Listics

The White House resident co-opted a typical right-wing Tennessee blogger and the bleating Judas Goat in Cambridge, Mass. is touting it like it’s some kind of journalistic coup instead of a crass and obvious act of media manipulation. Dave, you schmuck. The winos in DC can’t get within 20 blocks of the White House without a thorough background check and you think this was some kind of serendipitous event? Are you some kind of vapid Pollyanna, or are you a cynically manipulative suck-up hoping to parlay your fellowship into a blogger-laureate position in the second Bush administration?

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* Judas goat: The stockyards use such a goat to lead the sheep to slaughter. Without the aid of a Judas goat, the sheep would mill around endlessly in the pen and would not enter or traverse the chute to the slaughter house. The Judas goat, mingling with the sheep, is trained to lead them out of the pen and down the chute to the slaughterhouse. And at the last second, the Judas goat is allowed to escape by a side-gate while the sheep go to their appointed end.

MADISON MONTHLY MEETING
Madison, Wisconsin
Northern Yearly Meeting (FGC)
1987

We affirm our willingness as a Meeting to participate in celebrations of marriage, in accordance with our traditional procedures, for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples when one or both of the partners is a member of our Meeting. We intend to follow the same customary and careful process of arriving at clearness for all couples who wish to unite under our care. At every stage we intend to treat all couples with the same respect, the same care, and the same status. Because relationships are growing and living entities, we recognize also our responsibility to continue to provide care and support for each relationship and both partners as individuals, in the same way that we strive to care for all individuals in the meeting.

December 6, 1987

Seems to me that my meeting has been celebrating gay marriages for at least sixteen years, and many others around the world have done the same for as long or longer. What’s the big whoop? Why are people fueling the fire of the Bush League’s election year homophobic posturing? What’s to talk about? Just do it.

Jay Rosen says, “The age of mass media is just that, an age. It doesn’t have to last forever.”

Duly noted, I mean noded…urrr, what-EVER!

My Inbox included some subscription spammage from Search Networking. They were touting the inclusivity of their updated telecom glossary so I bit and followed the link. Damn. Wrong link. It took us to the entire glossary. Good glossary even if it does leave out proprietary stuff like Cisco Tag switching. It includes OSPF so what more do you really need? Anyway, I backed out of the depths of that collection back to the Spam to see if I could find the new updates. Found it! Okay. Forgive me. Some of this stuff is so bogus it isn’t worth the pixels. But a new term for me that looks like it has some real world promise is Virtual Private LAN Service. I don’t know how this differs from a VPN exactly but it has pizazz. Sounds like a good way to get out from under the burden of old Frame Relay contracts, improve throughput and cut down some WAN administration costs.

But that’s not what inspired this post. While I was rummaging around looking for info on Cisco Tag Switching I fell back to Google and found this link. This information is buried in a Cheat Service: Term Papers for Sale. I didn’t exactly have a paper I wanted to contribute, and I wasn’t willing to pay the subscription price so the info on Tag Switching that these people hold will remain forever hidden from my view.

The deceit implicit in the existence of this service is troubling. A search in the database reveals 903 papers for sale on the keyword “Cheating.” Even so, the ironic recursion is too delicious. These people are plagiarizing papers on plagiarism. How funny is that?

The Hubble will no longer be serviced under the administration’s post Colubia shuttle safety measures. It’s a pity since all the money that will be needed for the planned 2024 replacement is already lining the Bush family’s and their cronies’ pockets. That’s what those swings from surplus to trillion dollar deficit will do to a culture.

This bit of depressing news follows on the scion’s posturing about a trip to Mars. He already gave the cash to Halliburton. How the hell does he intend to pay for it?

Here’s an after-the-post edit noting that jr the duly noded dude has had these same thoughts.

Eric Norlin, the youngest crotchety 77 year old I know, never-the-less struck a chord this week when he posted (in his charmingly unreconstructed wannabe robber-baron declasse proto-fascist way):

1. People used to have a lot of children for a reason: so that the kids would take care of them when they were physiclally unable to continue working. Think i’m wrong on that? go live in a farming community in nebraska, iowa or wisconsin (or norway or sweden for that matter).

2. There is no innate “right” to retire.

3. Ideally, people would be working at things that they’d never want to retire from anyway (not possible on a massive scale, but ideal nonetheless).

This last point, the ideal of working at things from which we never want to retire is where I line up four-square and all-American red and blue and white with Eric, you bet! (But I wonder if it’s too late to get to Sweden and start making babies just in case the work-’til-I-die plan proves unfeasible?)

Seriously, I took an early retirement… spent a lot of it at Winterland, the Fillmore, Keystone Corner, the Matrix, Great American Music Hall next to the Mitchell Brother’s place on O’Farrell and sleeping on the beach outside of Esalen, sneaking in to use the baths after midnight, hitching up and down the coast just to see how far a lid of Panama red would take me, riding in step-vans with poor suspension, rocking from side to side around curves on narrow winding roads in the hills of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, wild gypsy violins and Bob Dylan playing loud, coming out of the sunshine and into the fog on Annapolis Road on the way to Gualala where a $12 room with clean sheets on the bed was available overlooking the ocean across Highway One in the old Gualala Hotel.

Yes, I took an early retirement and now I’m paying for that questionable investment that I’m reluctant to call a misspent youth. But I wonder if it’s rationalization on my part, or just a decent realism that underlies my conviction that I would rather not think of life as partitioned sequentially by education, career, and retirement. Rather, it makes sense to me that we do what we want to do when we want to do it, and if there are constraints due to lack of money or imagination, government repression or poor socialization, why we still each do our best to do the next right thing for us.

Except for taxes. It’s my hope, my dream, my vision, that the federal government should take every dime Eric Norlin makes and redistribute the money to older poor people who suffer ill health. And I hope those wretched few who are supported by Eric’s tax dollars do something decent with the money, like piss it away at the quarter slots or the bingo table at the nearest native American casino. They’re entitled.