Archive for May, 2007

Trent R.

Anybody heard the new NIN album yet? Opinions? I know a lot of it’s available for listening online, but I haven’t made the time yet.

Also, I once saw Trent Reznor at the Pittsburgh airport. He got his own bags after flying up from New Orleans on the same flight as Lil’ Stack. Here’s a quick list of other interesting people I or my bro have seen on planes or in airports:

Your call.

• Joey Porter
• Lil’ Wayne
• Barry Melrose
• LL Cool J
• That guy who thought King Arthur invaded Iraq

Sadly for LL and crew, none of them will ever top the time I made the scene with Heather Graham. In that quarter-second of eye contact at that Guggenheim art-collectors’ ball in 2004 that I wasn’t actually supposed to attend, I’m telling you: connection.

Ireland in 2007 : America in 1996-1998

Hey readaship.

We’re all down for analogies. Sometimes they make you feel like some illness is on the horizon, like how G-Unit Dubs Bizzle is sadly similar to Alcibiades back in the Athens day, goading mugs into a poorly-planned military venture that then spins out of control. Other times though you watch some stuff and just can’t help but note the inherent similarity to other stuff.

That’s how it is with this Fianna Fáil re-election victory in Ireland, because the voters in Ireland essentially re-elected a guy surrounded by scandal because he was doing a good job of keeping their wallets fat. (See also Chicago, Illinois.)

Bertie (there’s a name that would never fly in American politics) Ahern took some heat recently over questionable financial decisions that included accepting gifts and cash from different developers and businessmen during and after his time as Finance Minister, even though he insists it was all legit. Plus, he took a lot of heat for letting the American military land and refuel at Shannon Airport in 2003 on their way to Iraq. While all this stuff hurt him in the public eye (my cousin never tired of IMing me from County Kerry to tell me how much he hated Ahern), housing prices in Ireland recently have been off the chizain—the average new Irish house costs 304,000 euros, which is nearly $409,000. These are smaller Euro houses too, not the crazy McPalaces we got here in the American exurbs. And Ireland, notorious for sending people like Grandma and Grandpa Stack abroad in search of employment, is actually importing hella workers from Europe and elsewhere.

So, the people overlooked that non-economic drama and the fears of rising crime and declining education to re-elect Ahern and keep the economy humming. Sometimes you gotta just ride the wave, I guess, and make sure to look like you’re the bomb at surfing even while the ocean could take its toll in pwnage at any moment.

• Also, Sinn Fein rolls pretty strangely. They won all of four seats in the Irish Dáil assembly out of 166, hardly a big showing. I don’t really know why they think Southern Irish republicanism is going to make some sort of comeback when it hasn’t been fashionable since the 1960s or so, not to mention they’re still quasi-Marxist and, as I just mentioned, mugs voted with their pocketbooks. But more than that, like my cousins say, most of the people in the Republic still just wish they could “be rid of that crazy lot up there.” So, SF: get your gear in order in the Northern Assembly before you try to roll out on some Dublin dudes.

Illegal Immigration

Lately I’ve been thinking about the immigration debate, and the fact that I spent part of today picking fruit (it’s true) perhaps focused things a bit.

• It seems to me that if angry private citizens like the Minutemen really want to keep desperate Latinos from coming to the States, they should turn themselves into some sort of organized agricultural labor force instead of a quasi-militia. They could recruit armies of Americans to go pluck chickens, pick lettuce and mop restaurant floors for free so that the migrant labor pool would cease to be necessary. Plus, they’d be supporting native businesses by replacing the cost of wage slaves with the free labor of actual, volunteer slaves.
• In all seriousness, though, I wish the “keep ‘em out at all costs” side would at least recognize that there is an economic reason people will risk death to come here and work for a pittance. Unless this country stops eating produce and meat (though lower demand for meat would be a net positive for the environment and the world, but that’s another post), and until we can invent giant farming robots, it looks like there’s always going to be a demand for harvesting jobs that Americans won’t do for any price.
• But what about the obvious economic negatives? Being a pro-labor guy myself, do I think that illegal immigration undercuts U.S. wages? It seems that the effect differs by industry. Construction is probably the most hurt by illegal alien labor: construction work is often lucrative, unionized, and desirable for Americans, and a vast pool of cheap, unregulated, potentially skilled workers drags down wages for American construction employees. I think construction firms that hire illegals should be cracked down upon, picketed and shunned for this reason, as punishing the aliens themselves will have nowhere near the effect as going after their employers. I would also put landscaping in this category, having known several people from back home who’ve made decent careers out of it while on the labor straight-and-narrow.

  Other industries, however, are different. Illegals working in industries like the aforementioned farm work and perhaps some food-service jobs are doing vital jobs that would go unfilled, were it up to the native labor market. Migrant workers in these fields are nothing new either: read Steinbeck sometime.

• This fact, and the inherently unfair nature of punishing a starving man for trying to eat, leads me to part I of my main point: We need an industry-based approach that protects some industries from illegal immigration, but allows others to get the labor that they can’t otherwise hire. Choosing which industries should and should not be protected is quite a can of worms, but then so is just about every proposal on the table right now. We need to identify those jobs worth saving and save them, but without hurting the consumer who drives and is the ultimate benefactor of the American system.
• But we can’t forget part II: A vast majority of immigrants come here to work, not to do us harm, and as such they deserve fair treatment. Kicking these hapless people in the junk harder than we already are isn’t going to dissuade them from coming: coyotes, familial separation, the several hundred miles of desert between the habitable parts of the U.S. and Mexico and the life-threatening potential of all of those are about as severe a deterrent as can be imagined, and yet the illegals still come in the millions. Therefore, creating a harsher punishment for these people isn’t going to work.
• I think a guest worker program, limited by industry, is the best way to go. It’s not amnesty, and it’s not keeping the immigrants out at all cost, but it is a way to regulate who gets in and what they do while they’re here. Once you have an industry-driven quota in place, firms can bring their most trusted workers into the U.S., having them return to the native country once a year or so to “touch base” and keep in contact with the authorities on both sides. Successful participation in this program would also weigh in favor of an application for citizenship, should the participant opt for such. Once this program is set up, the government should then crack down on anyone hiring illegal immigrants with abandon and put up all the highly trained border security to keep out the drugs, environmental problems, MS-13 and terrorists that we possibly can.
• By the way, it’s good when Mexicans and others send their migrant wages back home, because that’s pumping a lot of cash into those foreign economies that, if properly spent, will someday eliminate the need for illegal immigrants to even come here in the first place.
• As for those who fear that the greatest problem with illegal immigration is cultural or racial dilution, I think you need to admit to yourself that that is just some 1840s Know-Nothing throwback crap. Those hordes of Irish, Italians and Slavs didn’t break the country then; they made it stronger and better, no matter how much prejudice was spat their way. Was it rocky? Sure. Are people of those ancestries some of today’s best Americans? Sure. Why are today’s immigrants different? There’s no rational answer to that.

I think the immigration issue provokes a lot of hysteria (hysteria that has made Lou Dobbs into a very rich jagoff) and I’m doubtful that an effective system will ever emerge to handle all the humanitarian and economic concerns here. But we can conceive of such a system, so why the hell not?

Legends of Airport Conversation

Today I was flying back to DC at the Indianapolis airport when a big, middle-aged dude sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. The topic of the war briefly came up after the guy said he couldn’t believe gas prices were so high when we had physical control of Iraq’s oil and could just take what we wanted. I mentioned how the Administration planners considered only the initial old-fashioned military invasion without any nod to the other 90% that was the occupation, and the dude then produced the gem below.

This may sound like he was pulling my leg, but I’m about 90% sure that he really meant it. It was a serious subject, and he took the tone that he was giving me the greatest history lesson I could possibly learn:

Hell yeah man; you know when King Arthur invaded that region 500 years ago, he knew better than to stick around; he told his assistants, ‘Let’s get the f out of this country right now, I can’t occupy this place.’

Agreed.

Sopranos: Bout to Be Over

• My theory based on the preview of next week’s show is that Patsy Parisi is the double-agent from Phil’s crew. His son appears to be the one firing a gun in one of the frames, and it makes sense that the son would also inform on just when he’d be bringing Meadow to the restaurant. I’m callin’ it.
• I liked this episode’s simultaneous display of how the Tony and A.J. both face the effects of their mental illness, but at the same time go too far in letting it as a moral shield for anything else they do. I think the last two episodes will somehow play up this angle even further, in that no matter what’s up in your world, you’re still the one responsible for your own good or bad actions.
• When my uncle told me about “biting the curb” as something that used to go down in Detroit in the 1960s, where he grew up, I thought that was just some crazy tall-tale stuff. But now we have two pop-culture uses of it. Thank you, American History X and The Sopranos, for giving my teeth that ill psych-out not once, but twice.

Puzzling

This was me on my run, just a few days ago:

But today, under similar conditions, I was kickin’ it this way:

Why does one’s body seem to randomly ill on one like that?

Jerry Falwell Died

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1621131,00.html

After many centuries to get it right, it’s a great human tragedy that people can still take a religious message based on love and forgiveness and turn it into a vessel for hate.

The Chrysler Sale

Daimler-Benz is selling off Chrysler to Cerberus, a private-equity firm. After the division lost $1.5 billion last year, I can hardly blame the Germans for that one, but it does leave me a little worried about my favorite U.S. carmaker. Chrysler in the past few years seems to be willing to respond to all the criticism frequently levied on American carmakers, save one major point: Can anyone name a fuel-efficient Chrysler model? I guess there’s the P.O.S. Dodge Neon—vague disclosure, my family may or may not have owned one in the past few years—but the gas savings there generally come from avoiding what my bro calls “the bare minimum of what can be put together and called a car.”

For real though, Chrysler has rolled out cars that are aggressively marketed and un-bland (though that Caliber “silly little fairy” ad took things into the realm of offensive homophobia), reversing that ultra-boring mid-’90s movement towards autos with names like “Sonata” and “Riviera”. While it was still popular, they jumped in big-time on the huge-SUV/truck movement (you should see the Ram truck that my bro’s Cajun friend drives) and remain the undisputed king of minivans (that sounds lame, but think how many families are out there that need the transport.) Finally, they’re out front on the tough-car revival with the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger, plus the upcoming Challenger, which I would in no way turn down as a gift from the readaship.

Maybe all of that appeals to me as a dude in the 18-34 demographic, and the company is in fact too masculine in its approach. (Chrysler does indeed lack a Jetta ripoff.) I can’t be too optimistic about the sale of a unionized shop to a private-equity firm named after hell’s guard-dog, because 13,000 people are already going to lose their quality jobs, and who knows how many after that.

Both my hometown roots and my urban elite sense are pissed at this one: the roots because we may witness the crushing of a union shop, and the elite because we may lose a culture that wasn’t afraid to roll out new design ideas. Either way, not cool.

HBO: Anything on the Horizon?

Yo Internet.

So does anybody out there know if there’s some quality programming coming down from HBO with the quickness? Not only did Rome and Deadwood end this year, now we got to worry about the end of The Sopranos and whatever show they’re going to get to replace that. That leaves me solely with Entourage, meaning the only dramatic show I watch anymore is Lost. (Which has picked back up again after a punked-out fall half-season).

Being that Big Love doesn’t do it for me, and I don’t know offhand of any new show ideas, what does anyone else know is coming? And if nothing, what should be the next topic? I’d like to see HBO’s take on a media workplace, personally.

Things Not To Do, Part I

Public service:

Don’t get a small cut your finger in the morning, then pour hot sauce on it at lunch. I’m impressed that it continues to sting after a good 10 minutes.

Just so yinz know.

The Thanks America Gets

It seems the FBI foiled an Islamist plot to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey when the potential terrorist masterminds took a tape of themselves firing assault weapons and yelling “Allahu Akbar” to the local video store for dubbing onto DVD format. The quick-thinking clerk called the cops, who called the FBI, who arrested the men and averted the attack.

The really interesting thing to me here is that, according to the story, four of the perpetrators were born in the former Yugoslavia. Being Muslims, that most likely means they’re either Bosnian or Kosovar Albanians, both of which were populations that the United States protected from Serbian violence through direct military action. Even today, the U.S. maintains a military presence in the area to keep ethnic conflict from flaring up again.

The Muslim world today is awash in anti-American sentiment. Yet if there’s any group of people that the West could expect to offer a counterweight to the jihadist hate, it would seem to be the two Muslim populations that NATO intervened militarily to protect less than ten years ago. Yet even after the U.S. and European militaries essentially act as the Bosnian Muslim / Kosovar air force and save scores of lives, Muslims from this community are still pissed enough to attempt a direct attack on the United States. We’re hardly talking about a parallel to the Iraq War in those conflicts; the impacted populations actually did “greet us as liberators”, or at least as forceful protectors.

I doubt that I’m alone in this sentiment, but after this, what more can the U.S. even hope to do to convince the Muslim world that we aren’t out to get them?

Fighting the Last War

I just got done reading this excellent piece by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling in Armed Forces Journal. If you’re at all interested in the Iraq war, civilian-military confluence in political society, or even just want to read a well-thought-out article, read it with the quickness.

The great lesson of the article isn’t one that’s only for the military, either: if you’re not in charge, have the balls to speak up when your leaders are going the wrong direction. And if you are in charge, then have the balls to listen. Ignoring other perspectives while you bull ahead isn’t a sign of toughness; it’s a sign that you’re a damned idiot who doesn’t know how to accomplish even your own goals.

Politics Bullet Pointz

• I’m not sure why it is that Nicolas Sarkozy seems to have been anointed as the front-runner by all the commentary I’ve read, but they were right about dude, as he won a pretty commanding victory, 53% to 47%. I think a lot of the positive coverage has to do with commentary peeps simply being tired of Chirac and his administration’s predictably boring obstinacy. Still, for all the press, I think the following are true:

  1. You might see France stop automatically siding vocally with Russia and China at the Security Council like they have in the past few years, but that’s about it for change. Sarko is an admirer of the U.S., but what really is going to be different for French action on the world stage? He’s hardly going to jump into the Iraq debacle now, much less even express support for it. And nobody’s going to risk Bush contamination: hell, America is 68% against the man at this point, much less the French public.

  2. Still, Franco-American relations will likely improve, and it’s about time. We need the two nations to come together for the sake of the global Spaghetti-Os community.

  I’m also annoyed with everyone tip-toeing around the identity of the rioters. Were they angry Muslim banlieu residents, or were they disaffected left-wing students? Maybe a blend? With French rioting, you really never know, so let’s quit the vagaries and get some 5Ws up in this piece.

• Tony Blair = Lyndon Johnson. Think about it: both rode large waves of popular support for a domestic agenda that had so much promise to shift the political culture of the nation, only to be dragged down by what they saw as strategically and politically necessary involvement in a misguided foreign war when, in reality, a strong stand by either one could have averted the ensuing chaos. Both watched as their efforts slowly crumbled, but each was forced to wear a positive face, even as it was obvious that underneath, each knew just how badly things were going. (This is where the Bush / LBJ parallel ends.) Both left before their time, and ultimately endured a downtrodden exit from the world stage.

  Who says history doesn’t mean anything?

• If he cares at all about the developmental mission of the World Bank—that may be debatable—Paul Wolfowitz should step down. What he did wasn’t illegal, but it was certainly in poor judgment for the head of the organization, and it’s causing fallout.

  That said, I don’t think Wolfowitz will resign. The Bush people are in full turtling-up mode—see Gonzales taking a beating lately to understand this—, and I think that extends to Wolfowitz as well. Euros, you can offer all the tasty deals you want, but you’re just setting yourself up for yet another public snub, because the real issue here is admission of failure. The last six years have proven that that is just not going to happen with any facet of our executive branch. They’re weathering the storm, but as a result, so is the rest of the world.

I Just Saw Dennis Kucinich

… while running on Capitol Hill. He looks a lot like Dennis Kucinich.

Bar Songs Worthy of Hate

3. “Don’t Stop Believing”, Journey - Yes, I do like this song. You like it too. So do your twelve friends. So does that annoying bar chick and her husband-hunting friends. So does the guy who says “bro” who’s just here to “cut loose with my boys”. These people indicate that the Journey trend has become way too popular to be ironically ahead of the game anymore. Sorry, Kevin.

2. “Living on a Prayer”, Bon Jovi - Again, I like this one. It brings back phat memories of Dance Marathon and Northwestern. Except that all those DJs who feel the need to pause the track during “whoaOOOOH! LIVING ON A PRAYER!” make me relive it a little too often, so hearing it all the time makes me feel like that dude who hangs around the college campus just a little too long after he graduates. And I am not that dude. I follow the “one visit after departure” rule very strictly here, Internet. Respect that.

1. “Sweet Caroline”, Neil Diamond - I don’t like this song. At all. In fact, I’ve hated it since I was a kid and my parents rocked “Oldies - 3WS” back in the car-radio day. Neil Diamond isn’t even a very good singer. Singing onomatopoeia doesn’t hold much of an appeal either: verbalized sounds aren’t lyrics, homes. If I go to a bar and the DJ rocks the track-stop for this one too (he’s probably already done it for Bon Jovi), I’m future-skipping that bar with the quickness. Also, Red Sox fans: baseball is boring. Sorry to tell you.

Tonight I had TV dinner and a beer. I am 1950s mantastic. What.