My feelings on the News Corp hacking scandal shouldn't really have to be guessed at. Nor should I waste time mincing words. Assuming News Corp is guilty as charged, I want them to go down and go down HARD. Hacking the phones of your subjects has no place in journalism or decent humanity. Add that to your subjects being murder victims and 9/11 victims, and your hacking actively impeding the investigations of same, and to say the least, you have no place in the journalism industry. Or polite society.
Bribing the cops to give you your scoops? Seriously, come on.
That established: one of my new favorite phrases has come out of this whole sorry affair. You know, one of those phrases you say you're going to start working into everyday conversation, and then you actually do that maybe twice before realizing you have no place for it in everyday conversation. That phrase is 'reverse ferret'.
As the story goes, Kelvin Mackenzie, former editor of The Sun, loved to go after people. When he had a target in his sights, he'd instruct his newsroom to "put a ferret up their trousers." At the same time, though, Mackenzie wasn't stupid. He knew that sometimes, taking this tack, he would have to back off lest The Sun get into trouble, legally, financially, politically or in the court of public opinion. When The Sun was at risk in this respect, he'd go into the newsroom and yell "Reverse ferret!" This was the signal for The Sun to play nice until they were out of danger.
You'll hear the phrase a fair bit over the course of the scandal. First, 'reverse ferret' is the most wonderful phrase in the world and every excuse should be taken to use it as much as possible. Reverse ferret. Reverse ferret. Reverse ferret. Second, the meaning of the phrase- back off the outrage and play nice- describes why Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp., is completely and utterly screwed. One of his holdings needs a specific, special emergency phrase just to tell them not to be jerks.
Translation: there's really no apology or measure of restitution Murdoch could possibly make to get himself out of this mess on his own terms. Any such measure will simply be called a reverse ferret and all investigations (oh, the glorious, glorious investigations) will simply continue on schedule.
Case in point, take Rebekah Brooks, editor of News of the World when the catalyst for this entire saga, the hacking of the phone of murder victim Milly Dowler, occurred. When Murdoch closed News of the World, the very first thing that crossed people's minds was that it was a move to protect Brooks. There was no celebration, no relief, no 'this is a positive step' editorials. No reaction whatsoever that would have signified a successful reverse ferret. The stink was not with News of the World, even though it was there too. The target was Brooks herself.
A few days ago, Brooks resigned from News Corp. Earlier in the scandal, that might- MIGHT, not a guarantee- have worked as a reverse ferret. Now, though, it's too late to be a successful fix. Enough time had passed to where the scandal had spread to every corner of Murdoch's empire. Brooks' departure was characterized by The Independent as "After 52 years, mogul's ally quits to protect jewel of US empire".
The phrase 'to protect'. Meaning, 'that's nice and all, but we have a bigger target in mind and we're not going away'. And the target is now Murdoch himself. Considering that News Corp. is centralized around Murdoch- structured to be so- to the degree that nothing really gets done without his say-so, that's a gigantic threat. Murdoch's been able to take a slow, steady stream of loyal opposition, but he hasn't dealt with something on the scale of the FBI and a united British Parliament going after him simultaneously.
So what happens to him, ultimately? On the American side of the Atlantic, the major criticism in my social circles is that while England may savage him, America won't care enough, his supporters are entrenched too deeply, for him to suffer in America or for Fox News, his most prominent American holding, to take any true damage.
My rebuttal is twofold. First: reverse ferret.
Sorry. Couldn't help it. First, the 9/11 victim-hacking aspect of this story hasn't fully unfolded yet. There is speculation, investigation, but so far nothing solid. So far, all the official, confirmed aspects of this scandal are UK-contained, and so given America's inclination to only care about America, more airtime has been given over here to Casey Anthony. (Which is downright shameful.) If the 9/11-victim link goes official, though, if the name of an affected victim comes out, well, all bets are off over here. There's no way that can't blow up... at least outside of Fox News, which is Murdoch-owned and thus has every incentive to try to save itself. Those who only watch Fox News still won't have a clue, but they're not the ones conducting the investigations. And the ones conducting the investigations are the ones Murdoch has to worry about.
Second, the kind of empire Murdoch has built isn't really structured so that he can just run to the other side of the Atlantic. If Murdoch goes down hard enough in Britain, it won't matter what he has going for him in America. Rupert Murdoch does not have clones running around. He is one man. If that one man, that one man that the entire empire is structured around, is taken down, the whole fortress is liable to crumble in his absence, like a video game boss whose lair collapses the second you beat him. News Corp., in Murdoch's absence, could do anything from undergoing a semi-orderly transition to shattering into a billion pieces.
And every new wrinkle, every new body found buried, only fuels the investigation further and digs the hooks in deeper, making Murdoch's ultimate departure more and more likely. For example, this newly-breaking news about the original News of the World whistleblower ever-so-magically turning up dead. The police do not, at least initially, consider it suspicious, but even official statements from the police have been rendered suspect, with multiple high-ranking officers of New Scotland Yard under investigation themselves for their roles in the scandal.
As deep as Murdoch's problems are in Britain, whether he suffers fallout in America is almost beside the point. He is liable to suffer a fall in America merely by proxy, rendered unable to operate in America to the degree he has been accustomed due to the damage suffered in Britain. It's all the same empire in the end.
So could he make an orderly transition to save News Corp from maximum damage (and there's almost no telling what 'maximum damage' might entail)? Given that he's 80 years old, he's certainly made plans. He would prefer to hand it down to his children. However, they've all got problems of their own, ranging from inexperience (42-year-old daughter Elisabeth) to past corporate failures (39-year-old son Lachlan) to being consumed by the scandal themselves (38-year-old son James). Elisabeth has been spotted verbally attacking James, saying that he "fucked the company". Shareholder pressure exists to hand control to someone from outside the family entirely, someone that doesn't have the tainted Murdoch name. Were that to happen, whoever took over almost certainly would not run things in so centralized a manner.
Which would probably be the biggest reverse ferret of all.
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Petty Theft And Highway Robbery
I'm of the philosophy that a diploma doesn't tell the whole story about your education or your level of intelligence. Often, of course, they do, or else they would be functionally worthless. But they're not a be-all-end-all, either. There are people that basically buy their way into the Ivy League and the diploma within, and then pretty much sit back and wait for the world to come to them, waving the diploma around as proof of an education that they only technically have. There are people from decidedly lesser colleges that, head-to-head, will think circles around the aforementioned Ivy Leaguers. Where an underachieving Ivy Leaguer may be so overconfident in their diploma that they fail to think things through and make some astoundingly bad moves, an overachieving small-college grad can realize they have ground to make up, and make that little extra crucial bit of analysis.
And then there's the occasional story of someone who doesn't have a college degree at all but nonetheless is one of the smartest people around.
Now, part of why I bring this up is a bit of a defense of my alma mater. Let's be honest. Madison Area Technical College- or Madison College; I think they changed the name recently- isn't exactly turning away perfect SAT scores left and right. But college is done and gone. MATC can only supply knowledge, and only while I'm enrolled. It's on me to make as much of what I was taught as I possibly can. I won't sit around and wait for people to be attracted to the MATC diploma, because MATC diplomas don't have that kind of drawing power. An MATC grad has a college degree, but they still have to go out and scratch and claw their way through, and put up a ferocious fight just to have the right to take on the Ivy Leaguers.
There are, however, worse degrees to have than that of a tech school.
You could have one from a diploma mill.
In 1989, an application for accreditation by Eastern Missouri Business College came to the International Accrediting Commission in Missouri. The catalog that showed up at the IAC, among other things, listed faculty members such as Arnold Ziffel, Edward J. Haskell, M. Howard, Jerome Howard, and Lawrence Fine; the college seal read "Solum pro Avibus Est Educatio"; the motto was "Latrocina et Raptus", and the marine biology textbook (offered through the mail, along with degrees in genetic engineering and aerospace science) was "The Little Golden Book of Fishes".
For those that didn't catch on already, those faculty members were from Green Acres and the Three Stooges, and the respective translations are "Education is only for the birds" and "Everything from petty theft to highway robbery." This was not a real college. It was a teeny little office in St. Louis, staged with a little bit of fake paperwork, a whole lot of blank papers, and no accounting records or actual classrooms. (Nowadays, the lack of classrooms wouldn't be a dead giveaway, given the proliferation of online colleges, but in 1989, that was a thing worth noting.)
Any accreditor worth their salt would have busted the Fightin' Eastern Missourians in about five seconds. Any accreditor worth their salt would have been tipped off at some point over the course of the catalog, maybe passed it around the office for laughs.
Instead, the head of the IAC, George Reuter, stopped by, wandered around for half an hour and noted how impressed he was. He then went out to have a steak dinner with the head of the college. Although they would pose for a picture of the "official passing of the accreditation check", which amounted to $500.
After later indicating that accreditation would be granted, and selling Eastern Missouri Business a "fancy plaque" for another $25, the faculty of Eastern Missouri Business sprung. They were in fact working for the state attorney general, and quickly got the International Accrediting Commission shut down.
Meet Accrediting Commission International. They popped up in Arkansas shortly thereafter, a state famous for not being Missouri. The fact that the name is the same as "International Accrediting Commission" with the words rearranged is surely coincidental. Them spelling 'commission' with three M's on the topline of your window when you go visit is presumably just a test and not to be read into at all.
And ACI is adamant that you don't read into it, or any other similarities to IAC. In a page entitled 'ACI Answers To Critics', they admit that from "the older organization" (they never state "the older organization's" name outright, although they do say that "most of the stories told about the other organization are only half-truths and outright falsehood"), about 25 colleges were carried over to ACI, as opposed to all of them.
Quackwatch, however, disagrees. They charge that ACI did in fact invite all the colleges under the auspices of ICA to be automatically accredited, which numbers about 250. Go to ACI, though, and you would never know, because they don't list the colleges they've accredited. (Unlike any accreditor worth their salt-- for instance, the Higher Learning Commission, a branch of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which will tell you that it's the one that accredited just about every college of note from West Virginia to Wyoming... including Madison Area Technical College.)
With a fair degree of legwork, though, some guys on the boards of DegreeInfo managed to track down about 100 of the places accredited by ACi. They are mostly Bible colleges. One of the ACI colleges, Wisconsin International University, is quite international indeed, because it has no campus in Wisconsin, or for that matter anywhere else in the United States.
Luckily, there is a simple way to avoid these places. In the United States, there are two institutions that approve accreditors: the Department of Education, and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. In effect, they accredit the accreditors. If neither of those two places think an accreditor is legit, it stains any college that's approved by that accreditor, to the point where people looking to transfer to a place the DoE or CHEA do approve of may have to start their college education again from scratch.
They don't approve of ACI.
And then there's the occasional story of someone who doesn't have a college degree at all but nonetheless is one of the smartest people around.
Now, part of why I bring this up is a bit of a defense of my alma mater. Let's be honest. Madison Area Technical College- or Madison College; I think they changed the name recently- isn't exactly turning away perfect SAT scores left and right. But college is done and gone. MATC can only supply knowledge, and only while I'm enrolled. It's on me to make as much of what I was taught as I possibly can. I won't sit around and wait for people to be attracted to the MATC diploma, because MATC diplomas don't have that kind of drawing power. An MATC grad has a college degree, but they still have to go out and scratch and claw their way through, and put up a ferocious fight just to have the right to take on the Ivy Leaguers.
There are, however, worse degrees to have than that of a tech school.
You could have one from a diploma mill.
In 1989, an application for accreditation by Eastern Missouri Business College came to the International Accrediting Commission in Missouri. The catalog that showed up at the IAC, among other things, listed faculty members such as Arnold Ziffel, Edward J. Haskell, M. Howard, Jerome Howard, and Lawrence Fine; the college seal read "Solum pro Avibus Est Educatio"; the motto was "Latrocina et Raptus", and the marine biology textbook (offered through the mail, along with degrees in genetic engineering and aerospace science) was "The Little Golden Book of Fishes".
For those that didn't catch on already, those faculty members were from Green Acres and the Three Stooges, and the respective translations are "Education is only for the birds" and "Everything from petty theft to highway robbery." This was not a real college. It was a teeny little office in St. Louis, staged with a little bit of fake paperwork, a whole lot of blank papers, and no accounting records or actual classrooms. (Nowadays, the lack of classrooms wouldn't be a dead giveaway, given the proliferation of online colleges, but in 1989, that was a thing worth noting.)
Any accreditor worth their salt would have busted the Fightin' Eastern Missourians in about five seconds. Any accreditor worth their salt would have been tipped off at some point over the course of the catalog, maybe passed it around the office for laughs.
Instead, the head of the IAC, George Reuter, stopped by, wandered around for half an hour and noted how impressed he was. He then went out to have a steak dinner with the head of the college. Although they would pose for a picture of the "official passing of the accreditation check", which amounted to $500.
After later indicating that accreditation would be granted, and selling Eastern Missouri Business a "fancy plaque" for another $25, the faculty of Eastern Missouri Business sprung. They were in fact working for the state attorney general, and quickly got the International Accrediting Commission shut down.
Meet Accrediting Commission International. They popped up in Arkansas shortly thereafter, a state famous for not being Missouri. The fact that the name is the same as "International Accrediting Commission" with the words rearranged is surely coincidental. Them spelling 'commission' with three M's on the topline of your window when you go visit is presumably just a test and not to be read into at all.
And ACI is adamant that you don't read into it, or any other similarities to IAC. In a page entitled 'ACI Answers To Critics', they admit that from "the older organization" (they never state "the older organization's" name outright, although they do say that "most of the stories told about the other organization are only half-truths and outright falsehood"), about 25 colleges were carried over to ACI, as opposed to all of them.
Quackwatch, however, disagrees. They charge that ACI did in fact invite all the colleges under the auspices of ICA to be automatically accredited, which numbers about 250. Go to ACI, though, and you would never know, because they don't list the colleges they've accredited. (Unlike any accreditor worth their salt-- for instance, the Higher Learning Commission, a branch of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which will tell you that it's the one that accredited just about every college of note from West Virginia to Wyoming... including Madison Area Technical College.)
With a fair degree of legwork, though, some guys on the boards of DegreeInfo managed to track down about 100 of the places accredited by ACi. They are mostly Bible colleges. One of the ACI colleges, Wisconsin International University, is quite international indeed, because it has no campus in Wisconsin, or for that matter anywhere else in the United States.
Luckily, there is a simple way to avoid these places. In the United States, there are two institutions that approve accreditors: the Department of Education, and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. In effect, they accredit the accreditors. If neither of those two places think an accreditor is legit, it stains any college that's approved by that accreditor, to the point where people looking to transfer to a place the DoE or CHEA do approve of may have to start their college education again from scratch.
They don't approve of ACI.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Cleri, Cleri, Way Too Eerie
Reality TV, unless you live under a rock, you know as filled with preening, uninhibited, often intoxicated loudmouths who are willing to do anything to get their 15 minutes. (Minus some far-too-uncommon blessed souls.) Once in a while, one of these inherently hateable people somehow becomes a person that people love to hate, or at least is viewed as such by the producers, and is brought back for future seasons, or even guest appearances on other shows, or for a rare obnoxious few, a show all to themselves.
This is a large part of why so many obnoxious people show up. Aside from the stated, primary goal of the program, many of them hope that by standing out enough, by being the famewhoriest of the famewhores, they too will get their own show, or at least another appearance on the one they're on.
What none of them realize, however, is that they can't all have that. The punishment for failure in acquiring the Famewhore Holy Grail can have disastrous effects once the cameras go off. Relationships at home can be strained or ended. Employers may be humiliated to have these people on the payroll. And if you're on a talent-search show for a common job- a cook, a businessperson, an interior designer- and you make a disastrous blunder, or get eliminated early on, your career in that field can easily come to a screeching halt. Never mind getting the dream job the show was offering. What aspiring cook anywhere is going to take lessons from the person who, on national television, can't tell sugar from salt?
(Colleen, Season 5, Hell's Kitchen. I know you were wondering.)
If you truly suck at what you do, or if you truly suck as a person, reality TV has a billion ways to make sure you get yours.
Take 'The Moment Of Truth', technically a game show but with all the spectacle of reality TV. The premise is simple enough. You take a lie detector test prior to the show, are asked a series of questions (some more personal than others), and are given many of the same questions on air. You are tasked with answering honestly. The more questions you answer honestly on-air, the more money you win, up to a top prize of $500,000. (In the American version, at least, and yes, there were international versions.) But if at any point you lie, you lose everything and the game is over. Refuse to answer, and the game is also over, although you (and your loved ones) are given one opportunity to swap out one question you feel is better left unanswered by pressing a button.
On its face, it doesn't sound so bad. But once you start asking the kind of questions you expect someone to answer for half a million dollars- or $200,000, as nobody ever made it to the top of the money ladder in the US version- things go south in a hurry, especially since friends, family and other people in the contestant's life were commonly brought in by FOX to spectate and sometimes ask a question themselves.
And this is prime-time television. They know how you answered before the cameras go on. You know full well they're going to make a beeline for the most humiliating and damaging answers in the whole test. Which is the other thing: the answers are out there once you give them, whether you win any money or not.
The most spectacular revealing of skeletons in someone's closet came by way of Lauren Cleri of Piermont, New York, who would later flat-out admit to the New York Post that she was solely going for the money.
Lauren left enough bridges burned in the process to span an ocean. Host Mark L. Wahlberg, who you'll note as the person who signed up to host this show in the first place, felt the need to make a preshow comment that the episode containing Lauren, had Wahlberg had his way, would not have aired at all, and that it was "the most uncomfortable I've ever been on television."
The episode is available on YouTube here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Here is the line of questions Lauren faced, with her answers in parentheses:
1: As an employee of a hair salon, have you ever told a customer you liked their hairstyle when in fact, you didn't? (no)
2: Have you ever flashed a stranger just for laughs? (yes)
3: Would you give food to a stray dog before you would give it to a homeless person? (yes)
This one got the first groans from the audience. If they only knew what was coming...
4: Have you ever derived pleasure when one of your siblings has gotten into trouble? (yes)
5: Have you ever been fired from a job for stealing money? (yes)
Please note, Lauren hasn't actually won any money yet. The first prize level, $10,000, comes only after answering the first six questions.
6: If you knew you wouldn't get caught, would you steal money from your place of employment? (no)
Now she's won money. The next level is five more questions for $25,000.
7: Since you've been married, have you ever pretended to be asleep in order to avoid having sex with your husband Frank? (yes)
8: Do you blame your husband for your lack of close friends? (yes)
9: Would you ever be a surrogate mother for your sister if she were unable to have children? (yes)
10: Do you think your parents are proud of you? (no)
11: Do you know things about your father that you keep secret from your mother? (yes)
$25,000 and some long talks with Frank are now Lauren's... for now. Next up, four questions for $100,000. And those long talks are about to get longer, as at this point Wahlberg appears for a second advisory warning, mentioning the following to be the part that made him not want to air the episode.
12: Do you secretly stay in touch with any boyfriends that your husband does not know about? (no)
13: Have you ever taken off your wedding ring to appear as if you were single? (yes)
14: Do you believe you might have been in love with a former boyfriend on your wedding day? (yes)
At this point, Wahlberg is half-facepalming and telling Lauren "I can't tell you to walk away" while in the process strongly suggesting it. When she elects to continue, he just shakes his head. Lauren's aforementioned ex arrives on stage to ask the $100,000 question.
15: If I wanted to get back together with you, would you leave your husband?
Wahlberg is almost begging Frank to hit the button and swap the question out, but by now Frank's reaction is 'no, no, now I kinda want to hear this'. So Lauren's sister hits the button instead.
Fate can be cruel, Lauren's sister.
15-A: Do you believe I am the man you should be married to?
Not only was that fight not avoided, it actually got worse. Lauren said yes with disturbingly little hesitation. Coming back true (and making the skipped question easily guessable), she made it to $100,000, which by this point seems not nearly enough money to cover the costs of even attempting to undo all the damage.
So of course Lauren continues on for $200,000, three more questions away.
16: Since you've been married, have you ever had sexual relations with someone other than your husband?
Wahlberg: "I wish the button was still there."
Frank: "You're telling me."
Lauren answered yes. The answer is true. Frank is now burying his face in his hands. Lauren's face has gone cold at this point. ...well, it was prior, but now it is flat-out emotionless. Forget the long talks. There's no longer anything to talk about. This marriage has died right there on-stage.
And then reality TV rears up to give Lauren a good hard smack:
17: Do you think you're a good person?
The entire human race and several species of lichen found only in Antarctica immediately scream the answer. Frank shakes his head no before a word comes out of Lauren's mouth.
Lauren answers yes.
The lie detector begs to differ.
Game over. Lauren walks away with absolutely nothing. This is the end of the episode, and Wahlberg makes one final note in front of an empty stage:
"I honestly believe that some truths are better left unsaid. Hopefully, Lauren and her family can make peace with what happened here tonight. I wish them all the very best."
In fact, the marriage may have been doomed from the moment she was cast. As the New York Post reported:
In an update interview, Lauren noted that she and Frank split up. Or as she put it, "are no longer living under the same roof." An aspiring model, she also told the New York Post that no job offers came out of her appearance.
Considering the nature of modeling, and considering there has been no update on her since, she is in all likelihood still waiting. Her only stable job now is as a cautionary tale.
This is a large part of why so many obnoxious people show up. Aside from the stated, primary goal of the program, many of them hope that by standing out enough, by being the famewhoriest of the famewhores, they too will get their own show, or at least another appearance on the one they're on.
What none of them realize, however, is that they can't all have that. The punishment for failure in acquiring the Famewhore Holy Grail can have disastrous effects once the cameras go off. Relationships at home can be strained or ended. Employers may be humiliated to have these people on the payroll. And if you're on a talent-search show for a common job- a cook, a businessperson, an interior designer- and you make a disastrous blunder, or get eliminated early on, your career in that field can easily come to a screeching halt. Never mind getting the dream job the show was offering. What aspiring cook anywhere is going to take lessons from the person who, on national television, can't tell sugar from salt?
(Colleen, Season 5, Hell's Kitchen. I know you were wondering.)
If you truly suck at what you do, or if you truly suck as a person, reality TV has a billion ways to make sure you get yours.
Take 'The Moment Of Truth', technically a game show but with all the spectacle of reality TV. The premise is simple enough. You take a lie detector test prior to the show, are asked a series of questions (some more personal than others), and are given many of the same questions on air. You are tasked with answering honestly. The more questions you answer honestly on-air, the more money you win, up to a top prize of $500,000. (In the American version, at least, and yes, there were international versions.) But if at any point you lie, you lose everything and the game is over. Refuse to answer, and the game is also over, although you (and your loved ones) are given one opportunity to swap out one question you feel is better left unanswered by pressing a button.
On its face, it doesn't sound so bad. But once you start asking the kind of questions you expect someone to answer for half a million dollars- or $200,000, as nobody ever made it to the top of the money ladder in the US version- things go south in a hurry, especially since friends, family and other people in the contestant's life were commonly brought in by FOX to spectate and sometimes ask a question themselves.
And this is prime-time television. They know how you answered before the cameras go on. You know full well they're going to make a beeline for the most humiliating and damaging answers in the whole test. Which is the other thing: the answers are out there once you give them, whether you win any money or not.
The most spectacular revealing of skeletons in someone's closet came by way of Lauren Cleri of Piermont, New York, who would later flat-out admit to the New York Post that she was solely going for the money.
Lauren left enough bridges burned in the process to span an ocean. Host Mark L. Wahlberg, who you'll note as the person who signed up to host this show in the first place, felt the need to make a preshow comment that the episode containing Lauren, had Wahlberg had his way, would not have aired at all, and that it was "the most uncomfortable I've ever been on television."
The episode is available on YouTube here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Here is the line of questions Lauren faced, with her answers in parentheses:
1: As an employee of a hair salon, have you ever told a customer you liked their hairstyle when in fact, you didn't? (no)
2: Have you ever flashed a stranger just for laughs? (yes)
3: Would you give food to a stray dog before you would give it to a homeless person? (yes)
This one got the first groans from the audience. If they only knew what was coming...
4: Have you ever derived pleasure when one of your siblings has gotten into trouble? (yes)
5: Have you ever been fired from a job for stealing money? (yes)
Please note, Lauren hasn't actually won any money yet. The first prize level, $10,000, comes only after answering the first six questions.
6: If you knew you wouldn't get caught, would you steal money from your place of employment? (no)
Now she's won money. The next level is five more questions for $25,000.
7: Since you've been married, have you ever pretended to be asleep in order to avoid having sex with your husband Frank? (yes)
8: Do you blame your husband for your lack of close friends? (yes)
9: Would you ever be a surrogate mother for your sister if she were unable to have children? (yes)
10: Do you think your parents are proud of you? (no)
11: Do you know things about your father that you keep secret from your mother? (yes)
$25,000 and some long talks with Frank are now Lauren's... for now. Next up, four questions for $100,000. And those long talks are about to get longer, as at this point Wahlberg appears for a second advisory warning, mentioning the following to be the part that made him not want to air the episode.
12: Do you secretly stay in touch with any boyfriends that your husband does not know about? (no)
13: Have you ever taken off your wedding ring to appear as if you were single? (yes)
14: Do you believe you might have been in love with a former boyfriend on your wedding day? (yes)
At this point, Wahlberg is half-facepalming and telling Lauren "I can't tell you to walk away" while in the process strongly suggesting it. When she elects to continue, he just shakes his head. Lauren's aforementioned ex arrives on stage to ask the $100,000 question.
15: If I wanted to get back together with you, would you leave your husband?
Wahlberg is almost begging Frank to hit the button and swap the question out, but by now Frank's reaction is 'no, no, now I kinda want to hear this'. So Lauren's sister hits the button instead.
Fate can be cruel, Lauren's sister.
15-A: Do you believe I am the man you should be married to?
Not only was that fight not avoided, it actually got worse. Lauren said yes with disturbingly little hesitation. Coming back true (and making the skipped question easily guessable), she made it to $100,000, which by this point seems not nearly enough money to cover the costs of even attempting to undo all the damage.
So of course Lauren continues on for $200,000, three more questions away.
16: Since you've been married, have you ever had sexual relations with someone other than your husband?
Wahlberg: "I wish the button was still there."
Frank: "You're telling me."
Lauren answered yes. The answer is true. Frank is now burying his face in his hands. Lauren's face has gone cold at this point. ...well, it was prior, but now it is flat-out emotionless. Forget the long talks. There's no longer anything to talk about. This marriage has died right there on-stage.
And then reality TV rears up to give Lauren a good hard smack:
17: Do you think you're a good person?
The entire human race and several species of lichen found only in Antarctica immediately scream the answer. Frank shakes his head no before a word comes out of Lauren's mouth.
Lauren answers yes.
The lie detector begs to differ.
Game over. Lauren walks away with absolutely nothing. This is the end of the episode, and Wahlberg makes one final note in front of an empty stage:
"I honestly believe that some truths are better left unsaid. Hopefully, Lauren and her family can make peace with what happened here tonight. I wish them all the very best."
In fact, the marriage may have been doomed from the moment she was cast. As the New York Post reported:
The show's executive producer, Howard Schultz, said Lauren Cleri told him later that "she doesn't want a relationship [with her ex or her husband].
"She wanted out of her marriage, and she wanted to . . . tell the truth," Schultz told The Post.
"Perhaps some of it was then, 'If I'm going to end my marriage, then if I can win a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars. I can start a new life with some cash in my pocket.' "
Asked if she went on the show to get out of her marriage, Lauren yesterday said "definitely" not.
In an update interview, Lauren noted that she and Frank split up. Or as she put it, "are no longer living under the same roof." An aspiring model, she also told the New York Post that no job offers came out of her appearance.
Considering the nature of modeling, and considering there has been no update on her since, she is in all likelihood still waiting. Her only stable job now is as a cautionary tale.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Mr. Akaka
The Washington Post on Thursday noted that in the current Senate, over 32% of total session time was spent on quorum calls. In practice, this usually entails calling the name of the first Senator alphabetically- in this case, Daniel Akaka of Hawaii- and then sitting around doing nothing because every single Senator is off doing something else. Maybe they're in a committee meeting. Maybe they're in their office. Maybe they're in their home state. Maybe they're in a round of Team Fortress 2. They're not on the Senate floor is what matters, and so C-SPAN plays classical music just to break up the static image on the screen.
The Post shows this as nothing getting done. And really, not much is. The Senate is only barely functional at this particular juncture and the increase in quorum call time is a reflection of that. But I would argue that there is a silver lining here.
The quorum calls serve to cut down on what I've come to call 'kabuki theater'.
I've used the phrase before, but I've never really delved too much into just what kabuki theater is. Kabuki theater is any political event that looks good for the cameras, that gives the media something to do and something to debate, but functionally accomplishes little and serves little practical purpose. It is anything that is a functional waste of everyone's time that could better be spent doing something else.
Kabuki theater is the daily White House press briefing that breaks no news and features a man who is very possibly the most out of the loop of anyone in the White House.
Kabuki theater is the debate featuring candidates who have memorized heavily scripted responses to every question the moderator is likely to ask, methods of railroading an unanticipated question back into scripted territory, and finely-tuned zingers to use in response to the response you have been briefed that your opponent will give, all of which results in the debate invariably being called a tie.
Kabuki theater is any speech given on a legislative chamber floor to an empty room.
Kabuki theater is any debate taking place on a legislative chamber floor the occurs despite all involved knowing at that moment exactly how everyone will vote regardless of what is being said, and who is going to get their way when all is said and done.
Kabuki theater is any debate on a political talk show that consists entirely of everyone yelling over each other and ends after five minutes with 'we'll have to leave it there' and a commercial break.
Kabuki theater is the default setting for most politicians skilled enough to make it to the federal level, any time they think there's a camera around. (Emphasis on 'skilled enough'. If this year has shown us one thing about state-level politics, it is that state legislatures are comparable to the minor leagues. There are people at that level who just aren't talented or seasoned enough to make it at the higher level, and you can see why.)
Kabuki theater, by definition, does not happen when everyone thinks the cameras are off.
This puts us in a bit of a dilemma. On one hand, if the things that happen on-camera are contrived and functionally useless, it would logically pay to put politics off-camera more often, or at least make it appear off-camera. After all, if there's no camera, kabuki theater cannot exist.
On the other hand, doing so would mean we have less of an idea what they're doing, and trying to eliminate most- maybe any- of these elements outright would probably just result in a lot of talk about smoke-filled backrooms and the Death of an Informed Populace. Who knows whose votes are being changed or even bought? And what, or who, made them change sides?
The solution really depends on the situation. What's the mentality of the people currently in office. remember that this is a job where the employees are in a constant mental arms race with each other. Anything put in place to solve Problem A will, sooner or later, be met with Loophole B. The rules and conventions thus have to shift and adapt to whatever legislative mentality may arise.
It also depends what you want out of your government. What attributes, if you had to choose, do you value over others. Do you most value openness? Do you most value compromise? Do you most value the quick passage of bills? Do you most value politicians simply buckling down and getting to work? Each answer requires different solutions.
There may even be the odd person that thinks, given the specific batch of people in office, the less they do, the better, and so the more time spent on kabuki theater, the less time spent actually passing bills. But it's reasonable to think that these people are in the vast minority.
The specific solutions aren't easy. I'm not going to promise anything of the sort. But the one thing that is certain is that simply stomping one's feet and going 'Fix it NOW! Shame on you!' isn't really going to help. Just yelling at them to stop the kabuki theater isn't going to make them stop. That's not enough. You need a plan. (You can always vote the offenders out, but remember that's far from a cure-all. The replacements may very well bring problems of their own.)
In the two previous pieces concerning kabuki theater, I put plans forward for press briefings and debates.
It might be that quorum calls are the solution to useless, time-wasting speeches on the Senate floor. The Senators once conducted most or all of their business from their desks on the floor, and now they have other venues of business as well. But then again, it might not. The time-wasting kabuki theater speeches can and will still be given, but at a later time or date.
I really am stuck on a solution, or even if there is a solution to be had. Aside from 'vote them out', any ideas?
The Post shows this as nothing getting done. And really, not much is. The Senate is only barely functional at this particular juncture and the increase in quorum call time is a reflection of that. But I would argue that there is a silver lining here.
The quorum calls serve to cut down on what I've come to call 'kabuki theater'.
I've used the phrase before, but I've never really delved too much into just what kabuki theater is. Kabuki theater is any political event that looks good for the cameras, that gives the media something to do and something to debate, but functionally accomplishes little and serves little practical purpose. It is anything that is a functional waste of everyone's time that could better be spent doing something else.
Kabuki theater is the daily White House press briefing that breaks no news and features a man who is very possibly the most out of the loop of anyone in the White House.
Kabuki theater is the debate featuring candidates who have memorized heavily scripted responses to every question the moderator is likely to ask, methods of railroading an unanticipated question back into scripted territory, and finely-tuned zingers to use in response to the response you have been briefed that your opponent will give, all of which results in the debate invariably being called a tie.
Kabuki theater is any speech given on a legislative chamber floor to an empty room.
Kabuki theater is any debate taking place on a legislative chamber floor the occurs despite all involved knowing at that moment exactly how everyone will vote regardless of what is being said, and who is going to get their way when all is said and done.
Kabuki theater is any debate on a political talk show that consists entirely of everyone yelling over each other and ends after five minutes with 'we'll have to leave it there' and a commercial break.
Kabuki theater is the default setting for most politicians skilled enough to make it to the federal level, any time they think there's a camera around. (Emphasis on 'skilled enough'. If this year has shown us one thing about state-level politics, it is that state legislatures are comparable to the minor leagues. There are people at that level who just aren't talented or seasoned enough to make it at the higher level, and you can see why.)
Kabuki theater, by definition, does not happen when everyone thinks the cameras are off.
This puts us in a bit of a dilemma. On one hand, if the things that happen on-camera are contrived and functionally useless, it would logically pay to put politics off-camera more often, or at least make it appear off-camera. After all, if there's no camera, kabuki theater cannot exist.
On the other hand, doing so would mean we have less of an idea what they're doing, and trying to eliminate most- maybe any- of these elements outright would probably just result in a lot of talk about smoke-filled backrooms and the Death of an Informed Populace. Who knows whose votes are being changed or even bought? And what, or who, made them change sides?
The solution really depends on the situation. What's the mentality of the people currently in office. remember that this is a job where the employees are in a constant mental arms race with each other. Anything put in place to solve Problem A will, sooner or later, be met with Loophole B. The rules and conventions thus have to shift and adapt to whatever legislative mentality may arise.
It also depends what you want out of your government. What attributes, if you had to choose, do you value over others. Do you most value openness? Do you most value compromise? Do you most value the quick passage of bills? Do you most value politicians simply buckling down and getting to work? Each answer requires different solutions.
There may even be the odd person that thinks, given the specific batch of people in office, the less they do, the better, and so the more time spent on kabuki theater, the less time spent actually passing bills. But it's reasonable to think that these people are in the vast minority.
The specific solutions aren't easy. I'm not going to promise anything of the sort. But the one thing that is certain is that simply stomping one's feet and going 'Fix it NOW! Shame on you!' isn't really going to help. Just yelling at them to stop the kabuki theater isn't going to make them stop. That's not enough. You need a plan. (You can always vote the offenders out, but remember that's far from a cure-all. The replacements may very well bring problems of their own.)
In the two previous pieces concerning kabuki theater, I put plans forward for press briefings and debates.
It might be that quorum calls are the solution to useless, time-wasting speeches on the Senate floor. The Senators once conducted most or all of their business from their desks on the floor, and now they have other venues of business as well. But then again, it might not. The time-wasting kabuki theater speeches can and will still be given, but at a later time or date.
I really am stuck on a solution, or even if there is a solution to be had. Aside from 'vote them out', any ideas?
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Wisconsin Recall Update
We have allegations of recall signatures being gathered from, among others, the dead.
How's democracy going where you live? (That includes you, first Tunisian visitor who just showed up. Welcome aboard, guy.)
How's democracy going where you live? (That includes you, first Tunisian visitor who just showed up. Welcome aboard, guy.)
Friday, April 8, 2011
Nicked Votes
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus has apparently, due to "human error"- namely, her own- failed to input 14,315 votes from Brookfield, which when added into the totals hand David Prosser a 7,000 vote lead. That's just barely enough to push the race out of the realm of an automatic recount, meaning Joanne Kloppenburg would have to pay for it, at the cost of $5 a ward.
When one looks at Nickolaus, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports, it becomes clear she is used to this kind of attention...
Given the timing of the find, the very coincidental amount of votes found, the place they were found being Prosser's and the Republican base, and Nickolaus' previous history, even after 538 pegs it all as incompetence rather than corruption, it seems fishier than the Time Bandit. Either way, it means Nickolaus has messed up badly.
If this is corruption, Nickolaus has stolen an election.
If this is incompetence, Nickolaus has disenfranchised 14,315 people, even if only for two days.
Either way, she should not be allowed anywhere near the inner workings of the political process at any point in the future.
When one looks at Nickolaus, as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports, it becomes clear she is used to this kind of attention...
In the 1990s, she worked as a staffer for the Assembly Republican caucus, one of four GOP and Democratic legislative groups that were shut down following a criminal investigation into state staffers doing campaign work on state time.
Prosser led Assembly Republicans as minority leader in that House from 1989 to 1994 and than as speaker in 1995 and 1996, giving him oversight of the GOP caucus in that House.
"To my knowledge (Prosser) has not had any contact with Kathy since she left the caucus," Prosser campaign manager Brian Nemoir said.
The caucus investigation eventually led to the resignations and criminal convictions of leaders in the Senate and Assembly for directing caucus and staff employees to engage in illegal political activity during their state employment.
Nickolaus, who earned $54,000 a year as a data analyst and computer specialist for Assembly Republicans, was granted immunity in 2001 by authorities conducting the investigation.
In a criminal complaint issued in 2002 against then-Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen and others, prosecutors claimed Nickolaus developed a computer software program that was used by state officials to track donations. According to a Journal Sentinel report, Nickolaus said she developed the software on her own time because she wanted to sell it to the state elections agency for use in automating state-required campaign reports. She left the caucus around that time.
Given the timing of the find, the very coincidental amount of votes found, the place they were found being Prosser's and the Republican base, and Nickolaus' previous history, even after 538 pegs it all as incompetence rather than corruption, it seems fishier than the Time Bandit. Either way, it means Nickolaus has messed up badly.
If this is corruption, Nickolaus has stolen an election.
If this is incompetence, Nickolaus has disenfranchised 14,315 people, even if only for two days.
Either way, she should not be allowed anywhere near the inner workings of the political process at any point in the future.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
No 'Koch' Puns; I Have Dignity Today
Okay, I guess I'm getting screechy after all. Ian Murphy, the editor of the Buffalo Beast, an alternative newspaper that later went exclusively online, decided to pose over the phone as David Koch, one of the conservative financier Koch brothers. His goal was to get through to Scott Walker.
Normally when someone tries this kind of thing, they either get busted immediately, or best case, they get through but are busted partway through the call.
Murphy, meanwhile, not only got through, but held an entire conversation with Walker, whose office later confirmed the call as authentic. (As the Beast's website is throwing out 404's right now, I link to the Huffington Post instead.)
This is the audio of that call, evidently held at 2 PM yesterday, which means I was in Madison while this call was taking place.
EDIT: You know... it might help if I posted the second half of that audio too.
Normally when someone tries this kind of thing, they either get busted immediately, or best case, they get through but are busted partway through the call.
Murphy, meanwhile, not only got through, but held an entire conversation with Walker, whose office later confirmed the call as authentic. (As the Beast's website is throwing out 404's right now, I link to the Huffington Post instead.)
This is the audio of that call, evidently held at 2 PM yesterday, which means I was in Madison while this call was taking place.
EDIT: You know... it might help if I posted the second half of that audio too.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Orioles Magic, Feel It Happen
You should know, if you're a baseball fan, that a forfeited game is put into the books with a score of 9-0. That's not really the whole story, though, as it takes rather extraordinary circumstances to cause a game to be forfeited. From the beginnings of pro baseball to today, there have only been 139, and only five since 1954. The most famous of these is, of course, Disco Demolition Night, in which a 1979 Bill Veeck promotion to blow up disco records between games of a Tigers-White Sox doubleheader resulted in a riot and so many fans storming the field uncontrollably that the diamond at Comiskey Park was rendered unusable and the White Sox forfeited Game 2.
That's the most famous. But I wager there's another forfeited game from way back in the old days that is perhaps even more spectacular than that.
We have to go back to 1902. The St. Louis Browns of the American League were playing the Baltimore Orioles. No, not the Baltimore Orioles you know from today; the current Orioles are the St. Louis Browns from this particular story. What about the Orioles you see here? Well, we'll get to that.
But first, we must cast our gaze on New York. In 1902, Tammany Hall, the most notorious political machine in American history, was 30 years past the arrest of Boss Tweed, the most notoriously corrupt politician in American history, and was as strong as if he had never left.
Part of Tammany Hall in 1902 was a man named Andrew Freedman, who had bought the New York Giants in 1895. In 1902, the Giants were awful. After the games of July 16, they were 22-50 and in dead last, 33.5 games back on the league-leading Pittsburgh Pirates. They would ultimately finish 48-88, 53.5 games behind Pittsburgh. Freedman wanted to pull the Giants out of the tailspin and, being a member of Tammany Hall, he had his ways.
Meanwhile, in Baltimore, the Orioles were in 7th place- next-to-last- 31-40, 13.5 games off the pace set by the Chicago White Sox. By the close of business July 16, they were riding a 6-game losing streak, their longest of the season to that point. John McGraw, player-manager of the Orioles, hated his job. He didn't hate managing. Just managing for the Orioles, and managing in the American League, which was at war with the National League over player contracts. The World Series would not start until 1903, and until then leagues would commonly raid the talent of other leagues. McGraw and Ban Johnson, president of the American League, were feuding. McGraw had earned multiple suspensions and gotten in multiple fights with umpires, and by June 1902, he had had about enough.
Enter Andrew Freedman. He wanted talent. McGraw, a future Hall of Famer, wanted out of Baltimore. According to Kiss 'Em Goodbye: An ESPN Treasury of Failed, Forgotten and Departed Teams by Dennis Purdy, they concocted a plan. The first thing McGraw needed to do was get himself suspended. Easy. On June 28 against the Boston Red Sox, he got the Orioles riled up enough to attack umpire Tom Connolly and forfeit the game.
That's not the forfeit we're looking at.
McGraw next had to get out of Baltimore. Done. Baltimore was fed up with him anyway. As McGraw was packing for (where else?) the Giants, though, McGraw sold some shares in the Orioles that he had purchased in 1901 when the franchise was granted. The buyer of these shares- and enough additional shares to claim majority control- was Joseph C. France, a frontman for Freedman. This was done on July 16. Effectively, the New York Giants, as of July 16, 1902, owned the Baltimore Orioles.
Freedman spent the next 20 hours thoroughly gutting the Orioles, systematically stripping the team of everyone of any quality and placing them with his Giants and, to a lesser degree, the Cincinnati Reds, whose owner, John T. Brush, had also put up some money for this little adventure and thus got some players as a thank-you gesture. The Giants sniped, among others, two future Hall of Famers, Roger Bresnahan and Joe McGinnity. The Reds' gains were led by Mike Donlin, who would go on to finish second in the NL in hitting in 1903, batting .351.
By the scheduled first pitch of the next day, July 17, the Orioles had only five players remaining on the roster: Jimmy Williams, Billy Gilbert, Kip Selbach, Harry Howell, and Wilbert Robinson. Freedman had not been overly concerned with replacing the players he had taken. It takes nine to play, and when the Browns showed up with their full complement, there wasn't anything the Orioles could do except forfeit to the Browns.
At this point, Ban Johnson stepped in and invoked a rule allowing the league to take control of any club that can't field a team, and ordered the other seven teams in the AL to send Baltimore a player each so they could finish out the year. Wilbert Robinson was asked to serve as player-manager the rest of the way. Unsurprisingly, the Orioles finished last.
So what ultimately happened to these Orioles? Freedman had until 1902 used his Tammany Hall muscle to prevent any local competition to the Giants. According to Field of Screams: The Dark Underside of America's National Pastime by Richard Scheinin, every time Johnson scoped out a site to put a team, Freedman would threaten to have a street run right through the middle of it. But later in the season, Freedman sold the Giants to John T. Brush, who in turn handed over the Reds to August Herrmann. After the 1902 season drew to a close, Freedman lost political clout in the ensuing election to a reformist slate of candidates led by incoming Tammany boss Charles Francis Murphy. Johnson had his opportunity, and took it.
The Baltimore Orioles were moved to New York for the 1903 season, and renamed the Highlanders. You know them today as the New York Yankees.
That's the most famous. But I wager there's another forfeited game from way back in the old days that is perhaps even more spectacular than that.
We have to go back to 1902. The St. Louis Browns of the American League were playing the Baltimore Orioles. No, not the Baltimore Orioles you know from today; the current Orioles are the St. Louis Browns from this particular story. What about the Orioles you see here? Well, we'll get to that.
But first, we must cast our gaze on New York. In 1902, Tammany Hall, the most notorious political machine in American history, was 30 years past the arrest of Boss Tweed, the most notoriously corrupt politician in American history, and was as strong as if he had never left.
Part of Tammany Hall in 1902 was a man named Andrew Freedman, who had bought the New York Giants in 1895. In 1902, the Giants were awful. After the games of July 16, they were 22-50 and in dead last, 33.5 games back on the league-leading Pittsburgh Pirates. They would ultimately finish 48-88, 53.5 games behind Pittsburgh. Freedman wanted to pull the Giants out of the tailspin and, being a member of Tammany Hall, he had his ways.
Meanwhile, in Baltimore, the Orioles were in 7th place- next-to-last- 31-40, 13.5 games off the pace set by the Chicago White Sox. By the close of business July 16, they were riding a 6-game losing streak, their longest of the season to that point. John McGraw, player-manager of the Orioles, hated his job. He didn't hate managing. Just managing for the Orioles, and managing in the American League, which was at war with the National League over player contracts. The World Series would not start until 1903, and until then leagues would commonly raid the talent of other leagues. McGraw and Ban Johnson, president of the American League, were feuding. McGraw had earned multiple suspensions and gotten in multiple fights with umpires, and by June 1902, he had had about enough.
Enter Andrew Freedman. He wanted talent. McGraw, a future Hall of Famer, wanted out of Baltimore. According to Kiss 'Em Goodbye: An ESPN Treasury of Failed, Forgotten and Departed Teams by Dennis Purdy, they concocted a plan. The first thing McGraw needed to do was get himself suspended. Easy. On June 28 against the Boston Red Sox, he got the Orioles riled up enough to attack umpire Tom Connolly and forfeit the game.
That's not the forfeit we're looking at.
McGraw next had to get out of Baltimore. Done. Baltimore was fed up with him anyway. As McGraw was packing for (where else?) the Giants, though, McGraw sold some shares in the Orioles that he had purchased in 1901 when the franchise was granted. The buyer of these shares- and enough additional shares to claim majority control- was Joseph C. France, a frontman for Freedman. This was done on July 16. Effectively, the New York Giants, as of July 16, 1902, owned the Baltimore Orioles.
Freedman spent the next 20 hours thoroughly gutting the Orioles, systematically stripping the team of everyone of any quality and placing them with his Giants and, to a lesser degree, the Cincinnati Reds, whose owner, John T. Brush, had also put up some money for this little adventure and thus got some players as a thank-you gesture. The Giants sniped, among others, two future Hall of Famers, Roger Bresnahan and Joe McGinnity. The Reds' gains were led by Mike Donlin, who would go on to finish second in the NL in hitting in 1903, batting .351.
By the scheduled first pitch of the next day, July 17, the Orioles had only five players remaining on the roster: Jimmy Williams, Billy Gilbert, Kip Selbach, Harry Howell, and Wilbert Robinson. Freedman had not been overly concerned with replacing the players he had taken. It takes nine to play, and when the Browns showed up with their full complement, there wasn't anything the Orioles could do except forfeit to the Browns.
At this point, Ban Johnson stepped in and invoked a rule allowing the league to take control of any club that can't field a team, and ordered the other seven teams in the AL to send Baltimore a player each so they could finish out the year. Wilbert Robinson was asked to serve as player-manager the rest of the way. Unsurprisingly, the Orioles finished last.
So what ultimately happened to these Orioles? Freedman had until 1902 used his Tammany Hall muscle to prevent any local competition to the Giants. According to Field of Screams: The Dark Underside of America's National Pastime by Richard Scheinin, every time Johnson scoped out a site to put a team, Freedman would threaten to have a street run right through the middle of it. But later in the season, Freedman sold the Giants to John T. Brush, who in turn handed over the Reds to August Herrmann. After the 1902 season drew to a close, Freedman lost political clout in the ensuing election to a reformist slate of candidates led by incoming Tammany boss Charles Francis Murphy. Johnson had his opportunity, and took it.
The Baltimore Orioles were moved to New York for the 1903 season, and renamed the Highlanders. You know them today as the New York Yankees.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Wikiplexed
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
Anyone who doesn't know the name Julian Assange by now is hiding under a rock. He's the Wikileaks guy, for the two of you that applies to. He takes leaks provided by a range of whistleblowers, and after a period of time spent X-ing out the informant's name, releases the leaks to the general public. For a while, this worked out pretty well. The leaks had a place to go, once in a while they'd get major media airtime, Wikileaks got a free plug, everyone ends up happy (aside from whoever's information got leaked.)
Recently, though, it's all gone wrong. Half the world's governments would love nothing more than to see a bullet through Assange's head, with much of the general public none to fond of him either, generally those from countries Assange has targeted. Interpol knows where he is and is one order away from moving on him. Sweden wants him on (disputed) sexual charges. Some Americans want to try him as a spy. Ecuador offered, then rescinded, an offer of safe haven. Wikileaks is losing places to host a server, as well as sources of financial support.
Things began to fall apart, at least from my vantage point, right around the time of the leak of the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, obviously NSFW, which was leaked back in April. Wikileaks, at this point, went from an in-the-background place to do your leaking to a news item in and of itself, placing its own practices in the spotlight. They came to a head just recently, when the first of the 251,287 diplomatic cables began to see light. So what of it all? What can we learn from all this?
Not all that much, actually. At least, not much that Assange has been intending to teach.
You see, a lot of his previous leaks never really drew much attention. Part of the reason, I think, has to do with the sheer size of the information dump being conducted. Remember the healthcare debate? Remember how many teeth had to be pulled to get people to read a 2,000-page bill? Remember how much hay was made of the size of said bill? People often made it onto the news simply for having read the entire bill front to back. 2,000 pages is a tiny, pint-sized Wikileak. Again, the diplomatic cables number 251,287. Assange himself has readily admitted that he receives more material than he can sift through on his own. Which is the thing. If he can't do it, the average person has no chance. No matter how much info is presented, one person can only get through so much. If the important bits are hidden among pages and pages of detritus, the important bits tend to go unnoticed, as if they were never leaked at all. In journalism, this is called 'burying the lede', and considering that Assange believes himself to at some level be a journalist, he ought to know this. When the important information is easily findable by a visitor, things run smoothly. When not, it has less impact.
With the diplomatic cables, he has reversed this and resolved not to bury the lede. However, he has gone too far in the other direction. He has made everything a lede. News cycle after news cycle sees only a small easily-digestible handful of the quarter-million cables released, with each and every one devoured. So far, only about 1,100 have seen air.
But there's a problem. 251,287 cables does not mean 251,287 bombshell revelations. Far from it. There is the assorted useful piece of information. There almost has to be. You take any random group of 251,287 diplomatic cables, there's bound to be something new and interesting. The knowledge that China is not as warm towards North Korea as originally thought, the plan by Hillary Clinton concerning spying at UN headquarters, these can be of use. But other things Assange may have intended as bombshells are really nothing that someone paying sufficient attention to the news might already have figured out independently. China's cavalier attitude and hacking of Google shouldn't come as a large shock if you had been paying attention to Google's early adventures in China, where they came perilously close to pulling out of the country entirely. Google had suspected as much. Corruption in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not big surprises if you had been paying attention to previous reports on same that did not require Assange's assistance to find out. Vladimir Putin knew of the death of Aleksander Litvinenko, we've learned, but then, this was merely a confirmation of something just about everybody had reckoned from day one. The cables show China as flexing their muscle in diplomacy to the point of irritation by much of the rest of the world, but then, this is about as easily seen as the sun. The part about China's irritation with Norway was already found out when the Norwegian-based Nobel committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, to where people came away knowing that if China wasn't aggressive towards Norway before, they certainly are now. We learn from the cables that the United States is doubtful of Mexico's ability to fight the drug cartels, but then, who isn't? Any news value is merely concerning tone and scale. Even the China/North Korea leak is seen as some as overstating the case.
And then there's the chatter behind each other's backs. The insults. The gossip, as it's been so frequently called. These are functionally worthless. Less than worthless, even. Sure. Diplomats are catty behind each other's backs. So are workers in just about any field of employment ever. This is nothing compared to what often happens in the diplomatic world. Spies are frequently sent into that field; it's easy to spy and easy to pull the spy out if something goes wrong. Duplicity is a grand, time-honored tradition in the diplomatic universe, of which you can find examples all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome; the Bible; the time of Hammurabi. People talking derisively about other people in the State Department? Well, I never! All that is likely to happen by releasing these is that it makes people less likely to talk to these diplomats, and go to other methods, potentially war, to achieve their goals concerning the countries involved. Diplomats also engage in diplomacy- trying to get along with each other. Why engage in conversation with another country if this is going to be the result of discussing things in their country (these are all cables from embassies in the US)? Forget talk. Might as well take the more direct and forceful route. And in moments of particularly high tension, one wrong word can sometimes be all it takes to light the powder keg. Go and look at all the duplicity that went on over the course of the Cold War, spying, name-calling and everything. How much of it that was not public at the time of its occurrence do you think could have been leaked without either the Americans or Soviets pushing the button in response? Not a whole lot, really.
That is, if it's only one target. A curious thing about blame is that when everybody is guilty, frequently, nobody is. Governmental investigations of lobbyists and corporations and such more frequently claim a scalp when someone is singled out for blame. When someone wants people not to 'play the blame game', this is what they're trying to do: make everybody guilty so that individuals- or, more to the usual point, they themselves- don't actually suffer consequences.
This is the phenomenon that Assange, in his zeal, has seemingly triggered. Though he may hate Hillary Clinton and want her to step down, he has created so many other guilty parties that few are in a moral position to press for her ouster, not that one would do so over such trifling things anyway, and the ones that have not been targeted have ample reason to believe they will be soon enough and any attempt to go after Clinton will end up blowing back on them. There will be a black eye for a while, yes, but eventually, all will be forgiven.
There is a debate that exists over whether we have a right to know about the content of these cables or whether they should remain secret. The first thing we must establish is that, either way, the debate does not apply to Assange. His informant, perhaps, who's surely in for a world of hurt because Assange's technique of simply X-ing out the informant's name is absolutely boneheaded, but not Assange. (Any interested party with a copy of the information can just look to see what got X'ed out, see what name is there, and go after that person; the informant would actually be better hidden if Assange didn't X out anything at all. It's the anonymity equivalent of giving the informant a large neon sign saying "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS MAN".) The cables originate in the United States. Assange is Australian and does not answer to American authority. (Not that he answers to Australian authority either, but you get the point.)
We've covered this particular mentality in a previous piece. Foreign nongovernmental entities don't really care what you think of them. And when an empire declines, as the piece exposits, everybody wants to get their licks in. Assange could, in a sense, be compared to the Visigoths sacking Rome, accelerating the empire's decline by making off with things of importance to the empire- in this case, the empire's secrets, privacy and reputation. An actual sacking of Washington DC, or any major world capital, would be unfeasible in this particular day and age, but what one can do is, instead of taking objects of value directly, take the ability to earn those objects or be able to afford to keep the objects they have. This being an age of information, every time a secret is divulged against one's will, every time one's dirty laundry is forced out into the open, it's like another gold coin, another gemstone, another crown jewel out the door.
Anyway. Do we have a right to know about these things? It's in the eye of the beholder as to the exact amount, really, but there is a line somewhere. You wouldn't divulge nuclear launch codes, for example. Obviously to suggest that you should is ridiculous, but that's just to establish the fact that a line exists somewhere- somewhere, anywhere. Any secret less important than that which you'd want to keep is merely helping to establish the location of the line. And the line, at least to me, does come well before that. Obviously there are things we need to know as well. I mean, look what I deal in around here. I want to know a whole bunch of stuff too. But I'm willing to wait if that knowledge is of the type where the downsides of having it be public knowledge outweigh the upsides. It's the political equivalent of a football playbook. You would not ask a football team to divulge, for public consumption, the contents of the playbook they are using this season. For them to do so would be to virtually guarantee that they lose their games. When a football player is called into the coach's office to be cut, they're told to take their playbook with them. You don't want them running off with it after they're no longer on the team.
However, the downsides diminish over time, as the information becomes outdated, so eventually just about everything becomes safe to release. Including playbooks. Any random fan can go out and find books containing diagrams of old plays. Most Packers fans will be able to tell you about a particular old play of Vince Lombardi's, the power sweep. Someone made a Broadway play to tell you all about it. It's a matter of what is okay to release and when, and it can be very tricky sometimes to establish the threshold.
As a whole, Assange has selected cables for which the downsides have been deemed by most to outweigh the upsides, in particular the catty insults. The questionability of the value of the leaked cables has done a strange thing: it's made this all less about the rights of the people to know, and more about Assange and his motives than is healthy for one who purports to engage in journalism. And his motives are plain as day: he describes himself as "a combative person" who enjoys "crushing bastards." Crushing bastards, as he puts it, is well and good, and a lot of people get into the industry with visions of the day they get to crush a bastard dancing in their head like sugar plums. But it is not something where you should be waking up and saying 'So which bastard am I going to crush today?' You try not to make the story about you. Sometimes you can't help but insert yourself into the story, but even so, you are trying to be merely a part of the story, not the story itself. And if you do become the story, you want to try to get the story off of you and back onto the original topic. Assange has become the story and is making no efforts to change that, and in the process a budding debate over how some governments are reacting to the content- the United States with warning people in an official government capacity away from reading the leaks, China opting for a straight blackout- has been to a degree choked out by stories about Assange. The debate here is peppered with frustration that while Wikileaks goes to considerable lengths to force out the information of others, they themselves remain deeply in the shadows. Considering the amount of people after them, this seems necessary if they want to remain able to do any leaking, but it smacks of hypocrisy to some who disagree to one degree or another.
He does, however, have an out. Maybe not out of his problems with the authorities, but out of his problems with the public. If there's one entity people tend to hate these days more than the government, it's banks. Assange has made note that among his cache of yet-to-be-released information is a "mega-leak" from a major American bank. Which one, he will not say. This fact has caused the ears of many to perk up, eager to find out what this leak contains. Arguably, there's more interest in the prospective bank leak than in the diplomatic cables. Assange, by releasing this, would get a significant segment of the public back on his side, carrying the dual advantage of being a popular and worthwhile target. The fact that he also has information on BP (he doesn't know if it's unique) helps his cause further. And if apprehended by Interpol or someone else, he has a contingency plan, namely, tens of thousands of other people who went to the Pirate Bay, a sympathetic site, and downloaded an 'insurance' file which includes, among other things, the remaining cables and the BP files, who will all recieve decryption codes in the event of his capture or death and put everything out in one gigantic tsunami of information dumping. This brings us back to the first problem of some important information flying under the radar, but at that point it can't really be avoided.
Assange has what is surely some extremely useful information, somewhere in all of that, and has taken great pains to ensure its eventual release. But he has no sense of what information is useful and what information is filler, or alternatively, he doesn't care. He has the potential to change the world in profoundly positive ways, and has provided a vehicle for this to be facilitated with an ease not previously seen anywhere, but has let it go to his head such that the vehicle has been damaged.
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
What am I going to do with you?
Anyone who doesn't know the name Julian Assange by now is hiding under a rock. He's the Wikileaks guy, for the two of you that applies to. He takes leaks provided by a range of whistleblowers, and after a period of time spent X-ing out the informant's name, releases the leaks to the general public. For a while, this worked out pretty well. The leaks had a place to go, once in a while they'd get major media airtime, Wikileaks got a free plug, everyone ends up happy (aside from whoever's information got leaked.)
Recently, though, it's all gone wrong. Half the world's governments would love nothing more than to see a bullet through Assange's head, with much of the general public none to fond of him either, generally those from countries Assange has targeted. Interpol knows where he is and is one order away from moving on him. Sweden wants him on (disputed) sexual charges. Some Americans want to try him as a spy. Ecuador offered, then rescinded, an offer of safe haven. Wikileaks is losing places to host a server, as well as sources of financial support.
Things began to fall apart, at least from my vantage point, right around the time of the leak of the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, obviously NSFW, which was leaked back in April. Wikileaks, at this point, went from an in-the-background place to do your leaking to a news item in and of itself, placing its own practices in the spotlight. They came to a head just recently, when the first of the 251,287 diplomatic cables began to see light. So what of it all? What can we learn from all this?
Not all that much, actually. At least, not much that Assange has been intending to teach.
You see, a lot of his previous leaks never really drew much attention. Part of the reason, I think, has to do with the sheer size of the information dump being conducted. Remember the healthcare debate? Remember how many teeth had to be pulled to get people to read a 2,000-page bill? Remember how much hay was made of the size of said bill? People often made it onto the news simply for having read the entire bill front to back. 2,000 pages is a tiny, pint-sized Wikileak. Again, the diplomatic cables number 251,287. Assange himself has readily admitted that he receives more material than he can sift through on his own. Which is the thing. If he can't do it, the average person has no chance. No matter how much info is presented, one person can only get through so much. If the important bits are hidden among pages and pages of detritus, the important bits tend to go unnoticed, as if they were never leaked at all. In journalism, this is called 'burying the lede', and considering that Assange believes himself to at some level be a journalist, he ought to know this. When the important information is easily findable by a visitor, things run smoothly. When not, it has less impact.
With the diplomatic cables, he has reversed this and resolved not to bury the lede. However, he has gone too far in the other direction. He has made everything a lede. News cycle after news cycle sees only a small easily-digestible handful of the quarter-million cables released, with each and every one devoured. So far, only about 1,100 have seen air.
But there's a problem. 251,287 cables does not mean 251,287 bombshell revelations. Far from it. There is the assorted useful piece of information. There almost has to be. You take any random group of 251,287 diplomatic cables, there's bound to be something new and interesting. The knowledge that China is not as warm towards North Korea as originally thought, the plan by Hillary Clinton concerning spying at UN headquarters, these can be of use. But other things Assange may have intended as bombshells are really nothing that someone paying sufficient attention to the news might already have figured out independently. China's cavalier attitude and hacking of Google shouldn't come as a large shock if you had been paying attention to Google's early adventures in China, where they came perilously close to pulling out of the country entirely. Google had suspected as much. Corruption in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not big surprises if you had been paying attention to previous reports on same that did not require Assange's assistance to find out. Vladimir Putin knew of the death of Aleksander Litvinenko, we've learned, but then, this was merely a confirmation of something just about everybody had reckoned from day one. The cables show China as flexing their muscle in diplomacy to the point of irritation by much of the rest of the world, but then, this is about as easily seen as the sun. The part about China's irritation with Norway was already found out when the Norwegian-based Nobel committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, to where people came away knowing that if China wasn't aggressive towards Norway before, they certainly are now. We learn from the cables that the United States is doubtful of Mexico's ability to fight the drug cartels, but then, who isn't? Any news value is merely concerning tone and scale. Even the China/North Korea leak is seen as some as overstating the case.
And then there's the chatter behind each other's backs. The insults. The gossip, as it's been so frequently called. These are functionally worthless. Less than worthless, even. Sure. Diplomats are catty behind each other's backs. So are workers in just about any field of employment ever. This is nothing compared to what often happens in the diplomatic world. Spies are frequently sent into that field; it's easy to spy and easy to pull the spy out if something goes wrong. Duplicity is a grand, time-honored tradition in the diplomatic universe, of which you can find examples all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome; the Bible; the time of Hammurabi. People talking derisively about other people in the State Department? Well, I never! All that is likely to happen by releasing these is that it makes people less likely to talk to these diplomats, and go to other methods, potentially war, to achieve their goals concerning the countries involved. Diplomats also engage in diplomacy- trying to get along with each other. Why engage in conversation with another country if this is going to be the result of discussing things in their country (these are all cables from embassies in the US)? Forget talk. Might as well take the more direct and forceful route. And in moments of particularly high tension, one wrong word can sometimes be all it takes to light the powder keg. Go and look at all the duplicity that went on over the course of the Cold War, spying, name-calling and everything. How much of it that was not public at the time of its occurrence do you think could have been leaked without either the Americans or Soviets pushing the button in response? Not a whole lot, really.
That is, if it's only one target. A curious thing about blame is that when everybody is guilty, frequently, nobody is. Governmental investigations of lobbyists and corporations and such more frequently claim a scalp when someone is singled out for blame. When someone wants people not to 'play the blame game', this is what they're trying to do: make everybody guilty so that individuals- or, more to the usual point, they themselves- don't actually suffer consequences.
This is the phenomenon that Assange, in his zeal, has seemingly triggered. Though he may hate Hillary Clinton and want her to step down, he has created so many other guilty parties that few are in a moral position to press for her ouster, not that one would do so over such trifling things anyway, and the ones that have not been targeted have ample reason to believe they will be soon enough and any attempt to go after Clinton will end up blowing back on them. There will be a black eye for a while, yes, but eventually, all will be forgiven.
There is a debate that exists over whether we have a right to know about the content of these cables or whether they should remain secret. The first thing we must establish is that, either way, the debate does not apply to Assange. His informant, perhaps, who's surely in for a world of hurt because Assange's technique of simply X-ing out the informant's name is absolutely boneheaded, but not Assange. (Any interested party with a copy of the information can just look to see what got X'ed out, see what name is there, and go after that person; the informant would actually be better hidden if Assange didn't X out anything at all. It's the anonymity equivalent of giving the informant a large neon sign saying "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS MAN".) The cables originate in the United States. Assange is Australian and does not answer to American authority. (Not that he answers to Australian authority either, but you get the point.)
We've covered this particular mentality in a previous piece. Foreign nongovernmental entities don't really care what you think of them. And when an empire declines, as the piece exposits, everybody wants to get their licks in. Assange could, in a sense, be compared to the Visigoths sacking Rome, accelerating the empire's decline by making off with things of importance to the empire- in this case, the empire's secrets, privacy and reputation. An actual sacking of Washington DC, or any major world capital, would be unfeasible in this particular day and age, but what one can do is, instead of taking objects of value directly, take the ability to earn those objects or be able to afford to keep the objects they have. This being an age of information, every time a secret is divulged against one's will, every time one's dirty laundry is forced out into the open, it's like another gold coin, another gemstone, another crown jewel out the door.
Anyway. Do we have a right to know about these things? It's in the eye of the beholder as to the exact amount, really, but there is a line somewhere. You wouldn't divulge nuclear launch codes, for example. Obviously to suggest that you should is ridiculous, but that's just to establish the fact that a line exists somewhere- somewhere, anywhere. Any secret less important than that which you'd want to keep is merely helping to establish the location of the line. And the line, at least to me, does come well before that. Obviously there are things we need to know as well. I mean, look what I deal in around here. I want to know a whole bunch of stuff too. But I'm willing to wait if that knowledge is of the type where the downsides of having it be public knowledge outweigh the upsides. It's the political equivalent of a football playbook. You would not ask a football team to divulge, for public consumption, the contents of the playbook they are using this season. For them to do so would be to virtually guarantee that they lose their games. When a football player is called into the coach's office to be cut, they're told to take their playbook with them. You don't want them running off with it after they're no longer on the team.
However, the downsides diminish over time, as the information becomes outdated, so eventually just about everything becomes safe to release. Including playbooks. Any random fan can go out and find books containing diagrams of old plays. Most Packers fans will be able to tell you about a particular old play of Vince Lombardi's, the power sweep. Someone made a Broadway play to tell you all about it. It's a matter of what is okay to release and when, and it can be very tricky sometimes to establish the threshold.
As a whole, Assange has selected cables for which the downsides have been deemed by most to outweigh the upsides, in particular the catty insults. The questionability of the value of the leaked cables has done a strange thing: it's made this all less about the rights of the people to know, and more about Assange and his motives than is healthy for one who purports to engage in journalism. And his motives are plain as day: he describes himself as "a combative person" who enjoys "crushing bastards." Crushing bastards, as he puts it, is well and good, and a lot of people get into the industry with visions of the day they get to crush a bastard dancing in their head like sugar plums. But it is not something where you should be waking up and saying 'So which bastard am I going to crush today?' You try not to make the story about you. Sometimes you can't help but insert yourself into the story, but even so, you are trying to be merely a part of the story, not the story itself. And if you do become the story, you want to try to get the story off of you and back onto the original topic. Assange has become the story and is making no efforts to change that, and in the process a budding debate over how some governments are reacting to the content- the United States with warning people in an official government capacity away from reading the leaks, China opting for a straight blackout- has been to a degree choked out by stories about Assange. The debate here is peppered with frustration that while Wikileaks goes to considerable lengths to force out the information of others, they themselves remain deeply in the shadows. Considering the amount of people after them, this seems necessary if they want to remain able to do any leaking, but it smacks of hypocrisy to some who disagree to one degree or another.
He does, however, have an out. Maybe not out of his problems with the authorities, but out of his problems with the public. If there's one entity people tend to hate these days more than the government, it's banks. Assange has made note that among his cache of yet-to-be-released information is a "mega-leak" from a major American bank. Which one, he will not say. This fact has caused the ears of many to perk up, eager to find out what this leak contains. Arguably, there's more interest in the prospective bank leak than in the diplomatic cables. Assange, by releasing this, would get a significant segment of the public back on his side, carrying the dual advantage of being a popular and worthwhile target. The fact that he also has information on BP (he doesn't know if it's unique) helps his cause further. And if apprehended by Interpol or someone else, he has a contingency plan, namely, tens of thousands of other people who went to the Pirate Bay, a sympathetic site, and downloaded an 'insurance' file which includes, among other things, the remaining cables and the BP files, who will all recieve decryption codes in the event of his capture or death and put everything out in one gigantic tsunami of information dumping. This brings us back to the first problem of some important information flying under the radar, but at that point it can't really be avoided.
Assange has what is surely some extremely useful information, somewhere in all of that, and has taken great pains to ensure its eventual release. But he has no sense of what information is useful and what information is filler, or alternatively, he doesn't care. He has the potential to change the world in profoundly positive ways, and has provided a vehicle for this to be facilitated with an ease not previously seen anywhere, but has let it go to his head such that the vehicle has been damaged.
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Random News Generator- Kenya
Recently, Transparency International released their Corruption Perceptions Index, something they've done annually since 1995. It is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: every country they can get enough information on- 178 of them in this case- is given a score between 0 and 10, 10 being best.
The least corrupt nations on Earth, according to their methodology, are Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore, which all garnered a 9.3. Somalia is most corrupt, at 1.1, followed by Afghanistan and Myanmar, each scoring 1.4.
Tied for 154th, at 2.1, along with Cambodia, the Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Russia and Tajikistan, is today's stop on the Random News Generator, Kenya.
It doesn't say why exactly, for them or anyone else, but one would think a country where anti-corruption official Suru Tanna was just shot by "three men who stole a mobile phone and a jacket" is not likely to score very highly.
There have been efforts to stem the tide of corruption, but it's a hard slog. Some officials have gone to trial, only for technicalities to gum up the works. One of those set to stand trial, Minister for Higher Education William Ruto, faces charges of an illegal land deal to the Kenya Pipeline Corporation. Another, Foreign Minister Moses Wetang'ula, has been forced out over the buying and selling of foreign embassies. In addition, the mayor of Nairobi, Geophrey Majiwa, faces charges over the purchase of land for a cemetary; that news is just breaking.
That's not all. Not even close. Bribes have been handed out to military recruits. Bribes have been handed to police by the public as a prerequisite for doing their jobs. Fraud is being investigated at the Kenya Planters Cooperative Union, which accuses the investigating committee of attempting to "kill" it. The Immigration Ministry is under scrutiny for how it handles routine matters such as birth and death registration. The healthcare system makes America's look well-run and ethical. The national soccer federation caused FIFA to briefly suspend Kenya in 2004 from international competition. And it should go without saying that a 2008 election had its share of corruption, as well as violence.
At some point, all one can do is laugh at it all.
The least corrupt nations on Earth, according to their methodology, are Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore, which all garnered a 9.3. Somalia is most corrupt, at 1.1, followed by Afghanistan and Myanmar, each scoring 1.4.
Tied for 154th, at 2.1, along with Cambodia, the Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Russia and Tajikistan, is today's stop on the Random News Generator, Kenya.
It doesn't say why exactly, for them or anyone else, but one would think a country where anti-corruption official Suru Tanna was just shot by "three men who stole a mobile phone and a jacket" is not likely to score very highly.
There have been efforts to stem the tide of corruption, but it's a hard slog. Some officials have gone to trial, only for technicalities to gum up the works. One of those set to stand trial, Minister for Higher Education William Ruto, faces charges of an illegal land deal to the Kenya Pipeline Corporation. Another, Foreign Minister Moses Wetang'ula, has been forced out over the buying and selling of foreign embassies. In addition, the mayor of Nairobi, Geophrey Majiwa, faces charges over the purchase of land for a cemetary; that news is just breaking.
That's not all. Not even close. Bribes have been handed out to military recruits. Bribes have been handed to police by the public as a prerequisite for doing their jobs. Fraud is being investigated at the Kenya Planters Cooperative Union, which accuses the investigating committee of attempting to "kill" it. The Immigration Ministry is under scrutiny for how it handles routine matters such as birth and death registration. The healthcare system makes America's look well-run and ethical. The national soccer federation caused FIFA to briefly suspend Kenya in 2004 from international competition. And it should go without saying that a 2008 election had its share of corruption, as well as violence.
At some point, all one can do is laugh at it all.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Election 2010: The Aftermath: The Preview
By now, you are in all likelihood sick of the election. It happens to pretty much everybody, me included, in just about every election cycle. The ads get too negative and too outrageous, they come too thick, too fast, they all just blur together after a while and you just want Tuesday to hurry up and get here already. I remember one time, when I was working the phones in 2004 for John Kerry, that some woman that got called (not by me, but someone in the same campaign outpost while I was present) said that she was adding up all the times she was called by Kerry, and all the times she was called by Bush, and then voting for whoever called her the least. True story.
Bad news on that: after the election, you don't get to cool down. In fact, the transition period can be the most critical of all in an incoming Congressperson's career. They can torpedo every principle they have before they're even sworn in.
Before we get to that, though, a note on what happens to the losers during this period; the incumbents that have been voted out. They get packed off and sent to the basement.
No, really. When you lose your seat in Congress, your big office that you've gotten used to goes away. You and your staff are transferred to the "transitional suite", which is a nice way of saying that you're shoved into a 5x5 cubicle in the basement of the Rayburn House Office Building with "little more than a tiny desk, a laptop, a phone, and a box of Kleenex." It is every bit as humiliating as it sounds. Re-elected members of Congress need to decide whether to move operations into a more convenient space, and incoming members of Congress need an office, period, having originally been given the "transitional suite" themselves. And someone needs your office. Which means YOU can't have it anymore. Your last two months are primarily spent trying to find jobs for your staff, who will also be out of office.
That out of the way, on to the winners. The incoming freshmen. Why do you need to pay attention to them immediately?
Because somebody has to help save the morally weak from themselves. You see, prior to being sworn in, they are not members of Congress (the official terminology). Not technically. They are members-elect. There's a big difference. Members are subject to gift-giving ethics laws. Members-elect, not being members, are not.
And the lobbyists- oh so many lobbyists- know this. They can sniff out a member-elect, give them a mansion, a yacht and a diamond-studded alligator and it's perfectly legal. Unethical as hell, but legal. Needless to say, this is done with as many members-elect as they can get their hands on.
During the transition period, Congressional officials administer "Freshmen Orientation. Here, they supply the freshmen with instruction on everything under the sun they might want or need to know about staffing, office design, perks, responsibilities, ethics, rules, legislation, constituent correspondence, where the bathroom is, everything. It's at about this point that a lot of the freshmen first start to wonder what the hell they've just signed up for. "Deer-in-the-headlights" expressions are common. Utter bewilderment. And remember, they haven't even done anything yet. Some of them are still attempting to find housing. Some end up sleeping in cots in their office; those that do are generally embarrassed to admit it. Jason Chaffetz of Utah will freely say it, but he's the exception.
This is something that a lobbyist with the proper connections can quite easily remedy. Of course, the lobbyist will then have easy access to the member-elect any time they're inside-- which is, of course, behind closed doors. That, obviously, is the point. The lobbyist isn't offering housing out of the goodness of their heart.
And remember, the member-elect only has two months before they're bound by gift-giving laws and have to turn it down. And they're in a giant hurry to get all their other affairs settled besides. The weaker-willed can wilt under the pressure.
And, of course, nothing says the lobbyists have to wait for someone to actually be elected to start trying to get to somebody. (They simply choose not to much of the time; they don't want to anger the incumbent, who they already have a relationship with, should he win re-election.) Nothing says the lobbyists can't make their own runs for office, either.
This is where you come in. The tendency to fund incumbents makes your task of finding the weaker-willed challengers difficult, but it can be done. Weak wills can be sniffed out. You're not necessarily looking for someone unsure of themselves. Minds can be changed given new experiences and new information. That's fine. That's human. In fact, when you get down to it, that's the way lobbying is supposed to work.
It's a little more complicated than that. There are no shortage of people out there that will tell you how to build up your willpower. But, of course, there has to be a weakness first. If you see someone changing their mind five times a week, that's a red flag. Changing one's mind is natural, but at some point there has to be a limit. If they're coming into Congress with barely any convictions at all, there are people that will be glad to give them some.
But that's the direct approach. That's looking for the weak will itself. Subtler red flags- the ones that tend to get addressed by all the willpower-building programs- often include:
*A generally negative attitude towards life, inferred by tips instructing one to improve said outlook.
*Bad habits, inferred by tips to exercise self-control. Smoking, excessive drinking, obesity, etc.
*Lack of perserverance.
*Procrastination, inferred directly here.
*The inability to say no.
That last one is the most important. After all, if they can't say no to anyone else, how are they going to say no to a lobbyist? How are they going to say no under pressure?
It's on you to make sure they can.
Bad news on that: after the election, you don't get to cool down. In fact, the transition period can be the most critical of all in an incoming Congressperson's career. They can torpedo every principle they have before they're even sworn in.
Before we get to that, though, a note on what happens to the losers during this period; the incumbents that have been voted out. They get packed off and sent to the basement.
No, really. When you lose your seat in Congress, your big office that you've gotten used to goes away. You and your staff are transferred to the "transitional suite", which is a nice way of saying that you're shoved into a 5x5 cubicle in the basement of the Rayburn House Office Building with "little more than a tiny desk, a laptop, a phone, and a box of Kleenex." It is every bit as humiliating as it sounds. Re-elected members of Congress need to decide whether to move operations into a more convenient space, and incoming members of Congress need an office, period, having originally been given the "transitional suite" themselves. And someone needs your office. Which means YOU can't have it anymore. Your last two months are primarily spent trying to find jobs for your staff, who will also be out of office.
That out of the way, on to the winners. The incoming freshmen. Why do you need to pay attention to them immediately?
Because somebody has to help save the morally weak from themselves. You see, prior to being sworn in, they are not members of Congress (the official terminology). Not technically. They are members-elect. There's a big difference. Members are subject to gift-giving ethics laws. Members-elect, not being members, are not.
And the lobbyists- oh so many lobbyists- know this. They can sniff out a member-elect, give them a mansion, a yacht and a diamond-studded alligator and it's perfectly legal. Unethical as hell, but legal. Needless to say, this is done with as many members-elect as they can get their hands on.
During the transition period, Congressional officials administer "Freshmen Orientation. Here, they supply the freshmen with instruction on everything under the sun they might want or need to know about staffing, office design, perks, responsibilities, ethics, rules, legislation, constituent correspondence, where the bathroom is, everything. It's at about this point that a lot of the freshmen first start to wonder what the hell they've just signed up for. "Deer-in-the-headlights" expressions are common. Utter bewilderment. And remember, they haven't even done anything yet. Some of them are still attempting to find housing. Some end up sleeping in cots in their office; those that do are generally embarrassed to admit it. Jason Chaffetz of Utah will freely say it, but he's the exception.
This is something that a lobbyist with the proper connections can quite easily remedy. Of course, the lobbyist will then have easy access to the member-elect any time they're inside-- which is, of course, behind closed doors. That, obviously, is the point. The lobbyist isn't offering housing out of the goodness of their heart.
And remember, the member-elect only has two months before they're bound by gift-giving laws and have to turn it down. And they're in a giant hurry to get all their other affairs settled besides. The weaker-willed can wilt under the pressure.
And, of course, nothing says the lobbyists have to wait for someone to actually be elected to start trying to get to somebody. (They simply choose not to much of the time; they don't want to anger the incumbent, who they already have a relationship with, should he win re-election.) Nothing says the lobbyists can't make their own runs for office, either.
This is where you come in. The tendency to fund incumbents makes your task of finding the weaker-willed challengers difficult, but it can be done. Weak wills can be sniffed out. You're not necessarily looking for someone unsure of themselves. Minds can be changed given new experiences and new information. That's fine. That's human. In fact, when you get down to it, that's the way lobbying is supposed to work.
It's a little more complicated than that. There are no shortage of people out there that will tell you how to build up your willpower. But, of course, there has to be a weakness first. If you see someone changing their mind five times a week, that's a red flag. Changing one's mind is natural, but at some point there has to be a limit. If they're coming into Congress with barely any convictions at all, there are people that will be glad to give them some.
But that's the direct approach. That's looking for the weak will itself. Subtler red flags- the ones that tend to get addressed by all the willpower-building programs- often include:
*A generally negative attitude towards life, inferred by tips instructing one to improve said outlook.
*Bad habits, inferred by tips to exercise self-control. Smoking, excessive drinking, obesity, etc.
*Lack of perserverance.
*Procrastination, inferred directly here.
*The inability to say no.
That last one is the most important. After all, if they can't say no to anyone else, how are they going to say no to a lobbyist? How are they going to say no under pressure?
It's on you to make sure they can.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Change The Channel
I don't trust Fox News.
I'm not stating some big revelation here. Years ago, before my TV had a cable box hooked up, it had an 'add/delete' feature where you could set it to automatically skip past certain channels when channel-surfing; you would have to actively punch in the channel number in order to see it. So if you never wanted to see, for instance, the Home Shopping Network again, you could delete that channel number. Which I did, along with the usual assortment of garbage channels- QVC, Hallmark, CMT, the channel devoted to advertising the cable provider, the televangelist channels.
I also used it on Fox News.
My channel-surfing mechanism may have changed over the years, but the sentiment remains; my only substantial interaction with the network since has been second-hand or through their online content. But the quality of the news, if anything, has gotten even worse since then, to the point where they have become little more than a 24-hour-a-day campaign headquarters for the Republican Party.
Exhibit A: A number of Republican candidates for office are using Fox News as basically their sole and only interview partner. Media Matters, on September 27, showed five names in the 2012 Presidential mix- Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, John Bolton, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum- appearing on Fox News a combined 269 times in 2010 through September 18, as opposed to a combined six times on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS, all six by Gingrich. MSNBC and CBS did not get any appearances at all. Palin and Huckabee in particular are employed by the network; Huckabee with his own show, Palin as a contributor.
Exhibit B: A few weeks ago, President Obama told Rolling Stone how he compared Fox News to the media empire of William Randolph Hearst. Looking back on the history of the Hearst papers, I like that comparison. Hearst pulled the same kind of tactics, most notably against Upton Sinclair in the 1934 race for California governor, a race largely credited with- or more to the point, blamed for- inventing modern media-driven politics as we know it today.
Exhibit C: The $1 million that parent company NewsCorp just up and gave to the pro-Republican Chamber of Commerce, which has been responsible for a lot of the campaigning this season, as well as an equal amount to the Republican Governors Association, which needs no further explanation. This is as opposed to the other media empires, which have done smaller donations that have been split between the parties.
Today, for me, came the straw that broke the camel's back, which we'll call Exhibit D: this piece about the 2010 Senate staffer edition of an annual health fair held throughout the federal government. Nothing big about that; lots of places do something similar. My workplace has signs up in the back room advertising flu shots for employees and family members. But no, apparently this has to be turned into an over-the-top wild-eyed outrage. Let's start at the very beginning of the piece:
It doesn't even matter what comes after these three paragraphs. It could be the word "Triscuit" repeated over and over. The emotional response from the reader has already been predetermined. You can just feel the piece straining to cram every last bit of anger down your throat as it possibly can. You can see from a mile away all the loaded unnecessary language and the responses it's designed to elicit:
'Yeah! I'm a HARDWORKING AMERICAN, dammit! They just sit around and screw me all day!'
'An orgy! They're having an orgy! For two whole days!' (Why else would that word even find its way in there if not to invoke that mental image?)
'The BEST HEALTH CARE IN THE COUNTRY and look at what I'm going through!'
'Ohh, LA DE DA with the fancy iPod and the prissy little organic food!'
The fourth paragraph tosses in a reference to taxpayers and the cost to same (answer: uncertain; translation: 'potentially eighty gazillion dollars of YOUR OWN PERSONAL MONEY'), as well as a reference to two sources, the Senate Education and Training Office and the Senate sergeant-at-arms, declining to state who the vendors are (translation: 'JUST WHO ARE YOU ALL ON THE TAKE FROM, I WANT ANSWERS'). I didn't even read on after that.
I can't take it anymore. If this kind of shameless dog-whistling is going to be inserted into everything, then I have little choice but to discard everything.
That is why I am officially stating that it will, from this day on, be official blog policy to regard Fox News as inherently untrustworthy. They will be treated not as news, but as propaganda. Anything they report officially does not count. If they are the only source available for a story, we'll just disregard the story. This was really done informally in the past, but now it is stated, official policy. If we were to do a future 'real news vs. random news' competition, like we did recently, neither Fox News nor any other Fox network will be included. (This includes Shepard Smith, whom normally would be left alone, because he's okay, but if this is to have any real punch, unfortunately, he has to take the hit along with everybody else.)
Yeah. I know. 20 hits a day over here. I'm a gnat. Big loss. But hey, one has to start somewhere.
I'm not stating some big revelation here. Years ago, before my TV had a cable box hooked up, it had an 'add/delete' feature where you could set it to automatically skip past certain channels when channel-surfing; you would have to actively punch in the channel number in order to see it. So if you never wanted to see, for instance, the Home Shopping Network again, you could delete that channel number. Which I did, along with the usual assortment of garbage channels- QVC, Hallmark, CMT, the channel devoted to advertising the cable provider, the televangelist channels.
I also used it on Fox News.
My channel-surfing mechanism may have changed over the years, but the sentiment remains; my only substantial interaction with the network since has been second-hand or through their online content. But the quality of the news, if anything, has gotten even worse since then, to the point where they have become little more than a 24-hour-a-day campaign headquarters for the Republican Party.
Exhibit A: A number of Republican candidates for office are using Fox News as basically their sole and only interview partner. Media Matters, on September 27, showed five names in the 2012 Presidential mix- Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, John Bolton, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum- appearing on Fox News a combined 269 times in 2010 through September 18, as opposed to a combined six times on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS, all six by Gingrich. MSNBC and CBS did not get any appearances at all. Palin and Huckabee in particular are employed by the network; Huckabee with his own show, Palin as a contributor.
Exhibit B: A few weeks ago, President Obama told Rolling Stone how he compared Fox News to the media empire of William Randolph Hearst. Looking back on the history of the Hearst papers, I like that comparison. Hearst pulled the same kind of tactics, most notably against Upton Sinclair in the 1934 race for California governor, a race largely credited with- or more to the point, blamed for- inventing modern media-driven politics as we know it today.
Exhibit C: The $1 million that parent company NewsCorp just up and gave to the pro-Republican Chamber of Commerce, which has been responsible for a lot of the campaigning this season, as well as an equal amount to the Republican Governors Association, which needs no further explanation. This is as opposed to the other media empires, which have done smaller donations that have been split between the parties.
Today, for me, came the straw that broke the camel's back, which we'll call Exhibit D: this piece about the 2010 Senate staffer edition of an annual health fair held throughout the federal government. Nothing big about that; lots of places do something similar. My workplace has signs up in the back room advertising flu shots for employees and family members. But no, apparently this has to be turned into an over-the-top wild-eyed outrage. Let's start at the very beginning of the piece:
As millions of hardworking Americans struggle to make ends meet, Senate staffers will participate next week in a two-day orgy of back massages, organic food tastings and milk mustache photos.
It's all part of a health fair for the staffers, who enjoy some of the best health care in the country.
Not only will they get health screenings, they'll also find out if their iPods are too loud.
It doesn't even matter what comes after these three paragraphs. It could be the word "Triscuit" repeated over and over. The emotional response from the reader has already been predetermined. You can just feel the piece straining to cram every last bit of anger down your throat as it possibly can. You can see from a mile away all the loaded unnecessary language and the responses it's designed to elicit:
'Yeah! I'm a HARDWORKING AMERICAN, dammit! They just sit around and screw me all day!'
'An orgy! They're having an orgy! For two whole days!' (Why else would that word even find its way in there if not to invoke that mental image?)
'The BEST HEALTH CARE IN THE COUNTRY and look at what I'm going through!'
'Ohh, LA DE DA with the fancy iPod and the prissy little organic food!'
The fourth paragraph tosses in a reference to taxpayers and the cost to same (answer: uncertain; translation: 'potentially eighty gazillion dollars of YOUR OWN PERSONAL MONEY'), as well as a reference to two sources, the Senate Education and Training Office and the Senate sergeant-at-arms, declining to state who the vendors are (translation: 'JUST WHO ARE YOU ALL ON THE TAKE FROM, I WANT ANSWERS'). I didn't even read on after that.
I can't take it anymore. If this kind of shameless dog-whistling is going to be inserted into everything, then I have little choice but to discard everything.
That is why I am officially stating that it will, from this day on, be official blog policy to regard Fox News as inherently untrustworthy. They will be treated not as news, but as propaganda. Anything they report officially does not count. If they are the only source available for a story, we'll just disregard the story. This was really done informally in the past, but now it is stated, official policy. If we were to do a future 'real news vs. random news' competition, like we did recently, neither Fox News nor any other Fox network will be included. (This includes Shepard Smith, whom normally would be left alone, because he's okay, but if this is to have any real punch, unfortunately, he has to take the hit along with everybody else.)
Yeah. I know. 20 hits a day over here. I'm a gnat. Big loss. But hey, one has to start somewhere.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
The Ballad of Honest Dick
It is common knowledge these days- or at least it should be- that anyone in a position of public dependency that handles large amounts of money needs to be placed under some sort of watch. The more money handled, the more stringent the watch should be. Because far too often, people in these positions prove unworthy of trust, and will start to take some of that money for themselves to the maximum extent they are allowed.
Far too often, we forget this fact, and every time we do, we pay dearly for it. Bernie Madoff. Enron. Savings and Loan. James Tate.
Today I tell you about that last one.
James W. Tate was named state treasurer of Kentucky in 1867, after two stints as assistant Secretary of State, and one stint as assistant clerk of the Kentucky House of Representatives. While an elected position, Tate became a fixture in the office, often placing among the biggest winners on the ticket, and putting in two decades of service. Over time, he earned the nickname "Honest Dick" (why a man named James would be called 'Honest Dick' is a question for the ages), with one man, John McAfee, writing in 1886, referring to Tate as a "trusted and honored treasurer" with an "unblemished record for probity and principle."
Famous last words.
Apparently, Tate was regarded as so honest that he had, for 20 years, never been subjected to a serious look at his books. His 1886 opponent, William O. Bradley, found this a little odd, and ran on it in his attempt at unseating Tate. He lost, but he did manage to get the seed planted in Kentucky's collective head. So they asked Tate for a look. Tate replied that he would need some time to get his books in order. Okay, Honest Dick, we can give you a bit of time to do that, but really, we would like to look.
You have surely figured out by now that Tate was not using that extra time to actually get his books in order. During that time, he stopped putting cash into the state's bank account, using checks instead. If he weren't Honest Dick, he'd have been called on this. Or the personal debts he was starting to rack up. On March 14, 1888, one of his clerks DID call him on the fact that he was filling two tobacco sacks with money, about $100,000 worth ($2,357,406 in 2009 money, according to the Consumer Price Index), just like a cartoon bank robber. All that was missing was a dollar sign on the bags. Then Tate hopped a train for Louisville, leaving a note that he would be back in two days.
He never set foot in Kentucky again. From Louisville, he went to Cincinnati, and then vanished, leaving his wife and daughter behind.
By March 20, the state figured something was up, and suspended Tate from his position as state treasurer, the epitome of closing the barn door after the horse has left. They finally, finally, after 22 years, would audit the financial ledger of Kentucky.
Or at least they would have if they could actually make out what in blazes Tate wrote in the darn thing. All they did know was that a whole bunch of money wasn't there anymore. Unpaid loans, advances, personal investments and straight-up theft ultimately relieved the state of Kentucky of $247,128.50. That's 1888 money, remember. According to the Consumer Price Index, in 2009 money, that translates to $5,825,822.76. The treasury vault had personal and state property in it, including beaded bags and purses, one of which was a satchel belonging to a dead child.
The entirety of Kentucky almost had a collective heart attack. Why would Tate steal so much money? He was rich already through land investments! He didn't need the money! (Ah, the naviete of people in 1888.) According to 'Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900' by Hambleton Tapp, James C. Klotter and the Kentucky Historical Society, one person wrote "Such a flash of lightning, such a peal of thunder, as was never before seen or heard came out of a clear sky, and rocked the state as nothing had done since the war."
After they got the shock out of their system, the call went up for Tate's head, seeking to try him in absentia. That is exactly what they got; according to 'Political Corruption in America: An Encyclopedia of Scandals, Power and Greed' by Mark Grossman, he was officially brought up on a misappropriation of $197,000 (the official estimate; that's $4,464,090 in 2009 money), along with abandoning his office, doing so without providing for proper administration, and three other charges. He was convicted of four of the charges on March 31, 1888- remember he had fled on the 14th- and the now extremely unfortunately-nicknamed 'Honest Dick' was disqualified from holding state office again. When a new state constitution was written in 1891, three years later, Tate turned out to be singlehandedly responsible for the state banning consecutive terms for state officials, a provision that was only rescinded in 2000, and even then only partially so. A position of overseer was also created.
No recipient of funds, ultimately, was asked to repay, however. Even though just about everyone in Frankfort was under suspicion of having gotten money from Tate at some point, and nobody was trusting anybody by now, it was ultimately determined that Tate acted alone. The governor made a loan of his own to the state until taxes could replenish the coffers.
Not that Tate noticed much of any of this. He had long since gotten away. He had fled to the four corners of the Earth, with varying accounts putting him in places such as Chicago, Arizona Territory, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, Germany, Japan, China and Brazil. It's not really certain what became of him, or even how long he lived after fleeing Kentucky; correspondence to his family ceased in December 1888. There were reports of various Tate sightings in the following years, but in 1897, his daughter had him declared legally dead, and his life insurance was paid off in 1898.
As for William O. Bradley, the guy who first called for a look at Tate's books, he was karmically rewarded by being elected governor of Kentucky in 1895, a term marked by his championing and passage of an anti-lynching law, among other measures protecting the rights of blacks, and elected to one uneventful term in the US Senate from 1909-1914.
He was, in his Senate term, appointed, among other things, chairman of the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Justice. Just in case.
Far too often, we forget this fact, and every time we do, we pay dearly for it. Bernie Madoff. Enron. Savings and Loan. James Tate.
Today I tell you about that last one.
James W. Tate was named state treasurer of Kentucky in 1867, after two stints as assistant Secretary of State, and one stint as assistant clerk of the Kentucky House of Representatives. While an elected position, Tate became a fixture in the office, often placing among the biggest winners on the ticket, and putting in two decades of service. Over time, he earned the nickname "Honest Dick" (why a man named James would be called 'Honest Dick' is a question for the ages), with one man, John McAfee, writing in 1886, referring to Tate as a "trusted and honored treasurer" with an "unblemished record for probity and principle."
Famous last words.
Apparently, Tate was regarded as so honest that he had, for 20 years, never been subjected to a serious look at his books. His 1886 opponent, William O. Bradley, found this a little odd, and ran on it in his attempt at unseating Tate. He lost, but he did manage to get the seed planted in Kentucky's collective head. So they asked Tate for a look. Tate replied that he would need some time to get his books in order. Okay, Honest Dick, we can give you a bit of time to do that, but really, we would like to look.
You have surely figured out by now that Tate was not using that extra time to actually get his books in order. During that time, he stopped putting cash into the state's bank account, using checks instead. If he weren't Honest Dick, he'd have been called on this. Or the personal debts he was starting to rack up. On March 14, 1888, one of his clerks DID call him on the fact that he was filling two tobacco sacks with money, about $100,000 worth ($2,357,406 in 2009 money, according to the Consumer Price Index), just like a cartoon bank robber. All that was missing was a dollar sign on the bags. Then Tate hopped a train for Louisville, leaving a note that he would be back in two days.
He never set foot in Kentucky again. From Louisville, he went to Cincinnati, and then vanished, leaving his wife and daughter behind.
By March 20, the state figured something was up, and suspended Tate from his position as state treasurer, the epitome of closing the barn door after the horse has left. They finally, finally, after 22 years, would audit the financial ledger of Kentucky.
Or at least they would have if they could actually make out what in blazes Tate wrote in the darn thing. All they did know was that a whole bunch of money wasn't there anymore. Unpaid loans, advances, personal investments and straight-up theft ultimately relieved the state of Kentucky of $247,128.50. That's 1888 money, remember. According to the Consumer Price Index, in 2009 money, that translates to $5,825,822.76. The treasury vault had personal and state property in it, including beaded bags and purses, one of which was a satchel belonging to a dead child.
The entirety of Kentucky almost had a collective heart attack. Why would Tate steal so much money? He was rich already through land investments! He didn't need the money! (Ah, the naviete of people in 1888.) According to 'Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900' by Hambleton Tapp, James C. Klotter and the Kentucky Historical Society, one person wrote "Such a flash of lightning, such a peal of thunder, as was never before seen or heard came out of a clear sky, and rocked the state as nothing had done since the war."
After they got the shock out of their system, the call went up for Tate's head, seeking to try him in absentia. That is exactly what they got; according to 'Political Corruption in America: An Encyclopedia of Scandals, Power and Greed' by Mark Grossman, he was officially brought up on a misappropriation of $197,000 (the official estimate; that's $4,464,090 in 2009 money), along with abandoning his office, doing so without providing for proper administration, and three other charges. He was convicted of four of the charges on March 31, 1888- remember he had fled on the 14th- and the now extremely unfortunately-nicknamed 'Honest Dick' was disqualified from holding state office again. When a new state constitution was written in 1891, three years later, Tate turned out to be singlehandedly responsible for the state banning consecutive terms for state officials, a provision that was only rescinded in 2000, and even then only partially so. A position of overseer was also created.
No recipient of funds, ultimately, was asked to repay, however. Even though just about everyone in Frankfort was under suspicion of having gotten money from Tate at some point, and nobody was trusting anybody by now, it was ultimately determined that Tate acted alone. The governor made a loan of his own to the state until taxes could replenish the coffers.
Not that Tate noticed much of any of this. He had long since gotten away. He had fled to the four corners of the Earth, with varying accounts putting him in places such as Chicago, Arizona Territory, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, Germany, Japan, China and Brazil. It's not really certain what became of him, or even how long he lived after fleeing Kentucky; correspondence to his family ceased in December 1888. There were reports of various Tate sightings in the following years, but in 1897, his daughter had him declared legally dead, and his life insurance was paid off in 1898.
As for William O. Bradley, the guy who first called for a look at Tate's books, he was karmically rewarded by being elected governor of Kentucky in 1895, a term marked by his championing and passage of an anti-lynching law, among other measures protecting the rights of blacks, and elected to one uneventful term in the US Senate from 1909-1914.
He was, in his Senate term, appointed, among other things, chairman of the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Justice. Just in case.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Yaaarrrrr!
I am a lifelong gamer. I've been playing video games dating back to the Atari 2600- games like Combat, Bowling, Baseball, Kaboom!.
So why haven't I done a pure videogame piece since I started the blog back in February?
Specifically, let's do the topic of copy protection. As you know, modern games are encoded in pretty sophisticated manners. If you've got an inauthentic copy, the game simply won't run.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. In reality, pirated copies of any game worth playing are still floating around out there. Someone dedicated enough and with enough skill and time on their hands will- WILL- eventually pull it off; the aim is largely to slow them down long enough for it not to be worth the trouble. But before the advent of 'game won't run' protection, game developers had to come up with a variety of other methods of thwarting pirates.
These are people that came up with plumbers growing by eating mushrooms and shooting fireballs from flowers in order to save princesses from giant turtles. They have been rather creative over the years, and they do still revel in pirate frustration to this day.
*Old Carmen Sandiego games would come bundled with a copy of that year's World Almanac or, alternatively, a Fodor's guide. In order to advance in the game, every so often the game would ask you to copy some text out of the almanac provided. The intention was to get kids interested in using almanacs. In practice, hope you kept the almanac and didn't update it to a newer year with newer text, because if you did, you're screwed.
This was a very common tactic: allowing a pirate to play PART of the game, then stopping them cold at some point along the way.
*Startropics for the NES, at one point, asked you to dip a map in some water to reveal a code. The map came with the manual... which caused some problems if you didn't get a manual with the game. (This was remedied when Startropics was released for the Wii Virtual Console; the whole thing is placed in the game itself.)
*In Chrono Trigger, for the SNES and later DS, you are asked at many times during the game to travel in time. This requires entering a time vortex. If you are playing a legitimate copy, the game will let you back out of the vortex. (The DS pirates cracked this within hours, so quickly that it prompted a fan club to give out 3,000 copies of the game soundtrack- widely thought of as one of the best game soundtracks of all time- out to actual customers, two of which were autographed by the composer.)
*Starflight I and II, space-exploration RPG's, asked you to input a value based on some code words given to you any time you wanted to leave base. Screw the code up once, it'll ask you to try again. Screw the code up twice, and you'll get to leave base, but six game days later, the Space Police will arrive and accuse you of software theft. (Game developers will often call players out directly about this sort of thing, in the game itself. They kind of have to, lest rumors spread about 'random' crashes and bugs that lower the reputation of legitimate copies and depress sales.) Screw the code up a third time, and the police blow you up.
*King's Quest IV does this.
*Some recent games, starting with Operation Flashpoint, use a system called FADE, in which when piracy is detected, the quality of gameplay slowly degrades over time. Here's FADE doing its job on ARMA 2.
*At one point in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman needs to glide with his cape. If you have pirated the game, you will find this to be quite impossible. When one gamer showed up in the game's official forums to ask about it, first he was outed as a pirate by another forumer- the game was only released in demo mode, and the pirate asked about a room full of poison gas which the demo did not contain- and then the administrator popped up to state:
"The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.
It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."
*Earthbound for the SNES was the most brutal of all. When the game detected pirating- and sometimes it would detect it on legitimate cartridges that had simply been worn down from excessive play- it would take three levels of copy protection. First it would spawn a whole lot more enemies than usual. Second, it would make those enemies much tougher than usual. And just in case some player decided to regard this as a challenge and press on, third, not only would the game would freeze during the final boss fight, but when the player reset, they would find all their save files had been deleted.
The link for Earthbond provides a code in case you have an emulator or Game Genie and wish to try it out yourself. Why you would do such a thing is your business.
So why haven't I done a pure videogame piece since I started the blog back in February?
Specifically, let's do the topic of copy protection. As you know, modern games are encoded in pretty sophisticated manners. If you've got an inauthentic copy, the game simply won't run.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. In reality, pirated copies of any game worth playing are still floating around out there. Someone dedicated enough and with enough skill and time on their hands will- WILL- eventually pull it off; the aim is largely to slow them down long enough for it not to be worth the trouble. But before the advent of 'game won't run' protection, game developers had to come up with a variety of other methods of thwarting pirates.
These are people that came up with plumbers growing by eating mushrooms and shooting fireballs from flowers in order to save princesses from giant turtles. They have been rather creative over the years, and they do still revel in pirate frustration to this day.
*Old Carmen Sandiego games would come bundled with a copy of that year's World Almanac or, alternatively, a Fodor's guide. In order to advance in the game, every so often the game would ask you to copy some text out of the almanac provided. The intention was to get kids interested in using almanacs. In practice, hope you kept the almanac and didn't update it to a newer year with newer text, because if you did, you're screwed.
This was a very common tactic: allowing a pirate to play PART of the game, then stopping them cold at some point along the way.
*Startropics for the NES, at one point, asked you to dip a map in some water to reveal a code. The map came with the manual... which caused some problems if you didn't get a manual with the game. (This was remedied when Startropics was released for the Wii Virtual Console; the whole thing is placed in the game itself.)
*In Chrono Trigger, for the SNES and later DS, you are asked at many times during the game to travel in time. This requires entering a time vortex. If you are playing a legitimate copy, the game will let you back out of the vortex. (The DS pirates cracked this within hours, so quickly that it prompted a fan club to give out 3,000 copies of the game soundtrack- widely thought of as one of the best game soundtracks of all time- out to actual customers, two of which were autographed by the composer.)
*Starflight I and II, space-exploration RPG's, asked you to input a value based on some code words given to you any time you wanted to leave base. Screw the code up once, it'll ask you to try again. Screw the code up twice, and you'll get to leave base, but six game days later, the Space Police will arrive and accuse you of software theft. (Game developers will often call players out directly about this sort of thing, in the game itself. They kind of have to, lest rumors spread about 'random' crashes and bugs that lower the reputation of legitimate copies and depress sales.) Screw the code up a third time, and the police blow you up.
*King's Quest IV does this.
*Some recent games, starting with Operation Flashpoint, use a system called FADE, in which when piracy is detected, the quality of gameplay slowly degrades over time. Here's FADE doing its job on ARMA 2.
*At one point in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman needs to glide with his cape. If you have pirated the game, you will find this to be quite impossible. When one gamer showed up in the game's official forums to ask about it, first he was outed as a pirate by another forumer- the game was only released in demo mode, and the pirate asked about a room full of poison gas which the demo did not contain- and then the administrator popped up to state:
"The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.
It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."
*Earthbound for the SNES was the most brutal of all. When the game detected pirating- and sometimes it would detect it on legitimate cartridges that had simply been worn down from excessive play- it would take three levels of copy protection. First it would spawn a whole lot more enemies than usual. Second, it would make those enemies much tougher than usual. And just in case some player decided to regard this as a challenge and press on, third, not only would the game would freeze during the final boss fight, but when the player reset, they would find all their save files had been deleted.
The link for Earthbond provides a code in case you have an emulator or Game Genie and wish to try it out yourself. Why you would do such a thing is your business.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Rule #1 Of The Internet
Today, the RIAA and MPAA learn a harsh, merciless lesson.
Never.
Ever.
EVER.
Piss off 4chan.
4chan does not give a damn about things like 'ethics' or 'laws' or 'privacy' or anything that might stop a normal person from doing awful things to you. They're not going to kill you or anything violent like that (although they will make threats), but they will bombard you with embarrasing things through the mail, they will DDOS your website (as has happened here), they will hack, they will post porn all over the place, all in the name of what they figure to be vigilante justice. Or laughs. Sometimes they do crazy things for laughs. It's sometimes hard to tell.
You remember when someone hacked into Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account during the 2008 election? That was 4chan.
You remember when seven different NFL stadiums had to deal with threats of dirty bombs in October 2006? That was 4chan.
You know Rick Astley? The whole rickrolling thing? That was 4chan.
You know those 'trending' topics on Yahoo? If you see something really strange for no good reason, like a swastika, or 'fried chicken', there's a decent chance it's 4chan.
Of course, to be fair, there have been several occasions over the years of some guy threatening violence through 4chan, and the rest of 4chan then turning on THAT guy, effectively handing him over to the police themselves. (They're not evil. Just chaotic.)
No, the rest of us on the Internet aren't about to try and corral them. Many of us dare not even speak their name, for fear of summoning them. We just watch them tear into somebody and we're glad it's not us.
RIAA, MPAA. I'm just glad I'm not you.
Never.
Ever.
EVER.
Piss off 4chan.
4chan does not give a damn about things like 'ethics' or 'laws' or 'privacy' or anything that might stop a normal person from doing awful things to you. They're not going to kill you or anything violent like that (although they will make threats), but they will bombard you with embarrasing things through the mail, they will DDOS your website (as has happened here), they will hack, they will post porn all over the place, all in the name of what they figure to be vigilante justice. Or laughs. Sometimes they do crazy things for laughs. It's sometimes hard to tell.
You remember when someone hacked into Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account during the 2008 election? That was 4chan.
You remember when seven different NFL stadiums had to deal with threats of dirty bombs in October 2006? That was 4chan.
You know Rick Astley? The whole rickrolling thing? That was 4chan.
You know those 'trending' topics on Yahoo? If you see something really strange for no good reason, like a swastika, or 'fried chicken', there's a decent chance it's 4chan.
Of course, to be fair, there have been several occasions over the years of some guy threatening violence through 4chan, and the rest of 4chan then turning on THAT guy, effectively handing him over to the police themselves. (They're not evil. Just chaotic.)
No, the rest of us on the Internet aren't about to try and corral them. Many of us dare not even speak their name, for fear of summoning them. We just watch them tear into somebody and we're glad it's not us.
RIAA, MPAA. I'm just glad I'm not you.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Democracy's Ultimate Subversion
One may hate a politician. One may hate everything the politician stands for. One may work tirelessly to convince him to vote a certain way, or get him voted out to prevent him from any further votes against one's interests.
However, it is generally accepted that once they reach the chamber floor to cast that vote, there's nothing more that can be done by people who don't belong on the floor. All one can do at that point is wait and hope. One can't physically stop a legislator from casting a vote, right?
I wouldn't be bringing it up if people haven't tried.
1908: 'Fightin' Bob' LaFollette of wisconsin was opposed to the Aldrich-Vreeland Act, which in hindsight was a perfectly good bill. It would establish the National Monetary Commission, which in turn recommended the creation of the Federal Reserve. LaFollette was most likely opposed to the part of the bill that allowed banks to issue emergency currency in response to the Panic of 1907; he was not a fan of the banks. He proceeded to filibuster the bill.
Or at least, he tried to. Over the course of the filibuster, starting at 12:20 PM on May 29, he would drink a mixture of milk and raw eggs to keep his strength up. (It would have to be for strength, I hope, because, ew.) Somewhere past his tenth hour, he drank one such mixture... or at least began to, before noticing something tasted different. He stopped drinking it, had it removed for analysis, and continued the filibuster.
But he had drank enough for it to take an effect. He would last until 7:03 the next morning, but then conked out with symptoms of dysentery, and the bill passed and was signed by President Teddy Roosevelt by the end of the day.
What was in the milk and egg that LaFollette noticed? Ptomaine poison, enough to kill a man, according to the book 'Wicked Washington: Mysteries, Murder & Mayhem in America's Capital' by Troy Taylor. Someone had tried to kill him to stop the filibuster. (Nobody was ever arrested for it. And by the way, 'ptomaine' is a word no longer used scientifically- think alkaloids now- but back then that word was used, so we use it here.)
1954: Puerto Rico has been a commonwealth since 1952, and has since existed in a kind of limbo between statehood, independence, and the status quo. Independence is not a commonly-held position these days, but in 1954, so soon after the declaration as a commonwealth, tensions were high.
On March 1, 1954, as Congress was debating an unrelated immigration bill, four independence-minded Puerto Ricans- Andres Figueroa Cordero, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Lolita Lebron, and Irving Flores Rodriguez- would make their way into the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Representatives. A guard asked if they had cameras; they did not.
They had guns.
While the House was debating, the four unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, Lebron screamed "Viva Puerto Rico libre!", and they opened fire. 29 rounds were fired; five Congressmen were hit; all would recover. Two current members of Congress were pages on the floor that day, Bill Emerson of Missouri and Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania.
President Eisenhower commuted the very-predictable death sentences to a minimum of 70 years in prison. Jimmy Carter commuted Cordero in 1978, and the others in 1979 as part of a spy swap with Cuba.
Lebron died earlier this month at age 90.
The backs of the chairs on the floors of Congress are now bulletproof.
1989: The state level's not entirely immune either. Bo Pilgrim, the owner of chicken processor Pilgrim's Pride, was worried that the Texas State Senate might vote against his interests on a worker's compensation bill.
Pilgrim's solution: Walk right onto the State Senate floor and start handing out $10,000 checks.
As Pilgrim put it, "The common practice of mine is to give large contributions to people -preachers, educational institutions and politicians - and $10,000 or $100,000 is a common practice with me. It's primarily just for the name identification with the politicians. They will answer your calls and give you an appointment and listen to you describe an issue. It does not infer a bribe."
While a number of the Senators accepted the checks, almost nobody that wasn't actively involved thought it could possibly be anything else. (And when the media caught wind of it, just about all of the checks were returned in a hurry.)
Amazingly, in Texas, this was legal to do at the time. It was nearly impossible to ring someone up on a bribery charge, and during special sessions of the legislature- which this was- the campaign finance laws were even looser than usual. Not for long, though. Pilgrim's actions proved so utterly beyond the pale that the bribe backfired. Not only did Pilgrim lose the vote, the incident spurred a series of campaign-finance reform laws, including- it seems so obvious- a ban on accepting contributions within the Capitol, and the creation of the Texas Ethics Commission.
Two years later, Pilgrim won the Bonehead of the Year award from the Bonehead Club of Dallas. In his acceptance speech, he said he had learned something from the experience, which "may be summed up in a few simple words:
Automatic fund transfer."
However, it is generally accepted that once they reach the chamber floor to cast that vote, there's nothing more that can be done by people who don't belong on the floor. All one can do at that point is wait and hope. One can't physically stop a legislator from casting a vote, right?
I wouldn't be bringing it up if people haven't tried.
1908: 'Fightin' Bob' LaFollette of wisconsin was opposed to the Aldrich-Vreeland Act, which in hindsight was a perfectly good bill. It would establish the National Monetary Commission, which in turn recommended the creation of the Federal Reserve. LaFollette was most likely opposed to the part of the bill that allowed banks to issue emergency currency in response to the Panic of 1907; he was not a fan of the banks. He proceeded to filibuster the bill.
Or at least, he tried to. Over the course of the filibuster, starting at 12:20 PM on May 29, he would drink a mixture of milk and raw eggs to keep his strength up. (It would have to be for strength, I hope, because, ew.) Somewhere past his tenth hour, he drank one such mixture... or at least began to, before noticing something tasted different. He stopped drinking it, had it removed for analysis, and continued the filibuster.
But he had drank enough for it to take an effect. He would last until 7:03 the next morning, but then conked out with symptoms of dysentery, and the bill passed and was signed by President Teddy Roosevelt by the end of the day.
What was in the milk and egg that LaFollette noticed? Ptomaine poison, enough to kill a man, according to the book 'Wicked Washington: Mysteries, Murder & Mayhem in America's Capital' by Troy Taylor. Someone had tried to kill him to stop the filibuster. (Nobody was ever arrested for it. And by the way, 'ptomaine' is a word no longer used scientifically- think alkaloids now- but back then that word was used, so we use it here.)
1954: Puerto Rico has been a commonwealth since 1952, and has since existed in a kind of limbo between statehood, independence, and the status quo. Independence is not a commonly-held position these days, but in 1954, so soon after the declaration as a commonwealth, tensions were high.
On March 1, 1954, as Congress was debating an unrelated immigration bill, four independence-minded Puerto Ricans- Andres Figueroa Cordero, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Lolita Lebron, and Irving Flores Rodriguez- would make their way into the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Representatives. A guard asked if they had cameras; they did not.
They had guns.
While the House was debating, the four unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, Lebron screamed "Viva Puerto Rico libre!", and they opened fire. 29 rounds were fired; five Congressmen were hit; all would recover. Two current members of Congress were pages on the floor that day, Bill Emerson of Missouri and Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania.
President Eisenhower commuted the very-predictable death sentences to a minimum of 70 years in prison. Jimmy Carter commuted Cordero in 1978, and the others in 1979 as part of a spy swap with Cuba.
Lebron died earlier this month at age 90.
The backs of the chairs on the floors of Congress are now bulletproof.
1989: The state level's not entirely immune either. Bo Pilgrim, the owner of chicken processor Pilgrim's Pride, was worried that the Texas State Senate might vote against his interests on a worker's compensation bill.
Pilgrim's solution: Walk right onto the State Senate floor and start handing out $10,000 checks.
As Pilgrim put it, "The common practice of mine is to give large contributions to people -preachers, educational institutions and politicians - and $10,000 or $100,000 is a common practice with me. It's primarily just for the name identification with the politicians. They will answer your calls and give you an appointment and listen to you describe an issue. It does not infer a bribe."
While a number of the Senators accepted the checks, almost nobody that wasn't actively involved thought it could possibly be anything else. (And when the media caught wind of it, just about all of the checks were returned in a hurry.)
Amazingly, in Texas, this was legal to do at the time. It was nearly impossible to ring someone up on a bribery charge, and during special sessions of the legislature- which this was- the campaign finance laws were even looser than usual. Not for long, though. Pilgrim's actions proved so utterly beyond the pale that the bribe backfired. Not only did Pilgrim lose the vote, the incident spurred a series of campaign-finance reform laws, including- it seems so obvious- a ban on accepting contributions within the Capitol, and the creation of the Texas Ethics Commission.
Two years later, Pilgrim won the Bonehead of the Year award from the Bonehead Club of Dallas. In his acceptance speech, he said he had learned something from the experience, which "may be summed up in a few simple words:
Automatic fund transfer."
Friday, July 16, 2010
The Same Thing Said In 27 Different Ways
Perhaps mankind's most reliable source of conflict over the course of history is religion. My god is better than your god, and I am going to save you from hell if I have to send you there myself in the process. Christians hate Muslims. Muslims hate Christians. Islam has a standing death sentence to anyone who abandons Islam for some other faith. Both Christians and Muslims hate the Jews. The athiests hate everybody. Everybody hates the athiests. Factions within a particular faith hate each other. And we haven't even gotten into the non-Abrahamic faiths.
Personally, I belong to a Lutheran church, which on a day-to-day basis is just about as low-key and laid-back a Christian sect as you're likely to find. Getting absolved of all your sins basically involves going to church. Sometime during the congregation, you will be relieved of all your sins. That is literally it. No Hail Maries, no pilgrimages, no tithing, no confessions, no real spiritual exertion whatsoever.
But Lutheranism isn't really the end of it for me. Along the way, I also picked up a belief in karma. Not really a pure good-deeds-lead-to-good-fortune, bad-deeds-lead-to-bad-fortune cause-and-effect-- there's far too much evidence to the contrary for that, and when it does happen, the proximity of act to reciprocation is all over the place-- but more of a system where your deeds get played against your well-being at the end, deeds getting more weight. Humanity gets a chance to sort it all out on its own, and then metaphysics accounts for any imbalance at the end. Which basically means the ones who got away with it in life get it the worst in the afterlife.
But more importantly, I feel that it really does not matter, in the slightest, what you believe so long as you parlay that belief into being a generally decent human being that can on some level get along with as many people as possible. In short, if heaven doesn't have room for Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Socrates, all at the same time, I don't want to go there.
It all comes back around to the Golden Rule, and no matter what you believe, if you believe, or where you come from, there is almost assuredly a Golden Rule for you. Some would claim that karma itself is simply an enforced Golden Rule. As much as the moral codes of all the world's faiths and cultures differ, the Golden Rule is remarkably- and thankfully- resilient.
Some present it multiple times, but we'll keep it to one telling per faith (as best reckoned)...
-------------------
Akkadian
"Do not return evil to your adversary; requite with kindness the one who does evil to you, maintain justice for your enemy, be friendly to your enemy."
Bahá'í Faith
"Ascribe not to any soul that which thou wouldst not have ascribed to thee, and say not that which thou doest not." "Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself." (Baha'u'llah)
Brahmanism
"This is the sum of Dharma [duty]: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you". (Mahabharata, 5:1517)
Buddhism
"Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." (Udana-Varga 5:18)
Christianity
"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." (Matthew 7:12, King James Version)
Confucianism
"Tse-kung asked, 'Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life?' Confucius replied, 'It is the word 'shu' -- reciprocity. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.'" (Doctrine of the Mean 13.3)
Ancient Egyptian
"Do for one who may do for you, that you may cause him thus to do." (The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, 109 - 110)
Hinduism
"This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you." (Mahabharata 5:1517)
Islam
"None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." (Number 13 of Imam "Al-Nawawi's Forty Hadiths.")
Jainism
"A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated." (Sutrakritanga 1.11.33)
Judaism
"What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary." (Talmud, Shabbat 31a)
Mozism
"If people regarded other people's families in the same way that they regard their own, who then would incite their own family to attack that of another? For one would do for others as one would do for oneself." (Mozi)
Native American Spirituality
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” (Chief Seattle)
Paganism, Greek
"Do not do to others that which would anger you if others did it to you." (Socrates)
Paganism, Roman
“The law imprinted on the hearts of all men is to love the members of society as themselves.”
Samaritanism
This one was founded off of Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan. Need I say more? I mean, really?
Scientology
"Try to treat others as you would want them to treat you." (The Way to Happiness, by L. Ron Hubbard)
Secular
"Don't be a dick." (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_a_dick)
Shintoism
"Be charitable to all beings, love is the representative of God." (Ko-ji-ki Hachiman Kasuga)
Sikhism
"We obtain salvation by loving our fellow man and God." (Granth, Japji XXI)
Sufism
“The basis of Sufism is consideration of the hearts and feelings of others. If you haven't the will to gladden someone's heart, then at least beware lest you hurt someone's heart, for on our path, no sin exists but this.” (Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, Master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order)
Taoism
"Regard your neighbor's gain as your gain and your neighbor's loss as your loss." (Tai-shang Kang-ying P'ien)
Vedism
"This is the sum of duty. Do not unto others that which would cause you pain if done to you." (Mahabharata 5:1517)
Unitarianism
“We affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” (Unitarian principle)
Wicca
“A'in it harm no one, do what thou wilt” (i.e., do whatever you want to, as long as it harms nobody, including yourself). (The Wiccan Rede)
Yoruba (Nigeria)
“One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.”
Zorostrianism
"That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself." (Avesta, Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5)
----------------------
In conclusion, here's a guy that completely misses the point.
Personally, I belong to a Lutheran church, which on a day-to-day basis is just about as low-key and laid-back a Christian sect as you're likely to find. Getting absolved of all your sins basically involves going to church. Sometime during the congregation, you will be relieved of all your sins. That is literally it. No Hail Maries, no pilgrimages, no tithing, no confessions, no real spiritual exertion whatsoever.
But Lutheranism isn't really the end of it for me. Along the way, I also picked up a belief in karma. Not really a pure good-deeds-lead-to-good-fortune, bad-deeds-lead-to-bad-fortune cause-and-effect-- there's far too much evidence to the contrary for that, and when it does happen, the proximity of act to reciprocation is all over the place-- but more of a system where your deeds get played against your well-being at the end, deeds getting more weight. Humanity gets a chance to sort it all out on its own, and then metaphysics accounts for any imbalance at the end. Which basically means the ones who got away with it in life get it the worst in the afterlife.
But more importantly, I feel that it really does not matter, in the slightest, what you believe so long as you parlay that belief into being a generally decent human being that can on some level get along with as many people as possible. In short, if heaven doesn't have room for Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Socrates, all at the same time, I don't want to go there.
It all comes back around to the Golden Rule, and no matter what you believe, if you believe, or where you come from, there is almost assuredly a Golden Rule for you. Some would claim that karma itself is simply an enforced Golden Rule. As much as the moral codes of all the world's faiths and cultures differ, the Golden Rule is remarkably- and thankfully- resilient.
Some present it multiple times, but we'll keep it to one telling per faith (as best reckoned)...
-------------------
Akkadian
"Do not return evil to your adversary; requite with kindness the one who does evil to you, maintain justice for your enemy, be friendly to your enemy."
Bahá'í Faith
"Ascribe not to any soul that which thou wouldst not have ascribed to thee, and say not that which thou doest not." "Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself." (Baha'u'llah)
Brahmanism
"This is the sum of Dharma [duty]: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you". (Mahabharata, 5:1517)
Buddhism
"Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." (Udana-Varga 5:18)
Christianity
"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." (Matthew 7:12, King James Version)
Confucianism
"Tse-kung asked, 'Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life?' Confucius replied, 'It is the word 'shu' -- reciprocity. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.'" (Doctrine of the Mean 13.3)
Ancient Egyptian
"Do for one who may do for you, that you may cause him thus to do." (The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, 109 - 110)
Hinduism
"This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you." (Mahabharata 5:1517)
Islam
"None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." (Number 13 of Imam "Al-Nawawi's Forty Hadiths.")
Jainism
"A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated." (Sutrakritanga 1.11.33)
Judaism
"What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary." (Talmud, Shabbat 31a)
Mozism
"If people regarded other people's families in the same way that they regard their own, who then would incite their own family to attack that of another? For one would do for others as one would do for oneself." (Mozi)
Native American Spirituality
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” (Chief Seattle)
Paganism, Greek
"Do not do to others that which would anger you if others did it to you." (Socrates)
Paganism, Roman
“The law imprinted on the hearts of all men is to love the members of society as themselves.”
Samaritanism
This one was founded off of Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan. Need I say more? I mean, really?
Scientology
"Try to treat others as you would want them to treat you." (The Way to Happiness, by L. Ron Hubbard)
Secular
"Don't be a dick." (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_a_dick)
Shintoism
"Be charitable to all beings, love is the representative of God." (Ko-ji-ki Hachiman Kasuga)
Sikhism
"We obtain salvation by loving our fellow man and God." (Granth, Japji XXI)
Sufism
“The basis of Sufism is consideration of the hearts and feelings of others. If you haven't the will to gladden someone's heart, then at least beware lest you hurt someone's heart, for on our path, no sin exists but this.” (Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, Master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order)
Taoism
"Regard your neighbor's gain as your gain and your neighbor's loss as your loss." (Tai-shang Kang-ying P'ien)
Vedism
"This is the sum of duty. Do not unto others that which would cause you pain if done to you." (Mahabharata 5:1517)
Unitarianism
“We affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” (Unitarian principle)
Wicca
“A'in it harm no one, do what thou wilt” (i.e., do whatever you want to, as long as it harms nobody, including yourself). (The Wiccan Rede)
Yoruba (Nigeria)
“One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.”
Zorostrianism
"That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself." (Avesta, Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5)
----------------------
In conclusion, here's a guy that completely misses the point.
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