Posted 10:35 PM by Floyd

Time for me to do my first Friday Five:

1. What's the last place you traveled to, outside your own home state/country?

Last November I went to China with my wife. We joined a weeklong tour that started in Beijing and proceeded to Hangchow, Suchow, and ended up in Shanghai, where my wife is from.

2. What's the most bizarre/unusual thing that's ever happened to you while traveling?

On the Great Wall I got my picture taken on a camel. It was a tourist trap operated by a couple that had a (one-hump) camel and some costumes. I donned a barbarian costume and sat on the camel and brandished a sword. I tried to look fierce, but succeeded only in looking constipated.



3. If you could take off to anywhere, money and time being no object, where would you go?

Alaska, or Europe. Or I might rent a car and drive all over the East Coast and Canada.

4. Do you prefer traveling by plane, train or car?

To LA, or somewhere far away, by plane. To, say, Eureka, by car. Can't imagine travelling by plane.

5. What's the next place on your list to visit?

I promised my wife a vacation in Hawaii.

Posted 3:15 PM by Floyd

One of Matt Welch's readers commented that he had already heard an anti-Schwartzenegger ad!

If you get a chance, see if you can catch one of Davis' anti-Arnold commercials on radio. I heard one this morning (so soon?) which, to give you a flavor of it, was spoken to an audio backdrop of Nurnberg goose stepping.

Crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch crunch...

Speaking of the recall, see Sac Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub's blog for lots and lots of good coverage.

Posted 12:51 PM by Floyd

Yesterday was my birthday. If I were a big-time blogger like Instapundit I could have a catchy name for it, like "InstaBirthday." But I'm just some shmuck who gets excited about 20 hits a day. "My birthday" will have to do.

I turned 36. 36 is a useful number because it can be divided so many ways. I spent some time last night thinking about "one-third of my life ago" and "one-twelfth of my life ago." I don't really mind getting older, but it's hard to escape the feeling that it's all downhill from here.

Here's a hypothesis, based on no real evidence: You know that you're really old when you have no intrinsic awareness of your age. When I was a kid, it was a big deal to have a birthday and any specific age was different from any other age. At present there's not much difference between 36 and 35 or 37, and I am probably aware of my age only because of ingrained habit. In ten or twenty years, someone will ask how old I am and I will have to subtract 1967 from the current year to figure it out.

Anyway, enough morbid mumblings. My wife bought me a CD (Queens of the Stone Age) and the Civ III Play the World upgrade, and we had a nice dinner at Armadillo Willy's (a barbeque joint).

Posted 10:07 PM by Floyd

It's time for me to make fun of the San Jose Mercury News letters page some more. Sometimes I feel guilty about doing this, because it is pretty much shooting fish in a barrel. But I figure that there are lots of comedians paying good money for this kind of material. Who am I to turn it down when provided to me for free?

Here's asshat -- I mean constestant -- one:

Are we getting the full story on Iraq?

In the first two weeks of July, for the first time, the U.S. media focused closely on the terrible price that American soldiers are paying for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. American soldiers are being killed almost on a daily basis, and reports of these attacks have seriously eroded Americans' confidence in the Bush administration's Iraq strategy. They have also led to a significant drop in the president's approval rating.

In the last several weeks, however, despite the increase in attacks on American soldiers, the American media have significantly reduced coverage of these events. In fact, the number of American soldiers that have died has been vastly underreported (Opinion, Aug. 3). Could it be that the Bush administration is pressuring U.S. media not to report these attacks and the true number of casualties?

Chris Rauwendaal
Los Altos Hills

That's quite a provocative idea. The Pentagon is forcing U.S. media to ignore some casualties. Those soldiers' deaths are not reported to us. The Pentagon then hires actors to imitate those people, so that no one knows they are dead.

You'll notice that only U.S. media does not report attacks and casualties. Foreign news outlets like the BBC and Reuters report the truth, but fortunately for the Pentagon, Americans don't have access to those sources.

It kind of makes you wonder if we're getting the full story on other kinds of news. For instance, what if it turns out that Niobium, which as we all know is the 41st element, is really the 42nd? Just let me explain how this could happen: Everyone was all happy with the idea that element 41 is Niobium. Then somebody does an experiment and is like, "Woah! This is really the 42nd element. Niobium and Molybdenum got switched!"

Then all the chemists would hold like a big chemist meeting. Some people would say that the truth will come out. "The truth will set you free", even if it's about Niobium. But then one big Nobel Prize winner -- I mean a big chemist, not that the Nobel Prize for chemistry is any bigger than the prize for Medicine or Opthamalogy -- would say:

"Look, everyone is happy the way things are right now. It's not like we're talking about an important element like Iron or Florencium. Nobody gives a shit. There's no reason for us to reprint a million books and embarrass Mr. Niobe. Just let things be."

So thanks for writing in with your provocative thoughts, Mr. Rauwendaal. Thanks for writing to the San Jose Mercury News, which as we all know is extensively fact-checked.

----------

Voila letter two:

Powell sends a message to Bush

Though he denies it publicly (Page 7A, Aug. 5), Secretary of State Colin Powell has indicated through a confidant that he will not be part of a second George W. Bush administration, should a second term come to pass.

It is no surprise that Powell would prefer to play no part in the president's extremist cabal. What is surprising is the timing of his ``leaked'' intentions. It would be more conventional to wait until the election results were in and then, if Bush were to be re-elected, to publicly announce his non-availability.

By announcing at this early date, 16 months prior to the 2004 national elections, his unwillingness to continue in the president's service, Powell tells me that he is sick of the heavy-handed, extremist, unilateralist and me-first ``foreign policy'' he has been forced to promote and explain to our partners overseas.

Good for you, Secretary Powell.

Hal Beers
San Jose

That makes a lot of sense. Let's say it's 2003 and I take a job where I don't agree with my boss and I don't like what I'm doing. Obviously for the first two and a half years I'm going to do nothing about it. Then in 2005 I'm going to have a friend tell the newspapers that I plan to quit in two more years, in 2007. You can't control me. I am a stone bad motherfucker.

----------

I saved the best for last:

Imagination wanes when arts are cut

Every time there's a budget crisis, we cut what we consider to be the least important programs -- art, music and anything creative. And every time the arts are cut, the imagination of the nation is further reduced.

This can be seen by the way Americans are unable to empathize with people at war. We're unable to put ourselves in the place of people having no water, electricity or sewage facilities. We can't guess what it's like to live in a war-torn land.

Our president has led us down a path leading to the destruction of this republic -- with pre-emptive war, unbridled capitalism, wastefulness and intolerance as his guiding principles. But we go about our daily activities without giving it a second thought -- because we can't even imagine the consequences.

Joyce Blaskovich
Aptos

How long would the oxygen flow to your brain have to be interrupted before you got this dumb? My guess is four and a half days. Did Joyce ever try to imagine what it was like to be in one of the hijacked planes on September 11th? Or what it's like to live under a dictator who throws people feet-first into shredders and takes money for food and spends it on palaces?

Anyway, what the hell does art have to do with imagining suffering during war? I mean, there's Guernica, but then what? What Joyce really wants is government funding for war movies and the History Channel.

Posted 8:48 AM by Floyd

Unbelievable! It's now been more than 24 hours since the Jakarta bombing and here is the Mercury News' top headline:

TOP STORY
From the Mercury News

California exodus
DURING BOOM MORE PEOPLE LEFT STATE
It's not Hollywood movies or wine. It's not even the cheese. California's most notable export is people, according to new census reports released today.

Nothing about the bombing on the Mercury News home page. Oh, and here's the "Nation/World" summary:

TOP NATION / WORLD STORIES

»U.S. Military Helicopters Land in Liberia - 08:06 AM PDT
»Feinstein Rules Out Run for Calif. Gov. - 07:50 AM PDT
»Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners freed - 03:19 AM PDT
»Study: Drivers' attention easily diverted - 08:03 AM PDT

"Drivers' attention easily diverted"? Sixteen people are killed by Islamic terrorists, and the Merc posts this shit as news? This is like a bad imitation of the Onion's one-liners. "Men, women attracted to each other." "Baseball player spits."

Posted 4:28 PM by Floyd

Some big-time blogger said recently that regardless of your ideas on media bias, it is impossible for a person to be educated about world events by reading newspapers or watching TV. I found evidence of that today.

I was reading Tim Blair's blog and saw this posting:

JAKARTA UPDATE

The toll now stands at 13 dead and more than 100 injured. Nine New Zealanders and two Australians are among the wounded. Reports that an Australian was killed are now being denied by the government. A Dutch national is reported dead.

...

Crap, another Indonesia bombing. I went to the Mercury News website and saw ... nothing about Indonesia. The top story listed under "Breaking News" was "Firefighters struggle to contain wildfire near Morgan Hill - 03:32 PM PDT".

You would think that this bombing would be the most important news at this moment. More important than the top story on the website:

'O.C.' fits Fox tradition
It's a month before Labor Day, but the fall TV season is getting what in the restaurant business is called a "soft opening" this week.

But to be fair, I checked the National/World News page. Again, nothing about Indonesia. But that's okay, because that left plenty of space for defeatist propaganda:

Iraqis increasingly view U.S. troops as foreign occupiers
Nearly four months after the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime, the euphoria most Iraqis expressed over their leader's ouster largely has evaporated, replaced by growing resentment of the American presence.

In fact, because the person who updates the Merc website is HTML-illiterate, there was room for this defeatist propaganda to be posted twice.

(Note that the story that Tim linked to had a dateline of 18:00 on August 5th. That's about 2 a.m. this morning local time.)

Posted 3:39 PM by Floyd

John Gilmore, who is on the board of civil liberties lobby EFF, was featured in Lawrence Lessig's blog two weeks ago. Gilmore pulled a stunt on a British Airways flight: He wore a button that said "I am not a terrorist." Before takeoff, a steward and the captain of the aircraft asked Gilmore to remove the button. Gilmore refused, and the plane was returned to the terminal and Gilmore was ejected.

This little act of civil disobedience hardly met with universal approval. Jeff Jarvis has called him paranoid and deluded, and today Richard Bennett added this nasty, dismissive swipe: "Gilmore wore the button in order to provoke a reaction, and then whined and cried like a little girl when he succeeded. His is not the behavior of a serious, rational person."

At the time, there was quite a debate in Lessig's blog comments. I posted my own comment, and then forgot about the whole matter.

Today Lessig posted Gilmore's response to his critics. This was a long, somewhat hysterical screed. For example:

...

Let me also say in my defense that I seldom fly these days, so I am not used to life in a gulag. I had zero expectation that my refusal to doff a button would result in the captain returning the plane to the gate. But even if I did fly often, my response would be the same: to constantly push back against the rules that turn a free people into the slaves of a totalitarian regime. I push back using the rights granted me by the constitutional structure of the country, plus my own intelligence and resources. Way too many of you readers are like the Poles who, under orders from swaggering bullies, built the brick wall around their own ghetto...

...

All this was of theoretical interest only until I hit the last few paragraphs:

Above, Floyd McWilliams posted a perfect example of what’s wrong with this debate:

Gilmore is insulted by being labeled a “suspected terrorist.” Okay, but then how would an airline figure out that he’s a peaceable fellow except by, well, identifying him? Did he expect to be labeled a low security risk because he wasn’t swarthy?

No. I expected to be treated as peaceable because I had not breached the peace. I expected to be treated as innocent because I was not guilty of any crime.

You can see my response here. Let's just say I was not amused.

Posted 11:03 PM by Floyd

Mickey Kaus has posted some chortle-inducing quotes in which prominent Democrats claim that they are behind Gray Davis -- one thousand percent! Here is Hillary Clinton answering the call to arms:

I'm just going to do everything I can—until informed otherwise—to fight against the recall. Right now, as far as I know, we're all fighting against the recall.

Kaus noted that California attorney general Bill Lockyer was asked if he would run, and Lockyer said "I don't know." Today I saw the context in which Lockyer made that statement.

Attorney General Bill Lockyer issued a stern warning to fellow Democrat Gov. Gray Davis on Thursday: Run the kind of "trashy ... puke" campaign you did last year and a lot of prominent Democrats will vote to recall you and give the job to Republican Richard Riordan.

...

"If they do the trashy campaign on Dick Riordan ... I think there are going to be prominent Democrats that will defect and just say, 'We're tired of that puke politics. Don't you dare do it again or we're just going to help pull the plug.'

"There is a growing list of prominent Democrats that, if that's how it evolves, are going to jump ship."

Asked if he'd be one of them, Lockyer, who has also come out against the recall, calling it "unfair to Gray Davis and bad for the state," said: "I don't know."

...

This is a much nastier backstab than one would have guessed from Kaus' short quote. Lockyer is making a not-so-subtle threat to turn on Davis if the governor runs a negative campaign. This is like France telling Colin Powell that they would be happy to support an American attack on Saddam Hussein, as long as US forces don't use any computer chips. I mean, if you take away "trashy" campaigning, what exactly does Davis have going for him? His winning smile?