and "selfish," saying that the union is unfairly hurting working-class people that get paid hourly and work far from their homes. He seeks a classic divide-and-conquer tactic, as well as spreading the risky and potentionally dangerous implication that the unioners are, if not criminals, then terrorists. It has worked, in a sense, in that the national TWU has divested itself of association with the local 100 - though mostly to dodge the fines that are currently levied on the local union, and to good effect, as the national organization is no longer under threat of those fines - and while the UFT and other city unions have supported the TWU's arguments over the inherently unfair propositions - Toussaint steadfastly refuses to have new employees get less than current employees, or get raises that are less than current inflation - they have been considerably quieter in supporting the strike.

In short, this is brazen propaganda, coming from a leader who had allowed the proceedings and deliberations to drag on as they have, late as they were, especially when the MTA was rather loudly spreading mixed messages between a billion-dollar surplus and ominous foreboding as to future funding. Come to think of it, it sounds a lot like the debacle of his, earlier, where his campaign media blitz was lauding student test scores on the same day that UFT teachers were rallying about contracts. It sounds as if Pataki is taking a page from Bloomberg's book, which is that if you throw enough money at the media, eventually people will come to your way of thinking.

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Bloomie on the Strike

Posted on Dec 20th, 2005 at 5:58 pm by Jonathan

I have to say that I commend the TWU's choice to strike, even against each employee losing three days' pay each day they strike (two thanks to the Taylor Law, one from not working), even though the TWU of America, of which they are a subsidiary, so to speak, does not condone the action (but then again, when NYC accounts for 45% of public transit in the entire nation, who the fuck cares what they think?), and even though I had to bike ten miles each way to get to work and back. And let me tell you, when they name those neighborhoods 'Washington Heights,' 'Hamilton Heights,' 'Morningside Heights,' it's not because the street numbers are so high.

It was fun watching the cops literally yell at motorists who Block the Box, however. Not only do you get a ticket (probably double-fee, too, as if the fines weren't high enough), but you get a tongue-lashing, too. And, it's always fun to be the fastest thing on the road south of 59th St.

Bloomberg is taking a Law and Order approach, with such rhetoric as, "For their own selfish reasons, the TWU has decided that their demands are more important than the law, the City and the people they serve. This is not only an affront to the concept of public service; it is a cowardly attempt by Roger Toussaint and the TWU to bring the City to its knees to create leverage for their own bargaining position. We cannot give the TWU the satisfaction of causing the havoc they desperately seek to create."

"For their own selfish reasons," like pay that keeps up with inflation, or a decent health care package or pension. One issue that the strike appears to have forced is that the MTA is no longer demanding that new employees work seven years longer than current employees work, for the same pension. They're just asking new employees to pay three times as much in fees as current employees. That's 6%, which means that, coupled with Social Security, more than 10% of their paychecks are already gone. Oh, and the MTA still haven't yet allowed wages to keep up.

"...has decided that their demands are more important than the law," which is unconstitutional anyway, in that it so clearly limits the manner in which public employees can peaceably assemble by directly denying them to seek redress - ie: They can cry and scream, but only at the table, and the offending agency has no obligation to heed or even acknowledge the grievances.

"This is not only an affront to the concept of public service..." - I'm sure that Bloomberg's speechwriter was in error here; he clearly meant indentured servitude.

"...it is a cowardly attempt by Roger Toussaint and the TWU to bring the City to its knees to create leverage for their own bargaining position." Yes, that's a fairly apt definition of what a strike is.

"We cannot give the TWU the satisfaction of causing the havoc they desperately seek to create," because comparing union workers to terrorists always wins the argument. Then again, it worked for Cheney.

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Strike!

Posted on Dec 20th, 2005 at 4:01 am by Jonathan

Holy shit, they did it!

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Freedom? What freedom?

Posted on Dec 18th, 2005 at 4:49 pm by Jonathan

If there was anything that I thought could cause a public reaction strong enough to spur riots, it's Bush publicly admitting to spying on the American populace, and then going out and defending it as the right thing to do. And yet... nobody cares.

I mean, sure, Kennedy and Feingold expressed their outrage, but its as if the prevailing mood is one of deeply entrenched bitterness and cynicism - that nothing could possibly surprise Democrats and moderate Republicans anymore, considering the extent that the current administration has already fucked things up for everybody. If Bush came out Monday morning with an address on how he likes to rape teenage boys that he finds on the White House tours (that is, on the rare occasions he's actually at the White House), we might hear a few indignant words on Tuesday, but that's the last anyone will mention it - dwelling on the latest outrage is so passé, when we've been doing it for five years.

Maybe the Democrats are sitting on their laurels - comparitively, considering the immensity of the offenses - because they expect the regime to implode at any moment. And like any candidate who watches another one dig his own grave - Bloomberg and Ferrer come to mind - the best thing to do is step aside and let the groundswell of public outrage to do the dirty work. Except that's asking a lot of people to independently fight an administration that simultaneously has more power to limit freedom than McCarthy in his prime and a far better Public Relations machine on top. Comparing what's happening now to George Orwell's 1984 would be erroneous, because even he didn't realize that Big Brother would make it look hip.

Meanwhile, the Transit Workers' Union's battle with the MTA is floundering, as they have clearly admitted that their sole power - that of striking - has been ripped asunder through the fear of the Taylor Law as well as the proposed threat of a $25,000 fine per employee, to double each day of the strike. While they have rejected the MTA's proposal at the deadline of 12:01 am Friday (rightly so, as MTA head Peter Kalikow literally showed up for the proceedings at the eleventh hour, and the rules on the table would have forced new employees to work longer for less, and retire 7 years later than their current counterparts - a regression to the rights of MTA employees in specific, and public employees in general, were it to be accepted), the only part to strike are a couple of express bus lines, to start Monday, as those employees are not yet under the Taylor Law, having been inducted under the MTA from private companies only recently.

I should say that I fully support the TWU's right to strike, and I think they should do so. I should also point out that if the MTA's going to make a fuss about money lost, they have to realize the simple economic fact of what happens to your economic activity and tax base when you sell out the incomes and pensions of 35,000 employees. No money coming in means no money going out - and speaking of money, what happened to that billion dollar surplus? Because an 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' motif in 50th St and conductor-less trains down 14th St (That's the ticket! Fewer employees means fewer embarrassing union rights squabbles, right?) are going to make everything a-okay.

The TWU proposed staging a more universal strike come Tuesday at 12:01am, but it seems to me less likely for that to occur, for the same reason that they haven't already. Which begs the question, what was Rockefeller thinking when he made that law? It grants state employees the right to organize into unions (though, if you ask me, that sounds like a right granted in 1867, not 1967), and states that state agencies must at least acknowledge the unions, but then it denies the union the very basis of its bargaining power. Without the real threat of a strike, what can a union bring to the table? Loud invective, I suppose. Consequently, that's what we're getting.

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Counter-Culture

Posted on Dec 15th, 2005 at 4:06 am by Jonathan

I'm not a true Hipster. And I'm not talking about that trendy anti-trend NYU crowd that meanders around my marketing job in SoHo (ironic, that, but expected and inevitable) obliviously displaying their hatred of the consumer culture's mantra that One's Purchases Defines Oneself by defining themselves with calculatedly kitschy purchases. I'm talking about Hipsters of old - the counter-culturalites that criticized the consumer culture by vowing a life of poverty and eternal childishness. The life of never holding a job or entertaining plausible aspirations. I can't do that. I'm too cowardly. I still hold hope for Fiscal Solvency and Societal Dignity and strive for Station.

Of course, I have by definition then become enmired into the trap of the current capitalist model - I make concessions in order to make ends meet, based on the assumption that my current situation is temporary, and as such become situated as an unwitting participant in the very system I hate because of necessity. Nobody expects to be where they are in five years, but everybody still does their little part to maintain the system.

It's a giant Tragedy of the Commons, a marionette show where the puppets poke and prod each other to prove their cynicism to the spectacle of continually clamboring to get the upper hand on one another. It's what causes the ironies where what's legal and illegal is based less on what defends or destroys society and more on whether something is being profitted from and who's profitting from it.

Such as that Blizzard Entertainment threatens lawsuits against Chinese 'farmers' selling in-game items for real money on moral grounds, but only because Blizzard hadn't thought of it first. Or Sony Entertainment threatening legal action on online music file-sharers on the same moral ground that they didn't do it first. Or complaints about the Afghanis' stranglehold on Heroin and Cocaine, and how dare those Iraqis shoot at us when we take our oil back from under their land.

And if the shoe were on the other foot, I'd be smoking my $25 Venti Joint in the new downtown Baghdad annex of Starbucks with what's left of the stipend my employer deemed sufficient for their ownership of my 'intellectual property' whilst I mop their floors. This week.

Not that I've yet lowered myself to mopping the floors. Changing the light bulbs, maybe. Carrying all the heavy boxes. But it's only a temporary fix, right? Gotta pay that tuition. In five years I'll be somewhere.

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Habits

Posted on Dec 15th, 2005 at 3:08 am by Jonathan

Y'know, I really gotta get back into the habit of writing. The problem is, there's really not much I can say about the Latest Travesty to dribble out of the mouth of our Glorious Leader or his puppetmasters without setting myself up as a target of the next round of lawmaking aimed at expanding the definition of treasonous speech.

Libel's pretty much a safe zone, however. At least, that's what I ken from what little I watch TV. Yeah, I got a TV. Pay some eighty bucks for cable modem service and you might as well. Humor is, I still download The Daily Show clips. 11PM's too important to sit in front of the boob tube.

Now, where was I?

Right. Pointed observations about the human condition, but in a manner as not to cause rancor.

I work at a marketing publisher's, now. That's right. A business whose sole purpose is to chew up calculated statistical half-truths and opinionated economics reports into bite-sized chunks and regurgitate them into the mouths of executives who have a dim understanding of the world around them but have control over the capital and production of our consumer society. O'course, 'consumer society' is and has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms, and that's why I'm an urban planning student, but since telling the truth doesn't get me any money (or you'd be paying to read this nonsense), or worse, rewards me with an FBI file, I pay my rent and tuition doing my duty to the Man.

I like long, complicated sentence structures.

I go to public school now, which is better than private school in a host of ways - the best of which are relative cost to benefit, and proximity and more importantly accessibility to actual knowledgable and worldly individuals (not to mention proximity to the heart and soul of humanity - another reason for being an urban planner!) - and spend whatever free time I have doing what most people do when faced with actually having to consider their lot in the world: Escaping in ever-deeper rabbit holes of fiction. Preferably with mind-altering substances. Hiding.

One of those is the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game 'World of Warcraft' - and interesting little product of our consumerism in a couple of facets: (1) the in-game economic system is heavily biased against actual production (hell, the only way to make money is to play the price market in the in-game Auction House, much akin to day-trading), and (2) the entire scenario is based on fanservice as contrasted to adhering to a particular playing-style or narrative cohesion.

In other words, the entire point is to make people want to play the game forever and ever, and the money made is doubly-faceted, just like in real life: It costs money to continue playing for any length of time, and it costs money for the itemry proportedly worth having. Blizzard collects on the former and the Chinese collect on the latter. Blizzard threatens legal action on the Chinese, but that's only because they haven't thought of the second way to make money first. Sony's MMORPG, Everquest, takes advantage of both as it also has subscription fees, holds its own 'buy high level in-game items with real money' auction, and creates disposable new in-game itemry with what are now ten (10!) add-on packs.

Which smacks of how the real world seems to work - a relative few have a monopoly or at least a considerable control on the income levels of the general public, and is actively devising manipulations both to maintain its monopoly and part the public with said money right back - and which is also - and these two points are related - some very clever marketing.

Crap, I've just come close to making a subversive statement.

Working in this marketing publisher's has taught me the lesson quite well that capitalism is decidedly and studiously amoral - they'll support minority or women-owned enterprises and strong employee unions if it profits them, just as they'll support wars of profit and cynical behavior modification if *that* profits them. And I've seen articles relating both, including an article praising Wal-mart for its calculated attempts at seeming fair to women through donations to certain causes in the same issue as an article citing statistics that most people admonish Wal-mart for making such transparent gestures in the face of its own nefarious practices.

I've seen articles talking about new strides in making healthy fast foods for mothers and moving away from the Stepford Wife/Barbie doll image for young women in the same issue that included marketing tactics on selling cell phones to 9-year olds and military recruiting tactics directed towards 13-year olds.

But I need the money. And it's better - well, warmer - than bike messengering. Gotta love the economy. But I was going to avoid mention of our Glorious Leader.

I'm sure some probing remarks and pointed accusations could further elaborate on what I've just obliquely alluded to, but damn if it isn't hard to get the mojo flowing. I'm just a 'fraidy cat all'a sudden. Hell, when literally every institution that's become aware of my little site has banned it, I have cause for a little worry. But that's half the fun. I simply need to get back into the habit.

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