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2010-04-14T15:35:00.000-04:00

Twitter Troubler

One can express a thought in 140 characters.¹ That's the success of Twitter, allowing writers to make every statement a poem. If you exceed [end.]

1. The pedigree of the "tweet," as individual Twitter communications are called, has its hereditary link to the SMS (Short Message Service), otherwise known as the cell phone's text message. But the text message itself owes as much to the more nontechnical postcard. See "Why text messages are limited to 160 characters," Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2009: "To avoid the need for splitting cellular text messages into multiple parts, the creators of Twitter capped the length of a tweet at 140 characters, keeping the extra 20 for the user's unique address." Today the US Library of Congress announced that it will archive the entire body of tweets since 2006: "Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow."

2010-02-18T01:55:00.004-05:00

Beyond Kumbaya

As a Christian, I am called to avoid being "yoked together with unbelievers,"¹ but also to love my neighbor.² When we find ourselves in associations with others who belong to the world, we have to keep these twin requirements in mind as we balance them in practice.

Here is an example of what I think is a proper Christian response to a online forum (in this case a Florida concealed-weapons forum) that has allowed a hateful attack on followers of Islam. It has nothing whatsoever to do with concealed weapons in Florida, but this is a thread in which such an attack was permitted and accepted. A first attempt to stop it was met with condescension and some derision. Hence the following response.

Looking beyond kumbaya and political correctness

My concern with this thread has nothing whatsoever to do with political correctness (PC), but rather with what I see as this Forum's acceptance of a hate-filled, ignorant screed against a certain class of Americans. I am a Christian: I am not a follower of Islam, so I have nothing spiritual at stake here. However, my daughter is a Muslim (and with that my son-in-law and my four grandchildren), and I respect that. My daughter is a US citizen; she is not a terrorist. In fact, the following Americans are Muslims (and also not terrorists, I believe):

Muhammad Ali
Mike Tyson
Ice Cube
Shaquille O'Neil
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Dave Chappelle
Jermaine Jackson

There are others, of course, and many of them are US citizens living in Florida and who may want to carry a concealed weapon and participate in a forum where this is encouraged and supported. The following selections from this thread, as far as I can tell, certainly fall within the class of "derogatory slurs" [forbidden by the rules of the Forum]:

"Islam is not a religon of peace it is a POLITICAL system of terror against others."

"They butcher each other. Cowardly, sneak attack us. Hate the Jews for no other reason but hatred. I have nothing good to say about the Muslims and wish they'd all go home."

"P**S on the Muslims."

"I don't think Muslims should be allowed to come here. Better yet, those here should take a long slow boat ride home, where on the way they can stop by Israel to pay homage, give the Jews a tithe and then go home to their sand gardens where they can eat dirt, ride camels and continue to kill each other as they've been doing for five thousand years. Once they are settled in and have decided to exterminate each other's sects, we should then sell them weapons (get us out of debt) to help them on there way. Israel could them have states."

"Like I give a rat's rear end what Muslims object to. Let 'em go ride a freakin' magic carpet if they don't like it."

"I can't give a rat's hind end about what the Muslims think. If it were not for them, there would be no need to scan in the first place."

"They can scan my Muslim body since I'm nothing but a skeleton and the best kind of terrorist...A DEAD ONE."

"quite frankly, I couldn't give two flying $h!ts about whether or not muslims object to full body scans! If the little effers would just learn to play nice with the rest of us, mind their own damned business, and practice their allah BS in peace like the rest of us, then things would be one hell of a lot better for everybody. But noooooo, they gotta go and declare jihad on the infidels. They want to convert everyone to islam, and if the infidels don't convert, then kill them. You know what, I want to see those sorry little ingrates come over to my door and try that crap with me, I'll send them to meet their 72 virgins long before they ever dreamed about it! And if they persist in pursuing their little jihad with the infidels, this infidel will gladly press the button that will turn their sorry little country into the worlds biggest GLASS FACTORY!!"

As a Christian, I gave up long ago trying to make it my personal mission to convert everyone to my faith. My daughter is Muslim, my sister is Jewish, and I can't control what they believe. And it's not my place to control them in that way. But I've learned that I can't be any aid in moving others to my faith if I give in to hate and to encouraging the destruction/killing of those who don't share my faith.

As an American, moreover, I am compelled to step in and stand up for those who choose a different religious lifestyle. This is provided by the US Constitution.

Considering who has participated in this thread (including senior members, distinguished members, and a super moderator), I am appalled at the language—and more so that this is apparently okay. I expect such from Stormfront, but I did not expect this from the Florida Concealed Carry Forums.

Therefore I am leaving the Forum. This dude abides.

The attacks continued in that online forum, but I certainly don't have any control over that. We do what we can.

1. 2 Corinthians 6:14.
2. See Matthew 22:36-43, 5:43-46.

2010-01-10T00:05:00.001-05:00

Fiction: Latent Millionaire-ism

Continuing the serial "In the Family Way"

I was on the phone with a client. I happened to touch my forehead and my hand came back wet with sweat.

"Marc, look, you're a first-class consultant, the best I've ever dealt with. My God, my system's running better than I've ever seen it run in three years, and my network administrator is walking around bored most of the time—maybe I should just fire him—because he doesn't have any trouble-shooting to do to keep him busy—I think I will fire him, after all—but I've thought about this for a long time and I've decided to retain the Kudzu brothers for my system consulting needs."

"But, Bob, we still haven't resolved the network cabling problem you've got and the Kudzus haven't handled a system as large as yours before. Look, I know those guys. They're smart, but frankly out of their league with a fifty-node system like yours...."

"Marc, you're a nice guy. So let me be straight with you. I think you're good at what you do—brilliant, really—but this FAMWAY! crap is standing in your way. I'm just being honest with you. It seems that every time you're over here, you're tapping somebody to come to one of those damned FAMWAY! meetings and I have to listen to all the complaints and frankly I don't want to deal with it any more. Look, when you finally give up on that pyramid scheme, give me a call. Maybe then we can do business again. What's that? Okay. Listen, sorry, Marc, but I've got an appointment. Give me a call, okay? Thanks, Marc, I knew you'd understand. Good luck with that scheme. I hope it pans out for you. Good-bye."

That was the fifth client I had lost in two weeks. After hanging up, my hand went involuntarily to my wallet. Then I thought of Christine. How was I going to tell her that our income just got sliced in half? Really, this was my problem and I had to find the solution to it. I was responsible for my family's well-being and I was going to fulfill that responsibility. Besides, no matter what anyone else said about the FAMWAY! business, it works and I wanted it to work for me.

I reached for a copy of the month's So You're In FAMWAY! and leafed through the pages. The first half of the magazine spotlighted the big stars in the business. Joe and Jackie Zimmerman—Sapphires. Rob and Sammi Fredricks—Opals. And then there were galleries of Topaz levels, and Zircon levels, and Jade and Garnets and Amethyst levels, and more galleries with Aquamarine, Moonstone, Sardonyx couples and faces. The lower levels got increasing larger in number, and the pictures got increasingly smaller in size. Then there were the new distributors—no pictures, just names in alphabetical order. Hey, I could soon be in this magazine, too! The program works! So what if I never get rich fondling computer equipment and schlepping coaxial cable from one room to another. FAMWAY! would be my vehicle for obscene wealth. I will be nouveau riche. Disgustingly rich. People will ask me with sincere indignation: Have you no shame? And I will laugh, because when you are that rich, you can do anything you want, and at that level on the economic scale people seem so small, like ants on the ground, that their indignation is laughable, and I always laugh at the laughable.

But you do not get rich just waiting for it. If you just wait for it, then you could be waiting a long time. For then it becomes like a lottery—you might win, you might not. And then it becomes like people killed in freak accidents—it might happen to you, it might not. As I understand it, to get money, you have to do something, anything—dig a ditch, move papers around on a desk, hold out your hand, point a gun—anything at all. But to get rich, well, that takes the right approach, because not everything works.

Take, for example, the guy who sells everything he owns and sinks it all into a bank account with simple interest. He's a single guy, you know, and therefore has the freedom to do such things. He then goes down to a cryogenics lab to have himself frozen, the contract being that he is to be revived in a hundred years. He figures that in a hundred years his bank account will have grown into a fortune. So a hundred years go by and they revive him. He jumps off the table and shouts with glee, thinking about the fortune waiting for him in the bank. He runs out the door, heading for the bank. But running to the bank is taking more time than he anticipated, and he can't wait any longer, so he stops at a phone booth and makes a two-minute call to his bank to find out how much money he's got. "You've got a hundred million dollars in your account," says the bank's officer." "Hooray! I'm a multi-millionaire!" he cries. At that moment, the telephone operator breaks in and says: "Sir, your two minutes are up; if you wish to continue your call, please deposit fifty million dollars."

So, in order to make money, one has to do something. And I was going to do something. If it works for others, and with enough consistency to the pattern, then there exists a template for success; if I follow the specs of that template, then it should work for me, too.

Why did I want it to work? What was it that made the accumulation of an obscene quantity of money so necessary for me? Basically, I wanted both time and money, and I had neither. I had no time to spend with my family and no time to vacation, and no time to enjoy what was left of my life. It seems I never did. I did not have the time when I worked full time as a hospital data administrator and I had no time now, working for myself. Now, admittedly, I have money, and had money when I worked for someone else, but not enough to give me the luxury of time and not enough of the money to enjoy life during the brief time I had to spend it. It was time I wanted most of all and money could buy it for me, if I could get it without having to spend all my time getting it. Because by the time I got the money accumulated, I would have time, I suppose, but not really at an age when I could enjoy it. So the money was needed to buy time and to buy what I needed to enjoy that time. I wanted money and I wanted it now. Later would be too late.

So I went back out and tried the plan.

"Marc, this is what you've got to do." The voice was that of my sponsor, Paul. I had called him and we made plans to meet at the restaurant of the nearby Holiday Inn. We met at 11 o'clock. "The plan is simple," Paul said. "First, you have to be accountable for what you do; you have to be reliable and keep your word. If you tell someone you'll be there, you be there! Second, stay teachable. Be open to what the leaders in this business have to say; they've been where you and I are, so they know. Be ready to learn from their experiences. Along the same lines: read and study daily. Spend fifteen minutes a day on some positive writings. Listen to tapes. You gotta get on tape-of-the-day. Nobody who's made it in the business ever did it without tape-of-the-day. And you absolutely—I mean absolutely—have to attend the major functions and rallies, in addition to the open meetings. I'll tell you about these as they come up. Next, use your own products one hundred percent. Support your own business, and demonstrate your belief and commitment in it. Besides that, get three to five people to the open meetings every week."

[ MORE ]

2009-11-08T23:30:00.000-05:00

The Way of All American Cars

I'm not sure what the owner is planning to do with this relic of the American hamburger, or rather the advertising of the burger, but Florida's climate is not treating it well. I was out on the bike today and was compelled to photograph it. I'm pretty sure that's an AMC Pacer in there.

I took this photo with my Helio Drift cellphone and its 2-megapixel camera and then resized and optimized it with Xatio Image Optimizer v5.1.

2009-10-04T23:15:00.006-04:00

If it's true, well, it's true

I can't say that I'm much of a fan of Gore Vidal, but still I admire his boldness. Like Quentin Crisp before him, he gets away with the most outrageous stuff. It's usually right-on-target stuff, but outrageous nonetheless.

Vidal is 83 and travels in a wheel-chair, but he has his wits, and wit, about him. Witness his September 30 interview in the UK's Times. A couple of my favorite quotes:

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. "We've failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it." The "War on Terror" was "made up," Vidal says. "The whole thing was PR, just like 'weapons of mass destruction'. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He'd be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you're both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination."

And:

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. "Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they'd say 'They live well but they're all alcoholics'. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over." Instead, America has "no intellectual class" and is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn't realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush."

Well, those ignorant Americans are being fed another media dose of WMD. This time the deception is Iran.

2009-08-14T23:50:00.002-04:00

Behind the Bush Brain

The truth about the Bush administration ... From Mr Fish at Truthdig.com. Cheney and Bush get the real cartoon treatment by the amazing Mr Fish:

I would guess that what's at issue is Dick's disappointment with George W's move toward independence from the former vice-president during their second term in the White House.

2009-08-01T23:15:00.005-04:00

Weltanschaung

Among my summer reads was Jonathan Littell's intimidating novel The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes, the Well-Meaning, in translation by Charlotte Mandell). Even at 984 pages, it was well worth the time, although most of that was at bedtime with a night light, a propped-up pillow, a Chihuahua under the covers beside me, and an interfering cat on my chest. It's a wonder I didn't have nightmares, given the subject matter of Littell's novel. Well, maybe not so much the subject matter, but rather the steady spectacle of shootings, gassings, beatings, rapes, bombings, bodily fluids,¹ homosexual dalliances, much wine and cognac drinking, and beautiful Aryan women whose names begin with the letter "H."

The narcissistic memoir is certainly violent and turbulent, but it is moved forward by a steady undercurrent of rationalism and belief in the Nazi Weltanschauung. This isn't to say that there aren't some strange surprises, such as an amazing nose-biting scene in the last chapter, but such events only add to this clever treatment of an ugly period of modern history. In the eyes of Dr Maximilien Aue, legal scholar and SS officer, his Führer leads by precisely expressing the spirit of the the German people, the Volk, and fulfilling the goals of the Weltanschauung. We know how it ends, but the novel goes a long way to helping us understand just how it is that Aue can declare: "I live, I do what can be done, it's the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!"

1. As for the bodily fluids, I can't wait for someone else to point out how the protagonist's behavior at his twin sister's house closely resembles a disturbing performance-art display by the Viennese Actionist Günter Brus in 1968, which led to his arrest and imprisonment. See the 2006 art show Primal Secretions: A G�nter Brus Retrospective: "In his Aktionen after 1967, Brus pushed himself to further physical and mental extremes as he analyzed his own body and its functions, while colleagues such as Hermann Nitsch and Otto Muehl concentrated on the role of the body in the construction and analysis of psycho-dramas. Symbolism was generally dispensed with in the performances, as Brus publicly urinated, defecated and cut himself with a razor-blade, for example. The first of these Aktionen to be performed in public, Citizen Brus Looks at his Own Body, was performed in Aachen and D�sseldorf in 1968; in June of the same year his Art and Revolution, performed at Vienna University, led to his arrest and a six-month prison sentence for degrading the symbols of the State."

2009-07-23T21:15:00.007-04:00

New Book Available

My new book, Twelve Stories from New Orleans (ISBN 9780982430200), is finally out and now available from the Florida micropublisher De Signis Press. It will take a few weeks before it shows up in the normal booksellers' outlets—although it's already available from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

The book is small, only 106 pages, but it's funny as heck. Well, hey, I think so. Besides, several of the stories first appeared right here.

2009-07-05T23:45:00.002-04:00

A Queen Palm Blooms

I was out on the bike again today and I just couldn't resist this, especially since you don't witness it very often (well, maybe not often enough) and only in a climate like Florida's. This is a bloom of the Cocos Plumosa. First it's encased in a long shell and then—bloom.

I also took this photo with my Helio Drift cellphone and its 2-megapixel camera and then resized and optimized it with Xatio Image Optimizer v5.1.

2009-06-28T23:35:00.003-04:00

Why We Do It

From Louisiana Quaker eLetter, vol 1:8-9 (2004):

There was a time when I thought that the most important question on earth was: Why is there something rather than nothing? Now I think the most chilling of questions has to be this: Why do we bother getting up in the morning?

It is not enough, surely, that there be a world and that we live in it. It must have meaning for us. Some of us go about with the many small purposes given to us; some of us make our own meaning—we literally create a reason to get up in the morning. To serve someone, to make things, to work, to eat, to play, to spend, to frolic, to enjoy. Rarely do we not have a choice. We could go further and say, too, that we can get meaning from several natural sources: biology and culture. We can get purpose from biology by merely heeding our animal nature: hunger, thirst, sexual desire, all the pleasurables that are presented to us by sense experience. We get purpose from culture by heeding the pleasurables that our social nature prescribes: television, music, cars, houses, money, clothes, gadgets, rituals, laws, etc., etc. From one standpoint, one could construct a perfectly natural human being from biological parts and from social parts. This is what humanism states.

A critical flaw of humanism, though, is that it never leads to any purpose beyond either the biological or the social, for within humanism there really is nothing beyond the merely human. We exist, we have purposes, and we can create for ourselves—individually and collectively—sundry other purposes. But we can never legitimately fashion for ourselves any plausible purpose beyond the merely human; the attempt to do this yields only more psychological phenomena. Thus spirituality, religiosity, higher moral aims—these are mere natural expressions of psychic needs and wants. From one perspective, then, one might argue that the logical consequence of humanism is always a type of existentialism: Life is absurd; we exist, but there is no reason for it.

I wish I could claim credit for having discovered this, but, curiously, such is the very point made by the author of Ecclesiastes. From a humanist perspective, absolutely everything is inevitably meaningless: Real estate and wealth [Ecc 2, 4, 5:8-20, 6], secular wisdom and folly [Ecc 2, 7], the natural order of things [Ecc 3:1-8], inductive science [Ecc 7:27], occupational labor [Ecc 2,4], pleasure in accomplishments [Ecc 2], perfunctory religious behavior [Ecc 5:1-7], positions of power [Ecc 5:8-9], honor and prosperity [Ecc 6], success [Ecc 9:11-12]. So, too, oppression, loneliness, hard work [Ecc 4]. Death, the ultimate fate of human life after the fall, also fails to give our life meaning [Ecc 6, 9].

In a fallen world, separated from God, we will always be frustrated in our search for genuine meaning in anything—for it is not there. As humanists, what we find instead are mere facts, pointing to nothing beyond themselves. Only as a gift from God does our life derive its meaning. Indeed, we have as a gift God's revelation, giving us a stalwart tradition of his presence in our lives. We have as a gift the resurrected Jesus Christ, for through Christ we are released from the meaninglessness of the fall. We have as a gift the Holy Spirit, by means of which we are sanctified [John 17:17; Rom 15:16; 2 Thess 2:13; 1 Peter 1:2], taught, and reminded of Christ's teachings [John 14:26]. And, as a gift, we have meaning for every aspect of our life.

This, says Paul, was a part of the great plan: "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." [Rom 8:19-21]

In the end, whether from an Old Testament or from a New Testament perspective, our duty as Christians is to do as the author of Ecclesiastes himself advises [Ecc 12:13-14]:

Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.

In other words, we are to fear God, obey his commandments, and look for the coming judgment. But how do we escape the humanist charge that this is religion, arising out of a bio-psychological need for meaning in an absurd world, pointing inevitably to nothing beyond a natural impulse to create meaning where there is none? We escape this because we have not created God. He has created us, and revealed himself to us—through Adam, the patriarchs and Prophets, and Jesus Christ—and continues to reveal himself through the Holy Spirit. We are not of this world, and neither is the meaning of our lives.

[ MORE ]

2009-06-21T23:00:00.000-04:00

The Way of All Florida Hotels

I was out on my bike this afternoon (105 degrees!) and decided to snap this picture of a beachside hotel at 251 South Atlantic Avenue in Ormond Beach. It's looked this way for several years, and it's one of several such hotels along the beachside. Some have been torn down to make the sand dunes of my youth, only now the dunes are surrounded by low concrete walls, chain-link fences, and no-trespassing signs. Once these hotels were very busy.

I read in the news today that Walmart is delaying its construction of 24 acres (at Nova Road and Mason Avenue in Daytona Beach) which used to be Father Lopez High School. Slower economy and tighter credit, they say.

I took this photo with my Helio Drift cellphone and its 2-megapixel camera and then resized and optimized it with Xatio Image Optimizer v5.1.

2009-06-17T23:45:00.002-04:00

Whither the American Empire?

This article by Chris Hedges charts and references what may be the end of the American Empire, built on money and military might, both of which we are about to lose. And we aren't going to like the outcome.

The American Empire Is Bankrupt
Truthdig
June 14, 2009

This week marks the end of the dollar's reign as the world's reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That's over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America's imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, "the most important meeting of the 21st century so far."

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

[ READ MORE » ]

Don't expect the corporate media to devote resources to discussing this with the American public—at least not until we're already swimming in the deep end.

2009-05-26T23:30:00.007-04:00

Fiction: In the Family Way

The wealthy man opens his wallet and sees a fat wad of money; when the poor man opens his, he sees only a deep black hole. And yet the real difference between these two men is this: whether the wallets contain anything at all is entirely irrelevant. I know this now, and wish I had known it then; I could have saved myself a lot of grief.

The grief began when my new company developed "cash flow problems," which is corporation talk for the time when more money goes out than is coming in. There are of course innumerable ways this can happen, but it usually starts when not enough money comes in, because no matter how much you cut expenses, trim the overhead, bite the bullet, step back from the challenge, etc., you cannot in the end spend what you do not have. Credit, as I learned, only extends the period of grief. But I was ever hopeful that my business would pick up and the coffers would be full, and my two feet would be firmly planted on the golden road to Rich City. When my Visa card reached its limit, I knew I was in trouble. When my MasterCard hit the max, I was in trouble. I started scraping bottom when I began using my gas card to by milk, eggs, and bread.

Christine was worried and carried bags under her eyes, but I was ever optimistic. God would take care of us. I was so optimistic, in fact, that I started walking around with a special look on my face; it was not quite a smile, not quite a simper, but it was the smile a man makes when he knows something no one else knows; it was also the kind of look that is commonly seen on the faces of morons.

But I am getting ahead of the story here. Much happened between the time I had money and the time my wallet showed me its lining.

It was about the middle of January when a friend of mine, Paul Smythe, called me on the phone. I was in the kitchen at the time. I had known Paul for about two years, but not extremely well; most of my contact with him was at the hospital where I used to work. He was a medical practice administrator for a large clinic in the area. Since leaving the hospital, I had not been in touch with him. Now, he told me, he and his live-in girlfriend, Collette, had just gone into a marketing business for themselves; it was something they were very excited about, and they were looking for two or three sharp people who are looking to make some extra money, but who need to keep doing what they are doing.

"Marc, are you looking to make some extra money?"

"Sure," I said. "But I can't say I've got a lot of time to devote to outside activities—I mean, this computer business of mine just about consumes all of my time. But I'm open to listening. What have you got?"

"Since this is a business opportunity, it's not something I can really go into in depth on the phone. Besides, I need a paper and pencil to go over the numbers with you. I think you understand that."

"I do. But I don't want to waste your time. Are you looking for investors? If you are, I can tell you right now I'm neither in a position to do that nor interested in any expenditure of money on something outside my own business."

"The company we are doing business with is fully capitalized. We're not looking for investors."

"Well, how much time would I have to devote to this venture of yours?"

"About six to eight hours a week."

"Does it involve selling?"

"Do you like to sell?"

"Not particularly."

"Then you'll like what I've got to show you."

"You said it was a marketing business. What are the products, and how do you market them without selling?"

"Those are good questions, Marc. But again the telephone is not the place to answer them, and I'm a little pressed for time right now. What I'd like to do is set aside about ten to fifteen minutes with you and go over some of the basics of the business, answer a few of your questions, and see if this would interest you and see whether you are the right person to involve in my business. How about tomorrow evening—Monday—say about seven o'clock?"

"Let me get my schedule book," I said. I put the phone on hold and left the kitchen for the study, looking for my schedule for the week. "Monday night's free," I said, picking up the phone and poking my finger on my next day's schedule.

"How about seven o'clock?"

"That's okay."

"Good. I'll see you at your house at seven. Now, I'm not going to be in a position to answer all of your questions, Marc. I'm only going to be there about fifteen minutes. I'm really just checking interest."

"No problem," I said, adding a few pleasantries before hanging up.

"Who was that?" asked Christine.

[ MORE ]

2009-05-21T23:55:00.001-04:00

Cheney and the Endless Lie

Tonight Jay Leno joked that we've seen Dick Cheney more in the past eight days than we got to see him during his entire eight years in office. Of course Cheney's been out and about making speeches, typically critical of the Obama administration.

His latest speech, presented today at the American Enterprise Institute, continued the Bushevik's clever use of language to cloak the real meaning of what can be easily conveyed in simple English for the nondelusional. For example, he says:

"The administration has found that it's easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo. But it's tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America's national security. Keep in mind that these are hardened terrorists picked up overseas since 9/11. The ones that were considered low-risk were released a long time ago. And among these, we learned yesterday, many were treated too leniently, because 1 in 7 cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East. I think the President will find, upon reflection, that to bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be cause for great danger and regret in the years to come."

We keep letting him and his cohorts get away with this abuse of language. It is easier to talk about the detainess at Guantánamo as "terrorists" than to state the facts of their status. Perhaps they are terrorists, but this is neither obvious nor proved. Putting aside the issue of Cheney's credibility (we know that most of the detainees never posed any threat to the US), the remaining detainees have not been convicted of any crime and the evidence against them (possibly gathered through torture or, in the parlance of the euphemism du jour, "enhanced interrogation techniques") has not been properly examined by impartial judicial bodies. So to call them the "the worst of the worst terrorists," as Cheney does here and as Donald Rumsfeld did before him, is to state and, under these circumstances, to perpetuate what is in fact a lie.

2009-05-20T00:45:00.000-04:00

Frog and Rain

It's been raining steadily for two days straight. Today was especially bleak with only a few minutes of bright sky. Before turning in for the night, I noticed a tree frog sitting casually on the porch rail in the carport, possibly to escape the rain. It looks like it might be a Cuban Tree Frog, but I didn't handle it and have only this photo to use in identifying it. I thought it was a toad at first, but the adhesive pads clearly suggest otherwise. It moved on after a half hour of this attention.

I snapped this photo using my Nikon P50 digital camera and reduced it for web presentation with Xatio Image Optimizer v5.1.

2009-05-14T23:35:00.002-04:00

The Way of All Steel

While walking Pepe the chihuahua this evening, we happened upon this tree that was in the process of growing around an old chain-link fence post. I noticed that it's also starting to grow over the wooden post on the right. That might take a while.

I should make sure to bring my digital camera with me when I walk around, but maybe it's not a necessity. My reliable Helio Drift cellphone with its 2-megapixel camera did the job, I think.

2009-05-10T01:45:00.001-04:00

New Quaker Site, Blog Updated

The newquaker.com site has been updated and, well, surgically revised. I've decided to dissolve most of the original site and keep only the blog. Gone specifically are Selected Links and the Quaker Books for Friends newsletter pages. The "search" button on the navbar can be used to trawl for extant pages of the full site, but at some point even that will change. The main index page now redirects here, and I'm using "canonical links" in the code so as not to deceive search engines.

I need to consolidate my time, liberating me for more experimental writing and less site maintenance. I'll be placing more publications and works-in-progress onto merleharton.com. I'm keeping the blog to preserve this outlet for new writing and outrage. Really, that was the point of the site when I created it 1998 (as in ten years ago): the blog was added in 2002.

My new short-fiction collection, Twelve Stories from New Orleans, is forthcoming from De Signis Press. This project pulls together some of my older New Orleans fiction, some previously published in small presses, including a few naughty pieces I wrote during a time when I still thought in bawdy terms. The new book will be available for purchase in a few weeks.

Thanks to all for keeping up with me.

2009-03-18T00:15:00.007-04:00

Stepping Lively in America

With the American economy undergoing continuous disruptive changes, we ought not to be surprised to encounter also changes that are not economic in nature. In fact, many of the more fragile aspects of life in the US are going to be falling apart, leaving us with a changing demographic and a different social face.

Last Thursday, CBC News reported on what is going on in the giant Ponzi scheme that is Florida, with reference to the clever system of taxation and growth that owes its vitality to continuous real estate development and a constant influx of new people. Oops. Like all systems built on a bad foundation, the "Ponzi state" now has more residents leaving than arriving, and tourism is down and the stupid scheme is decomposing. On Tuesday of this week, Britain's Independent reported on what's left of Wilmington, Ohio, after its single large employer, DHL, left town, leaving behind in its tumultuous wake a kind of ghost town. This is happening to other "company towns" that became the preeminent stakeholders in corporations that function very much like a feudal system; when the lord dies, or takes his castle and leaves, so goes the estate. Never mind that the Canadian and British presses can see this, but we can't.

Skilled immigrants are leaving the US and going back to China and India, where there are now more lucrative opportunities than they found in America. Even illegal immigrants are leaving, due predominantly to lack of available work.

The ridiculous but lively two-step dance now going on between our federal government and AIG and the bankers (with music provided by the Federal Reserve's printing presses) may turn out to be a mere historical distraction.¹

1. Especially the preposterous outrage over the AIG bonuses, which both the White House and Congress knew were going to happen. Never mind that President Obama, Sen Chris Dodd, and Sen Max Baucus are among the top recipients of AIC political contributions. Last month, Sen Ron Wyden and Sen Olympia Snowe amended the bailout bill to prevent huge executive bonuses. Alas, that amendment was not to be. According to an AP report: "In February, the Senate voted to add such a proposal to the economic recovery bill that cleared Congress, but in final closed-door talks on the measure, that provision was dropped in favor of limits that affect only future payments."

2009-03-14T23:50:00.004-04:00

More Hurt by Protest in Palestine

The US media routinely ignore news about Palestinian protests, whether against home demolitions or the separation fences. Here is another that may also flicker only briefly.

US citizens critically hurt at West Bank protest
Haaretz
March 13, 2009

Palestinian sources said that an American citizen, in his thirties, had sustained critical wounds during an anti-separation fence protest in the West Bank on Friday, Army Radio reported.

Peace activists with the International Solidarity Movement said Tristan Anderson, of the Oakland, Calif. area, was struck in the head with a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops. The military and the Tel Aviv hospital where Anderson was taken had no details on how he was hurt.

Protesters who were at the scene said that Anderson was standing by the side of the road when soldiers fired at him, and not near the hub of the clash. They added that there was no one in his vicinity that could have been perceived as a threat to the soldiers.

"He's in critical condition, anesthetized and on a ventilator and undergoing imaging tests," said Orly Levi, a spokeswoman at the Tel Hashomer hospital. She described Anderson's condition as life-threatening.

The protest took place in the West Bank town of Na'alin, where Palestinians and international backers frequently gather to demonstrate against the barrier. Israel says the barrier is necessary to keep Palestinian attackers from infiltrating into Israel. But Palestinians view it as a thinly veiled land grab because it juts into the West Bank at multiple points.

[ READ MORE » ]

We should not forget that in 2003 the 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed in the Gaza strip, crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in the Rafah refugee camp, during a protest by the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement to End the Occupation of Palestine (ISM) against Israeli government demolitions of Palestinian homes. The anniversary of Rachel's death will be Monday, March 16.

2009-03-02T23:15:00.003-05:00

Saint Andrew

My Uncle Andy was a good man, a "moral man," my mother said of her younger brother, who died last week. He was on the couch taking a nap in his Miami Lakes home and my Aunt Lucille went over to wake him up and his eyes were only half closed and she said, "Stop fooling around—you're scaring me!" He was a great kidder, with a unique sense of humor, but this wasn't funny. She touched him and he was cold: Andy was gone.

My uncle, Andrew J. Geranis, was a complex man. At least, I think so. I said that he was a kidder and I know this because during the mid-point of my college studies I went to work with him for a while in his General Contracting business. I stayed with him and Lucille in their south Miami house, which had an enclosed swimming pool right beside the back patio. One day he said to look at the bottom of the pool (I don't remember what I was supposed to look at) and as I did, he pushed me in, clothes and all. I think it took two days for my shoes and wallet to dry out. He thought it was funny; I think I sulked for a day or so.

He was born with a first name and a last name, but no middle name. Under normal cultural circumstances, he would have received a middle name upon baptism, but he refused to be baptized and later decided to take my grandfather's first name as his middle name. So he became Andrew John Geranis. He spent most of his life going back and forth between agnostic and atheist, and yet he gave substantial sums of money to the Greek Orthodox Church in Miami—so much, in fact, that the church renamed itself Saint Andrew Greek Orthodox Church. It's not clear whether the Saint was my Uncle Andy or the younger brother of Saint Peter, but the gesture is significant nonetheless. He liked being generous, and he used a tactic that I have since stolen. When he would go out to eat with other people, he would make sure that he paid the server after the meal but before the check ever made its way to the table.

He and Lucille never had children, but they kept an immortal dog, a salt-and-pepper Schnauzer named Ashes. Here's how the immortality part worked: When Ashes died, they would go to the kennel and buy another similarly-colored Schnauzer and name it Ashes—like Doctor Who, except that Ashes always looked like Ashes, and still does. Besides the immortal terrier, they also loved horses. He and Lucille raised thoroughbreds and traveled around the country racing them. Several were champions.

As a "moral man," my Uncle Andy was loved by many, and many of those were in attendance at his wake and his funeral last Friday. Before his burial at Vista Memorial Gardens, several of his friends spoke their memorials. We should all have such things told about us when we die. One couldn't speak and instead played a musical rendition of the Lord's Prayer on his harmonica. The funeral service itself was short. At least, I think so. It was too short, like his life.

2009-02-26T23:30:00.001-05:00

The French Quarter

(This is an another older fiction piece from my "New Orleans Memories" collection.)

The French Quarter. It wasn't the best of times; it wasn't the worst of times. It was June, and it was hot, as it always in New Orleans in the summer, and my live-in girlfriend, Christine, and I were down in the French Quarter for a day of jazz and drink and shopping for T-shirts. If you ever need a T-shirt, you just have to come to the French Quarter. Forget about art, Cajun music, historic architecture—the T-shirt is what it's come to, but we've got the best.

We had just walked out of a shop on Bourbon Street when I spotted a small crowd down Conti, near Royal; Christine and I hurried over to see what was up. It was a transvestite conked out on the sidewalk outside a greasy bar. One of the tourists, a guy from the Iowa wearing Bermuda shorts he'd taken out of mothballs just for this trip, was the most concerned of the crowd. "Do you think she's dead?" he asked me as I shoved my way through. I looked at him, and then again, making sure he knew I was doing a double take, and said: "That's not a woman. That's a man." He didn't believe me. "If you look real close," I said, "you'll see a five o'clock shadow under that makeup." So he bends down, looks real hard, and then comes back up scratching the bald part of his head. "Now I've seen everything," he said. "How long have you been in the Quarter?" I asked. "Oh, about a day," he answered. "Then you haven't seen anything yet," I quipped. I left him in a stupefied state and called the police from the corner T-shirt shop. When I got back, the transvestite was sitting up, moaning. The bald tourist from Iowa just stood there and stared at him, like he'd never seen a man in a dress before. Christine and I headed up Royal Street for more T-shirt shopping.

About an hour later, we were at Jackson Square. It was crowded with tourists and other T-shirt shoppers and clumps of street entertainers—jazz, tap dancing, mime, acrobatics—and a guy playing music on the rims of little glasses of water. For just a minute or two I stopped and watched a redhead with long legs and a short skirt, but in that brief time Christine disappeared. I thought I caught a glimpse of her walking down St. Ann, and hurried after her, but she vanished. This was exasperating me, and it was hot, and I wanted a drink of something cool. I slipped into a nearby bar. It was dark inside. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I hopped onto a bar stool and asked the bartender for a Coke. He looked at me like I didn't belong there, but I was too thirsty to care. I paid him for the soft drink and took two long drinks. Suddenly I sensed someone directly behind me. There was a moment of heavy breathing. [ MORE ]

2009-02-22T23:05:00.004-05:00

A Truth or Dare Commission

It is up in the air (floating like a lost party balloon) whether the Obama administration is going to sanction a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," something proposed recently by Senator Patrick Leahy as a means toward a public dialogue on the Busheviks' illegal behavior.¹ Also floating around the airy skies is a real skepticism as to whether such a commission will lead to actual prosecutions, to a real list of their illegal deeds, or even to any meaningful dialogue about past practices of any American president's previous administration. The McClatchy Newspapers has a competent article on the several issues surrounding such a commission and its likelihood of success.²

So why not simply walk straight into the courts with evidence of war crimes (about which there is already much evidence)? We shouldn't have to rely on an International War Crimes Tribunal to do this for us. Creating a "truth commission" is like setting up a conference table outside the courthouse and having people talk about it, interviewing torture victims (or their mothers and families) and other aggrieved parties, until nobody wants to talk about it anymore, or listen to it anymore, and a Report of the Commission is published and gets put on library shelves and the whole issue gets replaced, in the short American attention span, with some other issue, such as the economy, the stock market, bailout money, automobiles, mass transit, poverty, climate change, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, South America—all of the things that effectively force us to go forward, allowing us (hey, these things are important!) to avoid having to face our own collective guilt about the crimes we therefore continue to sanction in our refusal to look backward again.

1. "Sen Leahy proposes truth panel on Bush era abuses," AP/Breitbart, February 9, 2009.
2. "President Obama back 'truth commission' to probe Bush practices?" McClatchy Newspapers, February 22, 2009. Also archived at Common Dreams.

2009-02-21T22:15:00.005-05:00

Dinner at Antoine's

(This is an older fiction piece from my "New Orleans Memories" collection.)

It was sometime in April, and a doctor friend of mine and his wife were in town for a conference, and he gave me a call and wanted me and my live-in girlfriend Christine to go out to dinner with them. "Sure," I said. The dinner was free, after all. Since they wanted to go down to the French Quarter, I suggested Galatoire's, on Bourbon Street. It's a great place to eat and, besides, with all the mirrors and tiles around the wall, it looks just like a men's washroom and I thought that would really help to convey the spirit of New Orleans to my visitors. But instead they wanted to go to Antoine's, I guess because they liked wood floors and dim lights and big expensive bills. "No problem," I said. Anyway, the dinner was free.

So we all met down at Antoine's at 8 o'clock and went inside. We were directed to a nice table upstairs and a waiter named Paul came by with his hand out and took our order. It was a big meal. We started with Oysters Rockefeller, and then Oysters Bienville and Oyster Soup, which came with two hefty oysters floating obscenely in the bottom of the bowl. Everybody else had something different to eat for the main course, but I ordered fried oysters. Obviously something was missing from my diet and I was having a craving. Besides it was an "R" month and that meant the oysters would be firm, not mushy. [ MORE ]

2009-02-01T13:50:00.004-05:00

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

This one freaked my mother out—and, well, me too. This from the January/February 2009 issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club:

You can read the online piece here. What can we say, really, but "Thank you again, Mister Cheney."

2009-01-30T23:45:00.003-05:00

Toward This Unfamiliar Future

The current crisis is far more than an economic predicament, a global commerce disaster, or even a failure of recent political wills. As such, then, the current crisis won't find its solution in expensive economic stimuli, the mending of global levees, or through energetic regulatory structures. Yet we continue to look at it as if it's the broken mirror in the bathhouse where Wall Street and K Street boys came to fondle themselves. Not without surprise, we want them to cover themselves, express their shame, and get the place all cleaned up; with such hope that will erase their perversion and put them to task re-stoking the coals of the hot steam engine of our society.

Any repair of this crisis using the very techniques that caused it will surely give us the pretense of something new, but the aging structure, with its inherent malignancies, must reassert itself again and again, and the future will look like the past. If the stock market never rebounds, if it finally "hits bottom" but never recovers, then the investor will desire new models for financial growth; this in turn ought to necessitate new models to replace the stodgy, deadly publicly traded multinational corporation. If we cannot return to the global business model in which workers are off-shored, costs are externalized to the economy, and profits are the bright beacon guiding the corporate ships, then our attention will be diverted to the small company, the domestic company, the sole proprietor and the entrepreneur for essential products and services.

I am now one mind with Jacques Ellul on this issue:

If we want to make society livable, people will have to improve themselves. Moral progress is necessary. Political organization, economic change, or psychology will not do it. The actual situation shows us that contrary to what Marxism imagined, moral progress does not result from raising standards of living or bettering economic conditions or increasing the means placed at the disposal of all. On the contrary, these things simply trigger a frenzy of evil. The urgent need is not to establish a moral order, which cannot be done externally even by superior authority, but to find the way of self-mastery, of respect for others, of a moderate use of the powers at our disposal. This is the way of wisdom and morality. Such words are not greatly valued by our age-so much the worse for us! We have to consider that not taking this path will lead ineluctably to the impossibility of living in concert, a situation far worse than an economic crisis or war.¹

We have before us an opportunity—indeed a world-wide opportunity—to make systemic changes that will guide us toward an entirely new prospect. Instead of weeping, we ought to rejoice in the expectation of this new adventure.

1. What I Believe (Eerdmans, 1989), translated by Geoffrey Bromiley, p. 62.