Rayne Today

Finally!! I found my voice and I can SCREAM!!!

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 21:28:38 GMT

A silly series of boo-boos kept me from posting for weeks now...I felt gagged all this time, unable to post when the muse moved me.

Corrupted install, expiring license, other little sundry problems like migrating to another machine...seems like forever to resolve all these.

I still have a bunch of other bugs to fix yet; I couldn't properly back up my blog, may not have all my bells and whistles in place for a few more days. Bear with me if it looks like I'm posting all the time; it might just be me trying to restore all my posts between spring of 2004 and last month.

So...enough about me. What's up with you?

Just plain wrong

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 18:23:50 GMT

Unfortunately, holidays in America means television viewing -- like watching the parades in the morning or ball games in the afternoon or semi-traditional tear-jerker seasonal movies in the evening.

It also means exposure to advertising.

I could ordinarily tune it out, being little more than background noise -- but one advertiser has gotten under my skin.

It's just plain wrong to use Aerosmith's "Dream On" in any ad.

Let alone for a freaking Buick.

I suppose the next thing they're going to try to tell me is that it's not my grandpa's Buick Roadmaster...

Yeesh. Gives me the heebie-jeebies to even ponder the considerable dissonance of Aerosmith and Buick combined on television.

[-click-]

Last evening

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 12:56:46 GMT

At 5:16 pm, the house went dark.

The power flickered off then on several times between 5:10 and 5:16, as if to provide advance warning.

It really wasn’t a surprise, though; the warning wasn’t necessary. The snow was wet and heavy, streaming out of the northeast from off the lake. Just the kind of storm that might load up trees with ice and slushy snow, snapping off branches and taking out the power. Northeasters here are nothing to sneeze at; the wind was blowing crisply at 20 to 30 miles per hour, pelting the new house and the construction crew with beads of sleet and chunky snow as they put in the windows. They flew about their work, mounting five new windows in less than 30 minutes. The last crewmember left the site at 4:30 pm, leaving me to sweep hurriedly and race home.

Race. As if. Traffic stood still at the next major intersection. I’d forgotten the first snow makes drivers over-cautious; they creep along, willing to give up precious hours in traffic in that first snow. I took a left-hand turn and went the opposite way around, heading home against the stream of crawling traffic.

I’d managed to get the kids hurriedly bundled and outside to play in the white stuff, had just sat down with a hot cup of tea, when the lights went out. I could hear the kids squealing outside in the snow. Funny, but with the power on, I can’t hear them when they’re outside. My daughter realized the lights were out from outside in the dusk; she was shouting at me from the lawn, asking whether the lights were on.

Nope.

Time to get out the candles. Throw a log or two in the fireplace.

The kids were a little concerned, their giddiness about the first snow fading away to puzzlement tinged with fear. How long would the power be out? What do we do now? Questions and more questions.

First, we get the analog phone out and plug it in, see if it’s working. It did.

Next, we call the power company, in case no one else on the block called in to report the outage. It was rush hour when it happened; many folks weren’t home yet, and many more may not have analog phones. It was pretty obvious that there was no power up and down the street; there should have been lights on in the windows of homes around us in the growing darkness.

The kids wait, holding their breath, wanting the pronouncement.

2:00 am is the expected time of repair.

The questions fly as furiously as the snow at this point. I can’t even manage to get a word in edgewise until they pause to take a breath. Yes, there’s still water. Yes, we can eat food in the fridge for dinner, but we should keep the fridge closed as much as possible. Yes, you can still use the toilet. No, there won’t be any television this evening. No, you won’t be able to get on the computer. Yes, we can watch a DVD on my laptop, but the battery may not last long. Yes, we will be plenty warm. Yes, we can cook dinner in the fireplace. No, I don’t know when you dad will be home; the snow will slow him down. Yes, we can put on the radio. Yes, you can use your GameBoy as long as the battery holds out.

After the blizzard of questions came the search for flashlights and batteries. I wasn’t worried about them, but the kids obviously felt better once they were each armed with a flashlight to ward off the dark.

I went outside into the wet cold stillness, brought in some bricks from the yard and a grill from the barbeque, set them in the fireplace. Leftover steak and sliced potatoes packaged in foil, set on the makeshift grill made sizzling noises as they cooked over the flames. We ate in front of the fire, listening to the radio, talking about times past and what it must have been like to live before electricity.

We settled down on the couch, bundled under a pile of blankets, to watch a DVD on my laptop. The fire popped and hissed; the candles flickered. Two small heads grew heavy on my shoulders as we drifted off to sleep sometime after the laptop battery gave out.

When the power came back on, I woke with a start. I had the impression that a stranger had entered the house, but it was only the sound of various appliances coming back up. The kids were still hard asleep, worn out from the excitement of the snow and the darkness.

I changed the time on the clocks, shut off the lamps that came back up when the power returned. With the fire still hissing and the den dark once again, I crawled back under the blankets between the kids and went back to sleep.

This is the way it’s supposed to be, I thought as I snuggled deeper beneath the blankets and between the dozing kids. Cozy, dark, warm, and thankful on the eve of Thanksgiving Day.

Wishing you and yours much to be thankful for today.

Greening?

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 00:51:48 GMT

We live in a lawless place; we are living amidst a lawless society. I can agree with Charles Reich on this.

A place where there is no taxation with representation. My children have each been handed a bill for $140,000 for the national debt and taxes to pay it off by a government for which they cannot even vote.

A place where where what passes for representation continually violates our privacy, sneaking in legislation to spy on us without any consideration for our personal sovereignty.

A place where women have less and less value, having fewer rights with even less representation.

[sigh]

Maybe it's not living.

Now Reading: The Greening of America

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 12:17:41 GMT

"Viewed in a broader perspective, it can be seen that for each status, class, and position in society, there is a different set of laws. There is one set of laws for the welfare recipient, one for the businessman. There is one set of laws for the government employee, another for the congressman. There is one set of laws for the farmer, another for the writer. These differences are not limited to any particular area or subject matter; for example, the constitutional right of privacy is treated differently for a businessman or farmer than for a welfare recipient. A person receiving Medicare is required to take a loyalty oath; others are not. If "law" means a general rule to govern a community of people, then in most literal and precise sense we have no law; we are a lawless society..."

-- Charles A. Reich

WYSIWYG

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 02:27:46 GMT

There is nothing fake about this guy. He is, in the flesh, the very same person you see on television.

But that's what I've always dug about this guy -- utter candor, total frankness.

Completely refreshing in politics.

It was a great privilege to get to meet him and talk about the future.

Anybody can find somebody who'll lie and prevaricate about what's ahead.

Not this guy.

Dialogue with a couple dozen activists here in Michigan about the future.

A couple of the Michigan Dean Dozen -- these two were elected to office.

Yay for us!!! There's hope!!!

Juggling

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 01:32:13 GMT

There are too many balls in the air here.

We've got an executive spouse who's either on the road visiting clients or on the cellphone/Blackberry or at the construction site pulling cable and phone wire or up north trying to squeeze in hunting.

We've got a less-than-full-time spouse who's either at the office or escorting kids to and from school or sports or off to the construction site to check on contractors and the building inspector or headed to meetings for activists or coordinating attendence by both parents at parent-teacher conferences.

We've got two kids with completely divergent interests who are either forgetting their string instruments or needing to go to the doctor's office, or they need to be at swim lessons or a friend's party.

One of the balls that got dropped over the last couple of days was labeled "blogging".

Another one that got dropped was "NaNoWriMo".

What did I miss? I feel like I'm forgetting something.

Oh yeah. I'm attending a really, really juicy meeting tomorrow. This one is going to take up a lot of my time tomorrow so blogging may or may not make the cut.

I am absolutely certain I'll have something to blog on Sunday.

Yeah. If you only knew!

We now resume our regularly scheduled juggling. At this moment it means doing the dishes, throwing a load of laundry in the washer and another in the dryer, while tucking two kids into bed and uploading to my blog.

Barbaric Yawp: Life is funny...

Fri, 19 Nov 2004 00:31:22 GMT

Forwarded by Christopher Key, our beloved Barbaric Yawp:

Life is funny

© 2004 Christopher Key

The year was 1971. I was a young journalist on the East Coast. Still bitter from my experiences in Vietnam, I was out for revenge against the government that had sent me there.

Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh was only a few years older than I. He was White House Deputy for Domestic Affairs.

Another young man, Daniel Ellsberg, had written a government critique of the Vietnam War that eventually became known as The Pentagon Papers. He leaked it to the New York Times without permission.

This act outraged the Nixon administration and Krogh was appointed to head up a group called the Special Investigations Unit. Their charge was to find information that would discredit Ellsberg. Among the members of that unit were G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt.

Krogh, believing he was acting in the best interests of national security, authorized a break-in at the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Nothing incriminating was found, but the unit, unofficially known as The Plumbers, would go on to mastermind the break-in at Democratic campaign headquarters, located in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC.

Thus began one of the most infamous political scandals in American history that would result in the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

I was in the right place at the right time and covered Watergate as a pool reporter for a group of television stations. It helped make my career as it did for many other journalists. By the time the denouement had taken place, I was offered a job with CBS. That meant going to either Washington or New York. I was, and am, a small town kid. I have no idea why I was able to summon the wisdom to turn down that offer, but I did. God knows, I didn’t have much wisdom at that stage of my life.

Interestingly enough, Egil Krogh also was having to make a similar choice. On a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia, he had what he describes as an epiphany. The sheer weight of American history caused him to question what he had done as head of The Plumbers.

That epiphany caused him to plead guilty to felony charges resulting from the break-in at the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. It was the first crack in the stonewall that the Nixon administration had erected against the burgeoning Watergate scandal. He was sentenced to prison by Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski and was disbarred. The prison time, he now believes, gave him the time to reflect on what he had done and why.

To make a long story short, he rehabilitated himself to the point where Jaworski eventually wrote three letters to support his readmission to the bar. Since that time, Krogh has practiced law in Seattle and has now written a book about his experiences.

I was obsessed with Watergate even after Nixon’s resignation. The scandal gave me the opportunity to exact my pound of flesh from the government. I wrote about it extensively and even now have a large collection of books by journalists and participants in Watergate.

Things were simpler then. Everything was black and white. Anyone in the Nixon administration was a bad guy and all of us journalists were the good guys. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would have lunch with Egil Krogh.

Recently, Krogh came to speak to the Bellingham City Club, of which I am a member. I was fortunate enough to sit at the same table as our guest speaker and had the opportunity to converse with him before and after his presentation.

He is a soft-spoken gentleman who has learned humility the hard way. I introduced myself and mentioned that I had covered Watergate. We shared some memories of that time. Krogh is still a consummate political operative in that he remembered my name and mentioned it in his address to the group. I knew what he was doing, but it was still flattering to be mentioned by a man who was in such a high position.

He spoke of how political operatives can become insulated from outside influences by their loyalty to a cause. He cited the Orwellian concept of groupspeak, the secret language shared by insiders designed to exclude those not of the inner circle. He spoke of hubris, that pride and arrogance that has been central to dramatic tragedies from time immemorial.

Krogh was so unfailingly honest about his own failings that I found myself immensely charmed by a man I once considered an enemy. After his address, I told him how grateful I was that we had both matured to the point where we could see shades of gray. Two men who had been so diametrically opposed in political beliefs could not only share lunch, but come to admire each other. In the process, I was able to admit to him that I had done things as a journalist that I was ashamed of. Unlike Krogh, I never went to prison for those failings. Technically, I never broke the law.

But, as he pointed out, there are two things to be considered in any action. The first is whether or not it is legal. The second of which is whether it is morally right. He is forthright enough to admit that what he did as head of The Plumbers was neither legal nor morally right.

I admire anyone who admits his mistakes and takes responsibility for them. Egil Krogh is such a man. He sent a letter to members of the Bush administration after the election. Many of them are his friends and colleagues, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and others. In that letter, he cited his own experiences and cautioned them about hubris. He warned them about seeing a mandate where there was none. He also admitted that no one at cabinet level ever saw his letter, as far as he knew.

I asked him if he agreed with his colleague John Dean’s assessment that the Bush administration was “Worse than Watergate.” Krogh said he didn’t think so, but in a follow-up question, he admitted that there was a tendency toward insularity and groupthink that was precisely what led to the downfall of the Nixon administration.

Krogh said that the appointment of presidential advisors to major cabinet posts was something to be concerned about because the president would likely not hear opinions that differed from his own.

Those of us who read and understand history can draw our own conclusions. But this journalist learned an important lesson from Egil Krogh. Ask yourself constantly if what you are doing is legal. Even more importantly, ask yourself if what you are doing is morally defensible. This is just as important for journalists as it is for politicians.

It is also vitally important in the business world. Too often we divorce our ideals from our practices by saying, “Well, that’s just business. It’s not personal.”

Egil Krogh shows us that it is, indeed, personal. The decisions we make as politicians or businesspeople or journalists have consequences. Somehow, we have to grok the fact that morality, doing the right thing, is not something we can somehow put aside from our everyday lives. If we are to make this a better, sustainable world, morality has to pervade everything we do. Not morality in a narrow ideological sense, but morality in the context of what is right for humankind and the planet as a whole.

If a firebrand journalist and a conservative political operative can find common ground over lunch, there is hope for us all.

#

Perhaps there is hope for us, after all. I'll have something more to say about the topic on Sunday; in the mean time, I can only concur with Christopher that life is funny.

If you only knew what I know, or vice versa...if we could only meet somewhere half-way, perhaps in a cafe, to talk about exactly how funny life is.

A parent's hardest job -- part 2

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 03:42:51 GMT

The kids were in the back seat of the car, my daughter still unwinding from basketball practice and my son just nodding off in the warm, dark, closeness of the car.

The BBC news is on NPR. They are reporting on the murder of the aide worker Hassan and the shooting of an Iraqi prisoner in a mosque.

Two sides of the same hideous coin.

Fortunately, my son was too dozy to hear the report; fortunately, I turned down the volume before my daughter got fully settled into the car after pick up from practice.

I don't have the heart tonight to tackle the next part of this horrible lesson.

The murder of Hassan was truly evil; it was a sign that they'll trash the treasures; they'll burn the seed corn.

The murder of an unarmed and badly injured prisoner in a place of worship was equally evil; it was a sign that the occupying force has lost its way and may goad the further burning of seed corn out of fear, out of angry spite.

It's a vicious cycle begun that only the most noble, the bravest will be able to stop.

Only by breaking out of the cycle, busting out of this circle of madness.

We wanted Arafat to be most noble, to be the bravest; his life was compromised in so many ways that nobility and bravery were never possible.

And yet we are not noble ourselves, permitting a so-called trusted partner to wall in impoverished peoples, not standing up to this bullying. We are not noble ourselves, failing the starving and tormented ones in Sudan, adding further degradation in Abu Ghraib, ignoring the pleas of those dying of AIDS in the third world because they cannot pay us.

We cannot lead others when we have difficulty leading ourselves.

We cannot expect nobility, bravery, magnanimity, generosity, when we are unable to show it ourselves.

This part of the lesson must wait for now.

And so must the other part, the language that accompanies ignoble behavior and cowardice. Words and phrases like "soft target", "insurgent", and "collateral damage" must be pointed out for what they are - tools to dehumanize a victim, to make them easier to wipe off the face of the earth.

Like so much ashen seed on the ground or blood on the tile floor, merely something to be swept and wiped away.

The lesson plan has been written for a long time. It will have to keep a bit longer, until I have the strength for it.

But I hope and pray I have far fewer examples with which to teach between now and the delivery of the lesson

Turkey preparations?

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 23:57:24 GMT

Somebody asked me today what we were doing for Thanksgiving.

I have no clue.

It will involve a turkey, I'm sure.

With the house under construction and the weirdness of our schedules, it's hard to say what will happen this week let alone next week.

In the mean time, assuming you have a clue as to what you're doing for Thanksgiving and it also involves a turkey or at least cooking, give the Bookslut a visit on this subject.

What the heck. You'll enjoy the snarky review of this month's cooking magazines even if you aren't going to be cooking.

One can never have too big a helping of snark, yes?

A parent's hardest job

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 03:56:59 GMT

It was coming. I knew it was. I'd managed to put it off for a long time, for as long as possible.

But it had to be dealt with. There are times when the truth can no longer be avoided.

I had to have a heart-to-heart tonight with my daughter. It was time to make sure she knew the whole truth.

I know what you're thinking: It's the birds and bees thing.

If only it were that easy.

The door to the opportunity slammed open as we sat here on my bed this evening, innocuously watching some remodeling show together as I surfed through my usual daily blog reads. It was right there, thrown at me; I could have tried to avoid it, but it would only have been a temporary fix.

I knew I had to start at the beginning. I opened a window and went here.

Pointing to the picture, I told her the truth.

These things you see littering the ground are bodies. They are the bodies of women and children and babies. They don't look like much, being broken like this. They are dead.

Some of the children in this photo would be the same age as your mother.

There are no weapons in this photo, either. No one was armed.

I first saw this photo in a Life magazine when I was eight or nine, I can't remember. This was a time when many people still read magazines for some of their news; they didn't have cable news or the internet, just the evening news and radio and magazines. A lot more magazines. Your grandmother and grandfather used to get Life magazine among others. This particular edition I found in their bedroom with other magazines they'd been reading. I went back to re-read this article a number of times, so shocked by what I saw, unable to tell at first whether this was real. It took me a while to really wrap my head around this, that it was true, that something this horrible had happened. I snuck into their bedroom to read it; I think they would have taken it away if they'd known I'd seen it. But I was so shocked and horrified by what I saw, bodies of people that looked like family members broken and discarded like this.

This place is called My Lai. You can read more about it here if you wish.

I don't want to gross you out or scar you for life. But you need to know this. You must know this.

John Kerry went to Vietnam and saw atrocities like this; he came back and protested this and the war that spawned this. Many people felt he did the wrong thing by protesting, as if he was saying something bad about the soldiers who fought. We all know there are some people who are not quite right and do things that are hurtful. If you put them in a place where things are bad and likely to make them more hurtful, and give them weapons, this is what you get. (I pointed to the photo again.)

This is wrong. This is not what we do to other human beings, not what we do to unarmed women, children, babies. This we can't support.

You need to know that this kind of thing can still happen. Maybe not in exactly the same way, but you need to know that things are still going wrong.

This could be your My Lai. It will not be pretty; it will be hard to take. You will not see this on the news in the evening. You won't even see this in a magazine because things have changed since I was a kid.

(I went to this site and scrolled down.)

She winced at the bodies in the street.

The photos say they are insurgents. How do we know they were not Iraqi people who lived in Fallujah who were very angry or scared? We don't know the truth. It is so hard to tell from these pictures, except that these are people who are not our troops, who are now dead.

(I scrolled down further.)

This photo says this child is nine years old.

I can barely choke that out. I scroll down further.

This child has lost his foot. Maybe both feet. He is not as seriously injured as the last child, but he no longer has a foot or feet.

I can't talk any more. I am crying. She is starting to cry. She covers her head under a blanket.

I am sorry. I don't want to scare you, to hurt you, to scar you for life. But you need to know this.

Those pictures of My Lai when I was a kid shaped my political opinions for my entire life. My mom and dad, your grandmother and grandfather, have always been to the right of me, have tended to vote Republican. They never really understood why I turned out to the left. They thought it was because I was mixed race - just as you are of mixed race.

But it wasn't just that. It was those pictures that shaped my first political opinions. I can't help but think of those broken bodies whenever I think of going to war. A bad war will create more of these.

She can't look at the screen, even though her head has reemerged from under the blanket. I cannot look either and move to scroll down away from the horror on the screen.

I tell her as I scroll: This is not moral. This is not our values. We do not do this to children.

My scrolling has stopped at a point where pictures of troops who've been recently killed appear. I have stopped, quite unintentionally, on the picture of a 21-year-old man from our home state, killed this past week.

Look. He is younger than your stepbrother. He died this past week.

And others like your stepbrother have been asked to fight in Fallujah, doing what you already saw. That could have been your stepbrother.

I shut my laptop.

This is why I voted the way I did. It's why I couldn't do otherwise. The people that lived in this city will be very, very angry with us for a very long time to come. How do you get over the death of your child?

She says, peering over the blanket, I don't think you ever could.

It is clear from her eyes that she is very much cognizant of the magnitude of what she is saying.

Sometimes she is so wise, beyond her years.

No, I don't believe I could, as a parent. What does their town look like, what damage has been done to their houses? What about their homes? They will be very, very angry about this damage. We will have to pay billions of dollars to rebuild this town. You will be paying taxes when you are an adult for the damage you saw in these pictures, for the bullets, for the weapons that did this damage.

You need to know this, since everything else you hear and see in the news on television and the newspaper, from your friends, might only tell you there was some fighting in Fallujah. This is what it looks like in the end.

When I was a kid, every night there was a body count on the evening news. They would tell us how many had died, how many had been injured, how many of the enemy had been killed. You might be lucky to hear that any of our troops have been killed, let alone that Iraqis or others had been killed. Never mind hearing the number injured. You simply don't hear this. Things have changed so that you don't hear or see the truth, unless you really go and look for it.

I didn't want to you find it alone the way I did when I found My Lai.

We talked more about war, about morals and values. We actually managed to move towards easier things, like the birds and the bees.

I did not tell her that between her Fallujah and my My Lai, that I might have gotten the much lighter deal.

That will have to come another time, during another heart-to-heart.

It is ON

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 03:07:49 GMT

Wow. I am SO pumped!!!

Don't believe for a second that we're down for the count. We may be in mourning yet but we have but lost a battle.

It is definitely full ON, this war for the soul of our country.

Find a way to get involved, stay involved. It is one of our key learnings that we needed to be engaged earlier, longer, on a sustained basis to make the impact we really need. Get in at the grassroots, find a way to help your local candidates NOW. If there aren't candidates yet, find one...or become one. We can't wait a year or even eighteen months. We have to fight on, immediately.

After a meeting today with my fellow DFA members, it's only too apparent that we learned much more than this, and that we are up to it in spirit. It's time to gear up for the next level.

Are you ready? Are you on?

http://www.democracyforamerica.com

http://dfa.meetup.com

See you at the next Meetup!

p.s. I think I'll have something BIG to share at the next one!

Education and educators' bias

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 14:23:21 GMT

Dennis Jerz wrote recently on Mark Bauerstein's essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, regarding a bias towards liberals in secondary education. I commented:

Bauerstein forgets a fundamental issue affecting a large portion of secondary education: publicly funded schools must be open and accepting to all students that enter. Perhaps it's not that academia screens out non-liberal educators. "Liberal", after all, is based on the root, "libe", free; being liberal means being open- or broad-minded, free from bigotry, willing to entertain new ideas. In a publicly-funded system, is this attitude not critical to equality in education? That all comers and a multitude of ideas are welcomed?

Can you imagine what the repercussions would be if an educator taught from a bias that questioned the legitimacy of the Holocaust, that espoused eugenic practices and complete isolationism, that was highly sympathetic to anti-immigration? Are liberal educators likely to have any of these biases? Are these biases that should be entertained at all by any educator? Can conservative educators say that no one within their ranks harbors these biases?

Perhaps the real problem isn't whether educators at large are liberal or conservative. Perhaps the real problem is that a premium has not been placed on critical thought and analysis, on active and open questioning and dissent. This is far more important for students to master than the political leanings of their educators. Can conservatives say they are able to advocate this? Are liberals doing their best to encourage this?

I've had hard-core conservative professors at a private business school. Even years later I cringe thinking of a certain Econ prof that encourage the growth of renewable resources by advocating an increase in consumption of paper products. He punctuated his remarks by taking a brand-new piece of white paper off a pad, balling it up and throwing it in the waste can; he said that corporations would work to fill our needs as our needs increased. When I asked him about corporations' likely response to the increase in dioxin production and chlorine-based waste that act as hormone disruptors when released into the environment, resulting from an increase use of chlorine in paper pulp bleaching, he had no answer and shut me down, moving to the next topic. On the other hand, I had an exceptional business ethics professor who'd been elected as a conservative judge; he entertained all questions, was more likely to answer questions with more questions, and generally increased my understanding of the topic exponentially beyond that which the text covered. It can go either way. I'd prefer a generation of the latter, rather than the former; a generation of students taught to think as the Econ prof, allowed to acquire positions in management, might be the death of our future.

[You might find this bit an interesting read: http://reason.com/0411/fe.dc.whos.shtml -- note the educators who are voting conservatively. Also note the rationales given by those folks who might be considered liberal. What really is conservative or liberal?]

That Econ prof really got under my skin. I could have entertained his premise, believing as I do in the invisible hand of the market -- but he lost me because of his close-mindedness. Had he been able to support his premise completely by following his own logic under questioning or had he been open-minded enough to throw it out to the class for further discussion, I could have bought his concept.

I live in a community in which a feud rages with a local corporation regarding an accumulation of dioxin along a stretch of river in a chemical plant's waste stream. The issue of corporate response to both demand and public accountability was germaine when I asked the question ten years ago; it's more so, now that the public has begun to press suit against the subject corporation. How many new managers learned not to question the invisible hand in this last ten years while attending this private business school? How much will the example of this particular corporation cost both the community in terms of falling property values and health, or the corporation in curative action?

[Ed. note: please bear with me, I am having problems with editing in Radio and my laptop again. I think this is the final cut.]

Update: The new house project

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 01:26:20 GMT

Photos, long overdue, from late last month to this past Friday.

First floor deck framed in.

First floor walls framed.

Last shot with benchmark oak tree.

Second floor deck and walls framed.

First of roof trusses in place.

Damnably messy on site with the rain, sopping all the OSB subflooring and generally making the yard impassable.

All roof trusses up, roof sheathing on.

Rear shot of house (can no longer see the benchmark oak tree two lots over). Garage still needs sheathing.

And now it really begins to sink in.

It's a house, not just figment of the imagination.

Windows arrive next week.

Concrete for garage and drive delayed due to cold; evenings must be above 30F degrees for better quality results. Projected to pour both on Tuesday.

HVAC has been roughed in, and the first good sized contractor error has happened. The dryer vent is on the opposite side of the utility room from where it was supposed to be. Can I live with it, or do I make them rip it out?

Hmm.

Another "highly recommended"

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 19:46:31 GMT

Not on the same topic as this past week's recommended read. This will require high-speed internet and adequate time to view. But important to understanding the state of today's American democracy.

Can you imagine if the shoe was on the other foot exactly what would happen?