New York Cab Graft Ends!

 Culture, Politics  No Responses »
Feb 092003
 

About time. Maybe it was the protest vote:

“It’s not working,” Matthew W. Daus, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, said yesterday.

Mr. Daus’s agency conducted a study in recent weeks and found that 67 percent of the 4,000 or so respondents said they did not pay a lick of attention when Eartha Kitt or Plcido Domingo or Michael Buffer (“Let’s get ready to rummmmmmmble!”) asked them, by recorded proxy, to wear their seat belts in a taxicab.

Moreover, nearly 12 percent of those questioned said they purposefully refused to buckle up because the announcements were annoying.

If we must have a goo-goo mayor, this is what he ought to be doing, instead of persecuting smokers: ridding us of these stagnant puddles of graft.

Killing Liberty To Save It

 Philosophy, Politics  11 Responses »
Feb 082003
 

Of the many intelligent replies to the New York Sun’s editorial advocacy of censorship, Arthur Silber’s gets nearest to the heart of the matter:

In effect, the Sun announces its own, newer version of preemption: let’s destroy civil liberties now, and with absolute certainty, so as to avoid the possibility that those same civil liberties might be destroyed later. To identify the nature of this argument, is to realize how truly ludicrous it is, and it would be laughable if the matter were not so serious. Yet certain conservatives make this same kind of argument with profoundly disturbing regularity in connection with a compulsory draft, for example. They say: “But if we don’t forcibly conscript people, how will we be able to save our free country?” — thus ignoring the fact that by establishing the precedent of slavery yet again, and by establishing the principle that no one has the right to his own life, they have destroyed the very concept of a free country at its core — and that once this was accomplished, there would be nothing left to save.

(Update: Silber comments on the comments.)

Bad Poets Against the War

 Poetry, Politics  8 Responses »
Feb 082003
 

Sam Hamill was right. He had no business at “Laura Bush’s tea party” — not because of his fatuous politics, but because of his fatuous poetry.

State of the Union, 2003

I have not been to Jerusalem,
but Shirley talks about the bombs.
I have no god, but have seen the children praying
for it to stop. They pray to different gods.
The news is all old news again, repeated
like a bad habit, cheap tobacco, the social lie.

The children have seen so much death
that death means nothing to them now.
They wait in line for bread.
They wait in line for water.
Their eyes are black moons reflecting emptiness.
We’ve seen them a thousand times.

Soon, the President will speak.
He will have something to say about bombs
and freedom and our way of life.
I will turn the tv off. I always do.
Because I can’t bear to look
at the monuments in his eyes.

I’m not sure how you repeat cheap tobacco, I’m quite sure I don’t want to investigate the question, and I’m 100% sure that’s not what Hamill’s repeating here. This is actually worse than Andrew Motion, worse even than Harold Pinter: those were still possible to parody. Give me the actors against the war. Some of them can actually act.

(Update: Emperor Misha and Cinderella comment. Frederick Glaysher protests to The New York Times, which predictably sided with the poets, and maintains a useful list of links on the whole sorry affair.)

Google’s Greatest Hits

 Navel-Gazing  2 Responses »
Feb 072003
 

if god had an answer machine — Then you could leave a message, cupcake. But He’s in conference right now.

thomas kinkade lawsuit — Can you really sue for that?

top-down and bottom-up terror theory of Richard Rubenstein — You might want to ask Richard Rubenstein.

how much is an ounce of weed — It’s pricy. But it’s really good shit.

CRACK MACHINE — Look buddy, weed is one thing. What kind of blog do you think this is?

you have nothing to lose but your chains — You using those chains?

And not just f–k machine, oh no, but

how does a f–k machine work — You really need to come here to figure that out?

(Update: They improve! Today alone brings provocative ill-timed and internationally illegal actions and new economic policy lenin lesson plans, to which no comment of mine could do justice.)

A Philosophical Question

 Blogs, Navel-Gazing  1 Response »
Feb 072003
 

Suppose that you’ve set your comments up to email you each time one is posted, and you post a comment yourself. Suppose further that an email shows up in your box two minutes later, marked “New Comment,” and you open it excitedly, only to realize that it is, in fact, the comment that you yourself posted two minutes ago. Are you entitled to laugh at your cat when he chases his tail?

I don’t think so.

Comments?

 Navel-Gazing  3 Responses »
Feb 062003
 

It looks from my reefer logs that several people have tried to comment and not gotten through. If that’s you, or if you’ve had any trouble of this sort in the past, please email me (aaron at godofthemachine dot com or here), and advise. I’ve been thinking about switching from Greymatter to Movable Type anyway, and this may be the last straw.

Wormer Clauses

 Politics  3 Responses »
Feb 062003
 

Turns out Canada has a “notwithstanding clause,” “a rarely-exercised legislative veto allowing some individual rights to be suspended, explicitly, where a statute conflicts with them.” (Cosh: it’s not just hockey and Canadian football any more.) Hey, great: just like Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution! You remember, that was the one Hitler used to suspend the Constitution and declare himself dictator. I propose to christen these “Wormer clauses,” after Dean Wormer’s classic line in Animal House: “There’s a little-known codicil in the Faber College Constitution granting the Dean unlimited powers in times of campus emergency.”

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