In the spring of 1980 in Boston there was a murder trial of a notorious pair of thugs, ghetto low-lifes who had raped, murdered and robbed a young nurse in her own home. At the trial, the prosecutor asked one of the murderers about a certain boombox, proved to be the nurse's, that was in the man's possession when he was arrested. The exchange went something like this:

Prosecutor: You took that boombox from her apartment.
Murderer: Yeah.
Prosecutor: But when you were arrested, you said that it was your boombox.
Murderer: It is mine.

Now that is what the absence of shame looks like.

For a more recent example of brazen shamelessness, we have the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association. [Read More!]

From yesterday's Boston Globe, this depressing story about how the Massachusetts legislature does everything behind closed doors & under control of the Party Leaders. This is the way things inevitably turn out in a one-party state.

It's almost enough to make one think of voting Republican (and maybe that's why we seem to elect Republican governors like Romney pretty regularly). But the Republicans who run for state office here are generally even more abhorent than the Democratic hacks who run the show now, so we'll probably stick with what we have. The Democrats may practice machine politics, but at least they're not obsessively homophobic & insanely jingoistic warmongering anticonstitutionalists, which is the Republican trope here in Massachusetts as it is elsewhere across this great nation of ours.

The US Senate just passed a bill to outlaw discrimination in employment or insurance based on genetic testing. No one voted against it. It is expected to pass the house and be signed by President Bush.

No one thinks it's ok to base insurance on genetic information?

Then why the hell do we allow insurers to charge so much more based on the absence of a Y chromosome? (I own a day care that is unusual in providing insurance for our staff. They are mostly women, and the extra costs are staggering.)

I had thought that insurance was supposed to be about pooled risk. Actuarial studies were supposed to be used to figure out how much total risk the insurer faced, so that they could set overall rates to be solvent and actually provide their service when needed. Instead, insurers seem today to default on payments. Moreover, they seem to use actuarial studies (and past-payments to individuals) to manage profit from micro-pools or individual accounts. Instead of being about pooled risk, today's insurance is more like an individual savings plan.

The intrepid pro fair-use and anti-hate-speech activist known as Spocko has a link up to a bit by activist journalist Greg Palast about the “Summit for Security and Prosperity” (“SSP”) of the big cheeses of Mexico, the USA and Canada which recently happened in New Orleans, of all places. Whatever its stated purposes, Palast says, SSP's real goal is the blending together of Canada, the USA and Mexico for the benefits of the non-national power/money elites under the fig leaf justification of NAFTA. Among many of Palast's interesting point is that under new rules, Chinese products can come into the USA with all the rights and privileges of “Made in Mexico” products.

He also makes the point that the super wealthy are (perhaps ever have been?) post-national--it doesn't make sense to think of them as “American” or “Mexican” or “Canadian” or “Saudi” or “Russian” or whatever. How many members of the nominally American upper crust, for example, do you think are serving in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan? Right.

Yet they realize that the trappings of nationalism are important to “the people”, even if “the people” are willing to let go of democracy itself.

[Read More!]

Now, THIS is what I call an avatar!

[Note to readers unfamiliar with Stearns: he's the Wetmachanic who blogs under the “Inventing the Future” rubric, usually about avatars of some damn kind or other.][That's a joke, son.]

Steven Poole wrote a blog entry about how the hell us poor writers are supposed to earn a living in this newfangled “information wants to be free” age, characterized by what Poole calls the “Slashdot argument”:

[the Slashdot argument] says that books, music, films, software and so on ought to be freely distributed to anyone who wants them, simply because they can be freely distributed. What is the writer or musician to do, though, if she can’t earn money from her art? Simple, says the Slashdotter: earn your money playing live (if you’re one of those musicians who plays live),4 or selling T-shirts or merchandise, or providing some other kind of “value-added” service.

You may recognize this logic as a variant, or corollary, if you will of the first line of the Toddler's Manifesto: “if I want it, it's mine.”

After the jump, a link to a funny cartoon! [Read More!]

No, I'm not talking about the cadre of Pentagon Shills currently degrading the cover of the NY Times. I'm referring to the brave men and women who got up at 5 am here in Los Angeles, dropped all party affiliations and paddled out into the unseasonably cold waters to surf mediocre waves. It takes a certain kind of person to forgo the warm backsides of their beloved bedfellows, load up cars, stand naked on a pre-dawn beach, pull on stinking neoprene and paddle out into frigid waters which offer only the smallest of waves.

What kind of person, you might ask?

Well, I'll start with my carload and make it quick- It was me, Slatty, and Sam. Sam lives here and is an avid surfer. Avid in a stealth way. I get emails from Sam at all hours, reporting from breaks north and south. Most missives are brief, “Standing on a pier in Cambria staring at huge waves”. An actor and musician from way back, Sam took to the water in earnest about 4 years ago and has attacked surfing with a kind of masochistic fervor. Sam charges waves (that's a surfing term for one who surfs fearlessly). He's got more broken eardrums than a team of deepwater divers and last year he broke his nose...falling on water. This is charging. He shortly thereafter booked a coveted role on a new HBO series, so he may be onto something. As for Slatty, he's that same character from the last entry, one of my oldest, separated-at-birth friends, who has a Boston Irishman's gift for comedic flaying and a freshly born addiction to surfing that has yielded terrifying results. He rarely leaves the water when he has the chance. Couple this with the fact that he lives with his family in New York City and only gets out to LA for work (again, an actor. Brilliant, ubiquitous, always gets, “Where do I know you from?” as he walks down the sidewalk), and you see how we came to be up at 6 am, driving 40 miles north when we should have been sleeping. To Slatty's credit, he pulled up with a full tray of coffees and muffins.

Cut to cold water and a black, neoprene-skinned crowd of surfers bobbing across a 300 yard stretch of 54 degree water: You could be a doctor, you could be homeless window cleaner, you could be a chicken-hawk senator, smirking studio-head or a righteous lefty-campaign volunteer, but if you're out there when you could be in bed, sipping your coffee, you're a little bit closer to hearing the big bad rhythm of a much larger beast. And even if those waves are so small you have to paddle like a fool to slide along on a 6 inch face, that wave got it's start somewhere far, far away and breaks upon your shore like a foreign messenger singing a universal song. And some will surf upon these messages like pros and some will chatter as the cold ebbs through their feet and some will sit like Buddha, big and patient looking out to sea, but all will paddle in eventually. And I feel sagely certain that that news of middle-aged Generals doing Halliburton's duty, or Democratic candidate's miserable dividing of allies will all be put in it's place by the unifying message- that is neither simple nor small- delivered by a cold sea on a Sunday morning.

Google pays me about four cents a month to run adverts on this-a-here policy-wonk & general bullshit blog, and lately they've been running an awful lot of the John McBush “one man” animated gif, which may be running to the right of this image even now. On account of which, my friends and family give me a fair amount of grief. I tell them that I'm not crazy about Google's running McBush ads here, but I need the money.

In any event it reminds me to run the above picture, which I plan to do at least once a week, until I no longer need to.

Read it and weep.

He's right. What a horrible race of bastard cowards are we.

It’s April now, and we’re a few months past the talk of the town here in Los Angeles. I am, of course, talking about the strike by the Writer’s Guild of America. For those of us caught up in the strike—and by that I mean either participating, being unable to work because of it or both (we Screen Actors Guild members were there, standing side by side with the DGA, hamming it up for cable news crews everywhere)—the strike had the feel of being the “bad”cop in a mediocre crime drama. It may or may not have been necessary, depending upon whom you listen to, but it was grimly inevitable and provoked no end of snickers and eye rolls from the rest of the cast. Speaking personally, I think it got the job done but I hope it does not get hired for any near-future episodes.

Anyway, to get by as our bank accounts dwindled and “reality programming” filled the time slots with mercenary vigor, many turned to other means of expression. Some took their overflowing talents to the even-smaller-screen and turned out ground-breaking web series. “Wainy Days”, “Horrible People”and “Maria Bamford”" come to mind. (If you haven’t seen ‘em, well, say goodbye to your 52” plasma screens.) Some finally got to that novel they’d always wanted to write (results forthcoming, we assume). Others took that Real Estate Exam once and for all.

Me? I went surfing. And watched the state burn. [Read More!]

Never let it be said that nagging never pays off. For years I've been importuning my pal David Newsom, that matinee idol, photographer, award winning movie producer, etc, etc, to start a blog, preferably here on Wetmachine. He's a great storyteller, as you'll see shortly, and I've been looking for another voice to balance out the glorious wonkery from Harold, Greg, and Howard. I mean, I love FCC policy & sofware geekery as much as the next fellow, but sometimes I think our little wessle lists a bit to starboard, if you will. So I'm delighted to announce that David has tired of telling me to buzz off, and as of this instant is an official wetmachiner.

(David, is it OK that I announce that your new gig is as a producer/reporter for planetgreen? Gee, I sure hope so!)

As soon as our colleague Gary gets his attention back to mundane things, he'll be setting up a sub-blog for David to be called [notes or dispatches or null] [from a] West Coast Dilettante.

In the meantime, I'm taking the liberty of posting his innagural contribution to Wetmachine main page, which I'll do sometime later today when I get a sec.

Well that was a fun and significant weekend. Gary Gray, (known in some parts as variously Wetmachine's “quiet Beatle”, Wetmachine's Cowboy Neal, Wetmachine's Scotty (“I can no make Wetmachine go any faster, Captain, the di-lithium crystals are already overheated!”), etc, ) got married to the lovely and talented Marcia Levin. As I can attest with some confidence, having been best man.

Good show, old man!

Jim Munroe is a leading light in the do-it-yourself/self publishing universe. After getting bummed out by some less-than-thrilling experiences with the Big House who published his first, science-fictiony novel Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, he set out to create a methodology and infrastructure for people (like me) who had decided to go the non-corporate, auteur/artist route. As a founder of AdBusters, Jim had strong culture-jamming experience and street cred upon which to build.

One result of his going out on his own was the No Media Kings website, another was a kind of permanent tour of musicians, artists and writers, both of which are vehicles for similar-minded do-it-yourself artists. He's written & published several SF novels, and he also makes low-budget indy films and videogames. I've met Jim once or twice, and he's given me some publicity and advice.

Jim's most recent book is a graphic novel about a post-Rapture world. Below the fold, a short review, part of my occasional series of reviews of self-published books. [Read More!]

“What I meant was,” the Senator explained, “that's how long I want to say in your arms!”

Over on the corporate media Tee Vee, War Criminal Douglas Feith was seen to be spouting his lies, equivocations, rationalizations and deathworship the other night. He's pretty good at that shit, even if he is the “dumbest fucking guy on the face of the planet”.

Fortunately for us, we have Athenae (also known as Allison Hantschel), who is a bonafide expert on what a horrible lying war criminal Feith actually is, to provide running commentary and expert debunking of war criminal Feith's lies and omissions.

Her book Special Plans is a fantastic resource for anybody who cares about the truth of how the United States of America launched its disasstrous war of agression in Iraq.


Note to producers of infotainment shows on the TV: How about a little Allison love, OK? So she's not Alyson Hannigan, I'll grant you that. But she ain't bad lookin neither! Put her on the air; the country will thank you for it.

Via Slashdot, more happy news about neuromarketing (kissing cousin of neuroeconomics), that is, reading your brain to see how you respond to advertising and what you're thinking about when you decide to buy or not buy any old thing.

Yesterday in the Boston Globe (too lazy to find link) there was a story about law enforcement passively collecting DNA without a warrant by following around suspects and, for example, picking up discarded cigarette butts.

Not hard to imagine marrying these two trends. On the other hand I'm just a technoparanoid.

If there is a funnier, more astute commentator on political discourse than culture of truth in the bobblespeak translations, please don't introduce me to him or her. For if I laugh any harder with that ol' rueful laughter of the horrible truth, I may just die. And I ain't prepared to do that yet, George Bush's presidency notwithstanding.

By they way, I met CoT at the convention of Dirty Fucking Hippies known as Eschacon in Philadelphia last weekend. About which I will endeavor to blog at some point, if only to get cred for proving that I was indeed there. And I just want to say that for the reincarnation of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, Culture of Truth is certainly a mild-mannered, unassuming fellow.

Can you do it? Can you do it?
Can you do it? Can you do it?
Can you do it? Can you do it?