Who needs horror movies?

From Hendrik Herzberger's article The Darksider in the "New Yorker" of 9/16 July:

[M]any of the details and incidents that Gellman and Becker document [in a four-part series in June in the "Washington Post"] are as new as they are appalling. More important, the pattern that emerges from the accumulated weight of the reporting is, as the lawyers say, dispositive... for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams described as "the most insignificant office that the invention of man contrived," has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."

More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of "cruel," "inhuman," and "degrading" treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: "a no-brainer for me"), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.

The stakes are lower in domestic affairs—if only because fewer lives are directly threatened—but here, too, Cheney’s influence has been invariably baleful. With an avalanche of examples, Gellman and Becker show how Cheney successfully pushed tax cuts for the very rich that went beyond what even the President, wanly clinging to the shards of "compassionate conservatism," and his economic advisers wanted. They show how Cheney’s stealthy domination of regulatory and environmental policy, driven by “unwavering ideological positions” and always exerted “for the benefit of business,” has resulted in the deterioration of air and water quality, the degradation and commercial exploitation of national parks and forests, the collapse of wild-salmon fisheries, and the curt abandonment of Bush’s 2000 campaign pledge to do something about greenhouse gases. [...]

Cheney, Gellman and Becker report, drew up and vetted a list of five appellate judges from which Bush drew his Supreme Court appointments. [...] The result is a Court majority that, last Thursday, ruled that conscious racial integration is the moral equivalent of conscious racial segregation. [...]

[L]ast week, Cheney provoked widespread hilarity by pleading executive privilege (in order to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee) while simultaneously maintaining that his office is not part of the executive branch (in order to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives). On Cheney’s version of the government organization chart, it seems, the location of the Office of the Vice-President is undisclosed. So are the powers that, in a kind of rolling, slow-motion coup d'état, he has gathered unto himself. The laughter will fade quickly; the current Administration, regrettably, will not. However more politically moribund it may become, its writ still has a year and a half to go. A few weeks ago, on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the Vice-President issued threats of war with Iran. A "senior American diplomat" told the Times that Cheney’s speech had not been circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, adding, "He kind of runs by his own rules." But, too often, his rules rule. The awful climax of "Cheney/Bush" may be yet to come.

Impeach the bastards now, while you still have the right to do so.

Unbelievable

From today's Guardian Unlimited:

Timberlan Addison, two years old, was staying with his 37-year-old father, Timothy, in Tampa, Florida... Timothy had had several brushes with the law, including time in prison for cocaine possession. But neighbours say he was an attentive father who often looked after Timberlan at weekends. Renee Henderson, who lives across the road, described Timothy as "a sweet person". Her daughter, Marquita, was pregnant with his seventh child. Timberlan was his sixth.

That Sunday morning, the two of them had gone out to get some breakfast. Back home, Timberlan was playing, climbing over the furniture, when he reached behind the couch and found a Sig Sauer 9mm semi-automatic... Timberlan pulled the trigger. When Timothy heard the bang, he picked up his crying son to comfort him, thinking he was just scared. Only when he saw the blood seeping through his red-and-white striped T-shirt did he realise that Timberlan had shot himself. [...]

Timberlan was taken to Tampa General Hospital. Timothy was taken to the station for questioning while the police searched the house. They allegedly found two 1oz bags of marijuana in the microwave and more seeds on digital scales on the kitchen counter. They also reportedly recovered a Glock semi-automatic pistol and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, including some for an assault rifle. [...]

Two months later, Timothy was arrested while at his construction job and charged with possession of marijuana with intent to sell, parole violation and possession of a firearm during a drug crime. He still faces state charges of culpable negligence for leaving the gun where Timberlan could get hold of it. Timberlan's mother was at the hearing, where she reacted angrily to the charges. "I forgave him from day one," she said. "These people are not taking into consideration that this man lost his child ... He wakes up every morning crying. He feels like it's his fault."

Whose fault do you think it is? How many separate things are wrong with this picture? Only in America.

Spring on a Wednesday

yellows
Originally uploaded by udge.

G and U are in Bavaria again to wrestle in mud with the builders, so I have today and tomorrow off. I may very well take Friday too just for the hell of it, or as recompense for the anger and frustration and long hours of the last week.

Today is a wonderful day, sunny and blue-skied and warm (10°C). It's been a half-playday so far, I have been downtown for a cappuccino, photographed some flowers on the way there, and now I'm home again in that which we laughingly refer to as the "real world," meaning that grey and dusty place where work occurs.

I am installing Windows on a freshly formatted C: drive; after that finishes, I shall install the database and installermaker software and copy over my files. And if after all that I still cannot create a database application that runs under Windows, I shall throw the computer out the window and run off to the Outer Hebrides and become a beekeeper.

(Interesting that it didn't occur to me to say that I would run off to the South Pacific; when I think of paradise-on-earth I don't see visions of warm, sunny jungle vegetation. I am definitely a northerner.)

But first, it's time for lunch.

In other news I've discovered where the moths are breeding: inside my vacuum cleaner! Yeuccch. It's like a tiny, low-budget horror movie.

In other, other news yesterday's Wondermark is food for thought.

Not a paid review

A heart-warming message arrived this morning on a bulletin board that I read:

Today, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the pharmaceutical monolith that charges nearly $1,000 for a 30 day supply of one of its HIV/AIDS medications, is donating $1 to the National AIDS Fund for each person who simply visits their website and "virtually lights a candle."

My, you think, how noble and generous they are  — as you are intended to think. Well, think again my dears. As of midday CET the message is very different. The website now reads:

Thank you for lighting a candle to support the fight against HIV/AIDS... As a result, we are proud to honour our commitment to donate $100,000 to the National AIDS Fund to continue their vital work with those most impacted by this disease.

Pah. They are donating the annual turnover from eight patients. Well whoop-de-fucking-do.

As of 14:25 CET the count stands at 1,448,381 candles. They are donating 6.9 cents per candle-lighter, not a dollar.

BM-S paid its shareholders 2.18 billion dollars in dividends in 2005. (It's on page 120 of their annual report.) That is 1509 dollars per candle-lighter.

BM-S turned a nett profit of 3 billion dollars last year (page 116). The donation is equal to the profit they earn every 17.5 minutes.

BM-S spent 509 million dollars on advertising in 2005 (page 83). The donation is equal to the amount they spend on advertising every two hours.

I am glad that they are donating money to the National AIDS Fund, and even more so that they are supporting clinics and healthcare centres in Africa and Asia (pages 6-7). I am disappointed that the amount is so trivially small, and offended that they clearly expect me to be awed by their sensitivity and wholesomeness. Pah.