Category Archives: Current Affairs

Foggo’s Fooked

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Ah, the escapades continue.  From YahooNews:

The CIA’s third ranking official, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, has been under
investigation by the FBI, IRS, Defense Criminal Investigative Service,
the CIA’s inspector general and the U.S. attorney’s office in San
Diego, said FBI spokeswoman April Langwell in San Diego.

Under a sealed warrant, officials searched Foggo’s Virginia home and
his office at the CIA’s Langley, Va., campus, Langwell said. She could
provide no other details.

The FBI and other agencies have been investigating whether Foggo
improperly intervened in the award of contracts to a San Diego
businessman and personal friend, Brent Wilkes, who has been implicated
in a congressional bribery scandal…

Wilkes has been described in court papers as an unindicted
co-conspirator in a plot to bribe then-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a
California Republican who is now serving time in a federal prison for
taking $2.4 million from government contractors.

FBI agents also have been investigating whether Wilkes provided Cunningham with prostitutes, limousines and hotel suites.

Foggo has acknowledged participating in the poker parties at the
hotel rooms, but he has said there was nothing untoward about that. “If
he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr.
Foggo insists they were that and nothing more,” the CIA statement said.

Lovely.  So anyway, I’m watching the History Channel with my oldest son (he’s 13) and we’re watching a documentary about fighter pilots and dogfighting in particular.  While the documentary goes into the history of aerial dogfights they focus on one in particular during the Vietnam War and it features fighter pilot Randall “Duke” Cunningham.  Of course during one segment of the interview I point out to my son that the pilot is now in jail and when he asks me why, and I tell him, I can see in his eyes that I’ve helped speed him along the road to disillusionment.  If my kids make it to adulthood without being overwhelmed by cynicism I’ll consider it a minor miracle.

William Gibson on the NSA and Technology in General

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Boing Boing has some interesting excerpts from an interview with William Gibson re. the new NSA controversy.  He points out that as a society we’ve (Americans) been assuming that the CIA et.al. has been doing this kind of stuff for years anyway, and that during the Cold War we were even comforted by the idea that they were listening anyway.  I’d argue that many people are still comforted by this idea as we fight terrorism.

Reading this caused me to look at this another way.  A few years ago I did some work in the “database marketing” field.  I was stunned at how much information companies like Acxiom are collecting about all of us every day, but it didn’t really bother me that much because the data they were collecting had mostly to do with our habits as consumers.  What we buy, where we buy it, etc.  And they sold that data to companies whose only real goal was to figure out how to get us to buy more of their stuff. They really didn’t have any motivation to use it any other way. Still, even then there were privacy advocates who were worried that the data could and would be used for more nefarious purposes.  They pointed out that if the government decided to pay for the data the companies would have an instant profit motive for releasing the data.  And then, of course, there was the problem of the companies losing the data or having it hijacked by hackers, but that’s another story.

What makes this “government spying on citizens” meme so disturbing to me is that the government has not been forthright about what they’re doing, and not just on this issue I might add, and so there is no reason to trust them when they say they’re just doing it to fight terrorism.  That’s what happens when you violate the public trust: just when you may need us to trust you most we say “f— you.” 

Ironically I think if the government had said, “Hey, without getting into the details we want you to know that this is the kind of thing we’re doing to fight terrorism.  To protect the innocent we’re cooperating with the fill-in-the-blank oversight committee to make sure that we don’t violate citizens’ rights…oh, and by the way we couldn’t use any of this information in any kind of court because it was not obtained in the proper manner and was never intended for that use anyway” then many of us would welcome what they’re doing in principle. 

But the government assumes we’re idiots, that we can’t be trusted and they know better than us what we need/want.  That’s the other irony: this administration has created more of a “nanny state” than any of its supposedly more liberal predecessors.  This from a regime that turned “liberal” into an epithet.

And we have three more years of this crap.

Important Reading About the NSA’s Phone Call Data Collection Program

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Lex has written a great, extensive, article on his work blog about the newest NSA scandal. After reading it my first reaction is this: because what the NSA is doing isn’t actually listening to the conversations on all the calls they are tracking I guess the NSA (and the President and Attorney General) can claim they weren’t lying when they said earlier this year that they were only tapping calls between folks in the US and overseas.  And that is exactly the kind of hair-splitting I’ve come to expect of the President and all his little people.  Will we ever find the bottom of the pit that this Administration has dug?

Stuff, Lots and Lots of Stuff

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Having taken a rather long reading and writing sabbatical due to a very busy work schedule I haven’t had the chance to keep up with much of what’s going on in the world or to share some goings-on from my teenie little corner of the universe.  So I have a few observations to share:

We Americans can be some goofy MFers.  I mean this whole brouhaha about the Star Spangled Banner being sung in Spanish is really kind of funny.  After all as far back as 1919 it was done in Spanish and the State Department currently has four Spanish versions on its website. Oh and in 1861 it was translated into German and into Yiddish in 1947.  But forget that, does singing it in Spanish, or any other language for that matter, change its meaning?

Of course the roots of this are in the debate about immigrants making the effort to assimilate into the "English" speaking culture of America.  I agree that the effort needs to be made, but we need to keep in mind that this problem is as old as America.  First generation Italian immigrants went throught the same process a couple of generations back and what happened?  Their children all spoke English because they needed to in order to succeed.  I can almost guarantee the same will happen with the current wave of Hispanic immigrants.

And what about this whole oil thing?  Are we dense or just stupid? Gas is expensive now and everyone is jumping on some kind of reactionary bandwagon.  Windfall taxes?  So you want to penalize someone for doing their job and that will fix things how?  Will it reduce the price of gas?  Doubt it.  Will it make someone look good for the election?  Maybe, but I doubt it.  We Americans may be goofy but we can spot a pandering a-hole from a mile away.

Finally, the recent issue about American students not being able to find Louisiana is such a non-news item.  American students have always been bad with geography and just because a state was almost wiped from the map doesn’t mean they will know where it is.  Just watch Leno’s man-on-the-street items and you’ll see all the evidence you need.

If Disney World is any indication we Americans can be an incredibly lazy lot.  While I was visiting various Disney properties with the family earlier this week I noticed that lots of people who were perfectly capable of walking were renting those little electric scooter things.  I literally saw whole groups of people convoying on those things and I swear there were scooter jams all over the place.  Mix them with the strollers and legitimate wheelchairs and you had more traffic than the DC beltway.  No wonder we’re much less healthy than the British even though we spend more on healthcare than they do.

Working with unions sucks.  I was in Disney working a conference last week and as a result I was interacting on a limited basis with some union folks and I have to tell you that I find them harder to give instruction to than my pre-teens.  I mean if you don’t give these folks explicit instructions they can’t, or won’t, tie their own shoes.  I’d rather deal with middle-schoolers and those little monsters scare the bejeesus out of me.  Next year the conference will be in New York so I’m betting I’m gonna have all kinds of fun.

And before you accuse me of basing my opinion on a sole occurence I have to tell you that I had similar experiences at conferences in Chicago and Boston and in my earlier life I regularly worked with members of the postal workers’ unions.  The members themselves weren’t all bad, but they were a pain in the ass to deal with because of the union rules they had to follow.  Basically they can’t think for themselves and that’s antithetical to good business.

Sleeping in a hotel for 10 days sucks.  I don’t care how nice (or not) a room is, there’s nothing good about staying there 1 1/2 weeks.  I was never happier to get home than after my business trip/family vacation to Disney.

After being cut off from my online reading for a couple of weeks I now realize how much cool crap I find via blogs. Here’s just a few items I found in less than 10 minutes of reading my blog reader:

I’m sure there’s a lot more there, but I haven’t had time to find it and that ought to do it for this post.

Canuck Law: And You Thought People in the US Were Litigious

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Here’s the story: a 15 year old high school kid in Canada makes a video of himself reenacting a Star Wars light saber fight.  He leaves the tape on a shelf at the schools video lab and another student finds it and shares it with another student.  The second student digitizes it and emails it to some more kids.  A third kid decides to host the video on his website and then the video goes viral.  Life becomes miserable at school for light saber boy when all the teasing starts.

Okay, I feel bad for the kid but according to this article he and his parents sued the families of the three kids responsible for the video getting out and the parents of the three boys ended up settling the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount.  Huh?

If I understand this correctly the kid made a video using the school’s equipment, left the tape on a shelf at the school (expectation of privacy?) and then when some boys found the tape and put it on the internet his family sued the parents of the kids who found the tape and put it on the internet. According to the article the three boys are accused of bullying, but aren’t all the kids that teased saber-boy the real bullies?  Why not sue them all?

The article also talks about whether any of the parents had liability insurance and how much money they had available for settlement.  Who the heck carries liability insurance for instances like this?  Am I missing a potential business opportunity here?  Insurance against over-litigious parents might be a huge growth industry:)

Smithsonian Debate

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One of the more vivid childhood memories I have is of going to weekend classes at the Smithsonian.  One class was nature drawing (I’ll never forget the smell of the stuffed beaver they put in the middle of the table for us to draw) and another was black and white photography using a pinhole camera that I made myself in class (I’ll never forget the smells from the darkroom either).  That was right after my parents split up and we were pretty broke, so I’m not sure how my mom swung it but I’m glad she did.

Anyway I thought about those experiences when I was reading this NY Times article on a joint venture between the Smithsonian and Showtime that should mean some big dollars for the Smithsonian.  It is also raising the ire of many folks and it is worrying others who think that it will closet off some of the Smithsonian’s collection.

But as the Times article points out the Smithsonian is always struggling with cash issues, in no small part because access to all the Smithsonian museums is free.  To be honest I never knew that any museums charged admission until I was asked to pony up to get into MOMA in NY.  I was shocked and then very appreciative of what the Smithsonian is and does for free.

So my question is this: is the Smithsonian justified in entering joint ventures with commercial enterprises if it means that they can keep admission free?  It is quite possible that one issue has nothing to do with the other, I really don’t know, but if they are related and deals like this help keep admission free is it worth it?

Help Thy Neighbor, as Long as It’s Not Those People

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You know it had to happen: NIMBY in the wake of Katrina.  From AC360:

You know the phrase "not in my back yard?" Well, how about "not next door to my mansion!"

Homeowners
in a private, gated subdivision in New Orleans are furious that FEMA is
putting a trailer park for evacuees next door.

The homeowners
argue that there’s plenty of vacant land in the city. The city
councilwoman who represents the subdivision proposed an alternate site.
But FEMA ignored the proposal and started moving in trailers.

That
has made Mayor Ray Nagin so angry that he says he won’t allow any more
group trailer sites in the city — and he wants the FEMA workers
kicked-out.

FEMA says the city has "jeopardized" the housing
effort, and FEMA says it may demand that the city pay back the $1.5
million FEMA has spent on the site so far. The Mayor says no way.

Like I said back in the fall, it’s time we get rid of all the bastards who were in charge at the local, state and federal levels.  If it was me and I had people whining about the placement of some mobile homes near their houses, in the aftermath of a natural disaster mind you, I’d be sorely tempted to use a little eminent domain on their butts.  Or I’d at least put them on national TV and expose their greedy, elitist faces for the whole world to see.

BovineExcrement! Drug War Coming to Your Toilet

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Two recent news stories involving the US Government and excrement:

According to a Washington Post article that bookofjoe highlighted, the US Government ran a test on a wastewater treatment plant in Fairfax County, VA to determine how many people in the area have used cocaine in the recent past. From the Post article:

County workers collected five days’ worth of water samples between
March 13 and March 17 at the pollution control plant in Lorton,
according to a March 20 memo from County Executive Anthony H. Griffin
to the Board of Supervisors.

The plant, which processes about 67 million gallons of sewage a day,
takes in commercial and residential waste from about half the county,
including Fairfax City, Vienna and Fort Belvoir.

The samples, which totaled about 500 milliliters, were shipped to
the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, where they will
be analyzed for traces of benzoylecgonine, the main urinary metabolite
byproduct of cocaine.

Nice work if you can get it, huh?  My question is, "Why bother?"  What discernible difference will knowing how many people are doing coke make?  Does it matter whether 25,000 or 2,500 people are doing coke?  How?  Why?  Why not spend the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s time on something useful, like how many toxins or traces of bio-agents are in the water?  Maybe they already are, but I don’t like the idea that they might miss something because their trying to figure out how many people are pissing cocaine.  Absurd.

The other story that ties our government to excrement, or at least the concept of excrement, is the story about the FCC deciding that the word "shit" and all its derivatives are not merely "indecent" but "profane."  That means they can fine any broadcaster that airs the "shit" words for each incidence and they can also fine those who utter the words on-air.  (If I’m ever interviewed on TV I’ll probably be broke at the end of 30 seconds).  Jeff Jarvis takes great exception to this new FCC "nannyism" as he calls it and thinks that since bullshit is the single best term to describe much of our politicians’ actions that it is infringing on our free political speech to term it "profane."  Read Jeff’s "In Defense of Bullshit" here.

To tie all this together I’ll say just this: we need to call ‘bullshit’ on much of what our government is selling us these days. Of course we can’t call "bullshit" so we’ll have to do what my kids do: come up with a suitable substitute.  How about "Bush!"?

Government Sanctioned Nosy Neighbors

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The East Orange (NJ) Police Department is recruiting citizens to monitor video feeds and report suspicious activities.  There are plenty of annoying, nosy people in every community so I can see this really taking off, not just in East Orange but all over the country.  I’d be tempted to go out and do something that looks suspicious just to see what happened.