Category: Essay

One of the keystones when I read the New York Times in its staining, non-soy-ink edition, at the tail end of it’s black-and-white “Grey Lady” era was the language. Reporters wrote, editors edited and their bosses vetted articles for publication. “All the News That’s Fit to Print™.” And what was fit to print, in part, was the language of the article. Always in sync/synchronous to/in line with/alike to the current Manuals of Style (AP, Chicago, or internal) and their dictionaries. CBW became ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ RC airplanes became ‘drones,’ even if they were smaller than their decades-older ancestors, using batteries instead of gasoline-powered engines.

The press is already an endangered creature. I’ll be honest: I read the NYT and WP through their paywalls and pay only if the specific article gets my attention. I’m part of the problem: there are so many places where I can get the sensational information from multiple, free sources, and the more it bleeds, the more venues to watch/read/hear about it. After all, the Internet market is about click-throughs, page reads to set ad placement, and SEO analytics to monetize a page to the max.

Also about speed. And speed is queen, now. Who waits for the next morning to get information tweeted twenty hours previous, then blogged and shared through imagur, tumblr, facebook and a zillion other venues? Where’s the value added? Grammar? I think not.

So now we have outlets, like this CBS affiliate in my home town, where spell-checking is left to the computer, and the urgency is in the report, not the readability of the content. Such as, in this case, the content surrounding an Amber Alert. I’ll quote it from here in its entirety, just to point things out:

Amber Alert Suspect In Custody After SWAT Standoff
August 8, 2014 6:18pm
UPDATE: August 9, 12:20 p.m.
Austin Amber Alert suspect Jesse Thomas has been taken into custody, according to Harris County Sheriff’s Office. According to DPS officials, Jesse Thomas, the suspect in an amber alert out of Austin, was reportedly involved in a stand off with police in the Houston area. According to Sgt. John Sampa, troopers located Thomas’ vehicle this morning on the southbound frontage road of Highway 249. The road is blocked at Spring Cypress. Police had the suspect cornered in a parking lot of a Petco store. He says they were actively negotiating with him. Thomas turned the child over to authorities around 9:30 a.m. and was taken into custody after a brief struggle a shot time later. Officials would not say if a weapon was involved.

According to Austin Police Detective J.J. Schmidt, Thomas will be charged with Burglary for kicking the door in, DPS will charge him with Endangering a Child and APD will add several other charges related to kidnapping within the next several days.

9:15 p.m. UPDATE:

Police say Jesse Thomas is Cheyenne Johnson’s biological father, but he was told today that he no longer has parental rights.

He is currently out on bond for the aggravated assault against a peace officer with a deadly weapon. The biological mother is currently incarcerated. And the grandmother had full custody of the child, police say.

Investigators say Thomas went to his mother’s home, where Cheyenne was located. She refused to let him in but he went to the back of the house and kicked the door in, and got the child before fleeing the scene.

He was spotted at 5:15 p.m. at a U-Haul Storage facility, located at 1030 E. 46th St. Officers attempted to make contact, but as he saw them approaching he came at the officers with his vehicle and left the scene at a high right of speed, police say.

A short pursuit ensued, but was terminated due to heavy traffic and his erratic driving pattern — speeds of over 100 mph with the child in the vehicle.

Thomas has a violent history with other felony charges pending right now, police say.

If you see him do not make any contact with him. Call 911 or the homicide tip line at 512-477-3588.

Police say they believe the child is in danger.

EARLIER:
Police have issued an Amber Alert for a missing child last seen Friday afternoon in South Austin with her father — but his parental rights have been relinquished and he’s considered dangerous.

Investigators say two-year-old Cheyenne Johnson was last seen at 1:54 p.m. in the 1800 block of Anita Drive, just west of South Lamar Boulevard and south of Barton Springs Road…

The highlighted errors don’t change the story. I’m sure that Detective (Lt., by the way) JJ Schmidt (one of the best officers ever to be put in front of a microphone or camera) didn’t dictate the text.

The issue here, picayune as you might think, is that getting the basic spelling correct is part of the reporting. It’s a lot easier to trust someone who knows how to spell with at least 7th grade capabilities than someone who relies on “autocorrect” to get the words right. Spelling and punctuation change the meaning. And the reputation of the source (CBS’s KEYE-TV in this case) is on the line.

Getting it right is job #1. Getting it right quickly is a close, but not competing, second. If spelling stops being important, the facts are a close second in losing to ignorance or “fat-fingered” spelling.

In Citizen’s United, the Supreme Court awarded citizenship to corporations. Now, the same majority on the Court ruled that family-held companies, whatever the size, can have a religion.

The golem of the corporation as a person arises, one step at a time, from the nightmares of dystopic fiction into the Koch-fed reality of our purchased Congress.

It’s not just Hobby Lobby. It means that family-held Desseret (aka LDS) companies may apply their religious strictures on womens’ health to their religious doctrine. Scientologists owning business can refuse to pay for mental health care.

Jehova’s Witnesses? No surgery, blood transfusions, or any other invasive procedure for their employees. Charismatic Christian? Excellent: just prayer and the odd rattlesnake for you. Their employees don’t need no stinkin’ “modern” medicine.

This is a boon for insurance companies: the less they cover, the more they rake in. More irony: that’s something that President Obama counted on for insurance company support for the bill in the first place: requiring healthy younger folks to pay into a system to help those less healthy. So now insurance companies get money from the young, encourage smaller, closely held companies to “stand up for their religious principles,” and up the costs for healthcare a smidge because of “all the bureaucracy” with the law and its court-ordered complications. More than one someone is laughing themself into a cerebral hemorrhage — all the way to the bank.

Ironically, church-based hospitals can’t use the narrow Court ruling.

It’s a pity progressive religious such as those worshipping the Flying Spaghetti Monster can’t discriminate against deists: “No oxygen consumption allowed for our employees who believe in anything other than physics. And pirates. Arrrrrr, matey!”

Dr. Tyson’s latest edition of Cosmos focused on leaded gasoline and a scientist’s unanticipated fight to stop it’s use as a side-effect of his work on cosmology. It’s a quaint, simplistic and, with the animation, almost naive approach to the story (although I’ve never seen an animated short quoting articles from Nature). While the primary important issue was Dr. Patterson‘s “aha!” moment on lead in gasoline, the subtext, as Mother Jones pointed out, was corporate greed.

In the context of many changes we Americans have encountered over the past twenty years, it’s worth revisiting Superman’s credo:

• Truth
• Justice
• The American Way

97% yes, 2% unsure, 1% no.

Truth: Hitler made the ‘big lie’ a key weapon in his propaganda and brainwashing of Germans and the rest of the world. That lesson has been learned well by those in the US who believe that the “truth” is the lie spoken most loudly.

The truth is objective, not subjective. Fact, not opinion. Data, not belief. In the America of 2014, this means… not much. Politicians big and small make poisoned statements, disclaiming their need to stand behind them. Cue President Obama.

Justice: Justice has always been a squishy thing. It’s injustice for the loser. And what is just? Sure, property claims, business liens, tort law… these all apply. Justice as in “let’s kill the murderer to serve justice” is a hairsbreadth away from “eye for an eye.” (Don’t get me wrong: if we had a working justice (sic) system, I’d see the necessity for putting down a human animal. Not for justice, but to keep them from hurting society.) Is it just when a court orders putting down a religious artifact on public grounds because the majority of the local powers believe it’s the just thing to do? Justice in the time of Superman was decidedly on the white, male savior side. While justice occasionally rears its head in the form of marriage equality, the injustice of perverted law claimed as justice is the travesty of our time on the public national stage.

Now we’re left with “The American Way:” Which should be interesting given that we’re teetering at the cusp of a white minority in these here United States. So what’s the ‘American Way’ going to look like in my grandchildren’s time? (Kids, please don’t get any ideas!) Apple pie replaced with flan? A chorizo wrapped in a tortilla? A quiet, calm Tesla in lieu of a muscle car?

Bottom line: TJaTAW is a product long past its expiration date in America circa 2014. A pure truth today invalidates many of the initiatives and their idiot religious sycophants on the Justice side. And practical demographics will lay waste to the white, male, Christian ‘supermen’ that keep minorities and women economically beneath them.

Good News Everyone! Astronomers smelling planets!

I wonder what the earth smells like? Is it like one’s own flatulence, tolerated by self and abhorred by others? Is that why aliens keep coming to our planet and then dashing off at top speed?

The culture “war” (to besmirch Rupert’s pet yellow rag) continues. This time it’s “Ban Bossy,” an alliterative sound bite. Proponents of putting “bossy” in the same isolation ward as “retarded” say it’s because the word is fundamentally pejorative and used in conjunction with girls.

Unlike the “R” word (thanks, Tali, for being early in the game in having that banned in our households), “bossy” isn’t an objectively difference in a person from the perceived physical or psychological norm, it’s the user’s subjective opinion of another’s behavior.

Bosses should be “bossy.” In a random grouping, there will be leaders and followers. Leader frequently “boss” others to achieve their — and hopefully the group’s — goals. Bossy is a power term: this person directs others.

In the warped world of misogynistic etymology, “bossy” is the new “assertive” (trans: “aggressive”). Should we ban “assertive?” How about “pushy?”

Let the words roam free, I say, and attach the meaning to the speaker and context, and not the sequence of letters. And if that makes me bossy, or a pushy bastard, so be it.

A IT SR-52 calculator and it’s magnetic program storage card

The BASIC computer language turned fifty today. It was the second non-human language I learned, after Texas Instrument’s SR-52 programming “language” (read: keystrokes). The last paragraph in the SR-52’s manual said something like: “…If you want to learn more about programming, look for a book on BASIC.”

The visceral thrill I felt when I finished a 4-player Monopoly® game on the SR-52. 3½ hour games were now brisk 45 minute ones. No calculating 10% luxury tax, no shuffling around making change for paying rent. Bing, bang, done.

Boring.

The next thing I learned from programming was that just because something is made easier doesn’t make it better. The stodgy details of the board game turned into a boring set of whizzing shoes, dogs and flatirons. Sure, the game only lasted 45 minutes: but it was devoid of the social interactions.

Now it’s 38 years later and I’m still learning, still exploring. I’m not a perfect programmer, and I’m not a mathematician programmer. I see programming as a kind of poetry: governed by rules as stringent as the iambic pentameter and rhyming forms of a Shakespearean sonnet.

Languages change over time and yet remain the same: BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/1, TECO gave way to C++, Java, Ruby, lua, and their ilk. More words, a more complex syntax. The nuanced idea that statements create functions which can endlessly aggregate into larger and still more powerful programs.

Haiku to verse to story to novella to epic. To volumes of functional poetry that powers our social, electronic world.

I’m the child of Holocaust survivors. One of my closest family friends is dying (at 95), and my mother, an Auschwitz survivor, is in a sessile state with Alzheimer’s. That leaves me as the “elder generation” person. Which freaks this 54-year-old out. If I found a true “SS” member I’d kill him: only he’d be 90+ years old, so what’s the point:

I learned a lot about the concentric levels of evil, where “governments” pulled the noose tighter and tighter.

The Russians decided to use the bogey monster of “the Jews are selected” in their latest Psy Ops against the Ukraine.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d dance at the party to burn all the Ukraine SS that not only cheerfully joined the Nazis but performed all manner of independent cruelties while their victims were alive. But the Ukrainians of today ARE NOT the Ukrainians of WW II. And Putin, dictator of Russia, is making cynical use of that trope. And in that we are reminded not to jump to action, but to guard the memory of all those Ukrainians who did NOT Participate. All those Ukrainians who are more interested in the hatred and nonsense of

We are NOT the Jews of 1939. We are the Jews of the new century. We are the Jews of Now. The Jews of Understanding. Passover is the holiday Putin’s evil minions and absurd statement attempt to cover. And we are the Jews of We Will Not Bow.

My Ukrainian tribe-mates use Twitter and Facebook and all manner of social media. They stood at the barricades in Kiev and stand with the idea that the people, not the corrupt kleptocrats of the Ukraine and the rulers of Russia, . We, as they say “are not amused.”

It will take more than trying to pit Ukrainian against Ukrainian. Putin’s going to do it the hard way.

And the Jews of the World, despite all the time we’re spending on “running the global markets,” are just trying to stay alive.

But if you _really_ want to be honorable, and have guts, please, oh please, show yourself. American and non-psychotic countries would be happy to relieve you of your burden of life.