Entries from July 2002 ↓

In a previous entry, I stated that the media, in their preoccupation with Martha Stewart’s supposed wrong-doing, was “ignoring the gutting of the campaign finance regulations, the languishing of the accounting reform bills, and the seeming disappearance of the Bush-Cheney-Enron connection from the headlines”.

Boy was I wrong! The media is ignoring a much bigger story: the Bush-Harken Energy story. Seems the Pres, who’s going to be giving a lecture to Wall Street on the recent spate of business scandals, needs to take a good long look in the mirror before he uses terms like “insider trading” and “corporate accountability“.

The news is all over the web, but the big media seems to be pooh-poohing the seriousness of the claims. That might not last long, since Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo is hinting about some powerful revelations in the new issue of The Washington Monthly.

I think its’s going to be a long, hot summer for the Boy Emperor.

The LA Weekly has a devastating article on the harshness of the death penalty as applied to mentally retarded defendants. After researching the cases of the 183 death row inmates in LA County jails, the Weekly discovered that there were 10 mentally retarded inmates waiting for execution. Of the 10, 5 had accomplices in their crimes, and in each of these cases, the accomplice was not sentenced to die.

The Weekly’s findings go to the heart of this death-penalty debate: questioning whether it is humanly possible to reserve the death sentence for the worst of the worst, or whether, in fact, it is often meted out instead to those least equipped to fend it off. In the cases we reviewed, where one of the killers was mentally retarded and the others were not, the answer seems clear. Retardation, instead of shielding the mentally impaired from the harshest possible punishment, swung wide-open death row’s door.

Most of these defendants will have their sentences reviewed, perhaps overturned or sent back for re-trial in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Atkins v. Virginia, which prohibits the execution of the mentally retarded.

Still, this unfair apportioning of the most severe sentence possible makes me glad that US District Court Judge Rakoff has ruled the Federal death penalty statute unconstitutional. His reasoning was that innocent people are too often sentenced to death, and that the vindicating evidence often comes after the sentence has already been carried out. Although his ruling applies only to Federal death penalty cases, he used evidence from the individual states.

“There is no good reason to believe the federal system will be any more successful at avoiding mistaken impositions of the death penalty than the error-prone state systems already exposed,” Rakoff wrote.

If perfect outcomes of trials cannot be guaranteed, then how can perfect sentences be imposed?

Got an e-mail at work the other day from something called “MAILSweeper“: “Incoming Profane Message Notification”.

The MailSweeper text analyzer has detected and quarantined an incoming message which contains profane language. This message will be quarantined for seven days and subsequently deleted.

This was a big surprise to me because 1) I didn’t know we had any filters at work and 2) I couldn’t imagine why I’d be getting “profane” e-mail at work when that’s what I have a Hotmail account for.

I checked with the system admin who informed me that we’d just turned the filters on because of some complaints MIS had gotten about employees receiving obscene e-mails. I asked them to release the e-mail so I could look at it.

It was my daily mailing from the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal (fascist conservatives, I know, but it’s important to know what the other side is thinking.) I couldn’t imagine what profanity the button-downs at the Journal would be sending, so I read through the entire thing. The only thing I could find was the word “porn” in a snippet about terrorist martyr recruiting techniques, titled “Suicide Porn“. So I tried sending an e-mail from my Hotmail account to my work account containing nothing but the word “Porn”. Sure enough, I got a MAILSweeper message.

I hate the petty, continual encroachments on my autonomy by scared pseudo-parents who think they know what’s best for me. This company has never been like that — one reason why I’m still here after 4 years. So– excuse me, but I’ve been a little obsessed about this issue.

I requested that MIS allow me to opt out of the MAILSweeper, telling them I would state in writing that I hold them harmless for any possible offenses which couldn’t be removed with the delete key. No dice.

I questioned the reasoning for instituting the filter, and though I received no answer, I was led to believe by my manager that the company was trying to make sure it didn’t violate any “hostile workplace” rules.

When I informed MIS that most sexual harassment originates inside a company and MAILSweeper only filters mail which originates outside the company, I was ignored.

When I informed MIS that I could not find any citation anywhere which indicated that “porn” was a profane word, I was told that MAILSweeper weighed many factors in its rating and that “porn” couldn’t possibly have been the only reason.

When I outlined the number of steps required for me to have an e-mail un-quarantined by MIS and what a waste of time it was, they told me that I shouldn’t worry about MIS’s time.

When I told them that I was an adult, that they trusted me to represent the company, to produce work upon which the company’s reputation rests, and that it seemed irrational to try to censor what I can read, they ignored me.

When I informed them that the filter did not prevent me from sending profane e-mails to outsiders and that the potential was there for ruining the company’s reputation by getting us listed on one of the spam blackmail lists, they told me that they weren’t worried about that.

I’m banging my head against the wall, aren’t I?

Ed Quillen of the Denver Post Online has a great article which questions the meaning of the word “terrorist” while skewering the knee-jerk denunciations of dissent by our sanctimonious government officials.

Just in case you don’t get it, the document Quillen is talking about is the Declaration of Independence. And, just in case you don’t remember, the body of the Declaration is a listing of the reasons for our secession from Great Britain. Upon re-reading the Declaration — a good thing to do on this day, especially — I came across a couple of the charges against King George which seemed to have a great deal of resonance today:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. Homeland Security?
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: State of Emergency?
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: Tarriffs on steel?
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: Military Tribunals?
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences Camp X-Ray and “unlawful combatants”?
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments USA PATRIOT Act?

I’m sitting in my computer nook, surfing and typing, surfing and typing. The air conditioning is on and I’m ignoring the very hot outdoor world today. Every couple of minutes, I hear a jet fly overhead. My house is in the flight path for several of the BWI Airport approaches, so I’m used to hearing jets. But these seem too frequent. I start getting concerned.

I know there’s heightened security all over the Capital Region and New York City this Independence Day, so I assume that it’s military jets patrolling the airspace over the Baltimore/Washington corridor. But, even accepting that reasoning, this is still WAY too frequent: a flyover every minute or two, sometimes 3 or 4 flybys within a couple of seconds.

Maybe something is happening. Maybe all those numbingly vague alerts and color-coded threat states are not just there to keep the populace stupefied while our civil liberties are thrown away in a vague and indeterminate “state of emergency”. I check feverishly all the news sites I can think of, but there’s nothing breaking.

I’m being paranoid, I think. I look out the sliding-glass doors, scanning the sky for contrails, fast-moving black dots, mushroom clouds. I see nothing. There’s a knock at my door. The dog barks, there is no other sound. I hesitate, then I open the front door.

It’s my neighbor, Sean, sweating profusely in the 100F heat. His shorts and sneakers are soaking wet, and there’s more moisture than just sweat could be responsible for. I ask him in, but he says, “No thanks, I’m just letting you know that I’m powerwashing my fence — sorry about all the noise — and I’m gonna need to get into your backyard. I hope you don’t mind.”

I tell him its no problem, and I sit back down at my desk. I hear him start up the compressor and then I hear the water hitting the fence, making a sound just like the roaring of a low-flying jet.

I got one of those e-mails again this morning — not the porn or the spam which are like the background radiation of my inbox and are easily ignored. No, this was one from an older relative, who, having discovered the power of the internet, doesn’t always use it wisely. She forwarded to me a call for a boycott of FujiFilm, because, it was claimed, Fuji had erased Israel from a free world map it distributed to its customers. I groaned.

I’ve received this particular email several times already this year, and each time, I painstakingly construct a response which goes something like:

This false e-mail has been circulating since early this year (at least).

It’s been debunked by The Urban Legends Reference at snopes.com. The Wiesenthal Center has an explanation of the rumor and of the dangers of these kinds of inaccuracies to friends and supporters of Israel. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has a debunking of this rumor as well as a letter from FujiFilm thanking the ADL for its fair and accurate debunking of the issue. It took me about 2 seconds to find all these sources — a search on Google with the terms “fuji israel boycott” brought up all these references on the first page of results.

Please, before attaching your name to these kinds of messages, take a second to check on their accuracy.

Each time I send this message, I wait for some kind of response, some kind of acknowledgement, something… But the usual response is for that person to stop emailing me altogether.

Is it really that hard to admit you are wrong? Maybe so. Maybe it is so unusual that Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle can write an entire column about a Shakesperean scholar who did just that. Donald Foster, who several years ago created his reputation and his career as a literary forensics expert by statistically “proving” that Shakespeare was the author of a previously unascribed poem, now admits in a public forum that he has been proved wrong, and is glad to see the error of his ways.

This is a man with far more to lose in his admission of error than an email forwarder, yet he does so gladly, graciously, because as Carroll points out, “Friends, we have an adult on our hands.”

It makes a good story, doesn’t it: America’s Domestic Diva researching ways to decorate her jail cell. Too bad its just another smokescreen, designed to take our attention from all the other – much more serious – instances of corporate corruption cropping up all over the news.

In focusing on Martha’s supposed wrongdoing in the ImClone insider trading flap, the mainstream media are pandering to their readers, obscuring the real story in the same way the tabloids do. It’s so much easier to celebritize the story than it is to provide some real information about people who need two names in order to be recognized. Sam Waksal? Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling? Dennis Kozlowski? Bernie Ebbers? Gary Winnick?

And there are plenty of questions. For instance, how did the news of the FDA’s rejection of Erbitux – ImClone’s anti-cancer drug, and the source of the bad financial news for ImClone – get out to ImClone with such certainty that the major shareholders knew they had to unload? If it wasn’t some sort of underhanded leak, then perhaps the FDA procedure for releasing information needs to be streamlined so that the public gets the information at the same time as the insiders.

What actions are the SEC, Congress, and the Courts taking against Aliza Waksal, the daughter of ousted ImClone chief Sam Waksal, and Harlan Waksal, Sam’s brother and the person who stepped into Sam’s job when Sam resigned? Harlan sold nearly US$50 million worth of ImClone stock early in December.

And what about Bristol Meyers Squibb, ImClone’s marketing partner? They owned 20% of ImClone, had access to the same early information as the Waksals. Do their shareholders have a case against them for losing a substantial amount of money for not acting on the information?

While journalists are rubbing their hands with glee over the involvement of Martha in this whole mess, they’re ignoring the gutting of the campaign finance regulations, the languishing of the accounting reform bills, and the seeming disappearance of the Bush-Cheney-Enron connection from the headlines.

We are amusing ourselves with National Enquirer junk, just the way they want us to.

I used to tell people that I was a liberal — somewhat to the left of Karl Marx. Of course, that’s when I was thinking of the political spectrum as being a straight line from communist to capitalist. Of course, after viewing the information at “The Political Compass”, I realize that, today, I would better be described as a “libertarian socialist”. And, I find that I’m in the same quadrant of the compass as Gandhi — which is okay with me!. (I’m also in the same quadrant as Rebecca Blood whose blog pointed me to this site.)

Invest five minutes in taking this fascinating — and totally anonymous questionnaire — to see where your political inclinations lie. (I come out with a -3.62 on the economic left/right axis, and a -6.41 on the authoritatian/libertarian axis.) Where do you stand?

Jenn, who is a store manager for a large chain bookstore (Hint) was required to take a county Health Department course in order to have her store café certified for serving food.

One of the topics during training was proper handwashing technique. The instructor informed the class that it is important to wash your hands for at least 20 seconds in order to ensure that the soap has had a chance to remove dirt, oils and micrõorganisms. “You could count to 20-Mississippi,” she told them, “or you could just sing “Happy Birthday.”

I wonder if this instructor (and the Stanford University MedNews and the Cornell University Cooperative Extension) realizes that she’s being a shill for AOL/Time Warner, whose Warner/Chapell Music owns the copyright to “Happy Birthday” and who, due to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, will keep bilking kindergardeners and chain restaurants out of performance money until 2010.

Right now they can’t get any royalties out of me while I’m standing at the bathroom sink, scrubbing away, but I’m sure that won’t last forever.