Things I Know I Know

Everyone says that if we are to find a way to make long term, positive changes, to revive the mixed economy, and reenergize the debate on progressive issues, then the Democrats need to learn how to fight.

Herewith, things I've learned from Rottweilers:

• Stand your ground
• Stare your opponent right in the eye
• Be deadly calm in the face of provocation, but remember:
  • If you need to make noise, make it BIG
• Ignore yappy little heel-biters and other distractions
• When all else fails, show them your teeth

And most important--

• Throw your whole heart into it

It also helps to remember these two central tenets of the Rottweiler code:

• Pain is as nothing
• Bad stuff never happens

Posted by debco at 07:25 PM | Permalink

...part one of a continuing series

• Art Linkletter--learned to ski when he was 60
• Annie Peck--scaled Mt. Corpuna in Peru in 1911, when she was 58

Posted by debco at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of my jobs is to supervise a telephone support line. After what was a long day on the phones recently, I came downstairs and said, I'm looking for things to put on the web site. What should we tell people to remember?

One of the guys looked at me and said, Tell them--Remember. Don't be stupid.

If you're looking for a personal mission statement, you could do worse than this. Because people often do phenomenally stupid things--like build giant new stores smack in the middle of a flood plain--and then when inevitable disaster strikes, say, well, how could we have known?

Because you're engineers?

Because it's a flood plain?

I knew. The people living next door to me knew. Children who saw the last flood knew. Everyone knew.

Or, maybe you remove regulations and protections and gut anti-trust laws and make sure the balance of capital and labor skews strongly to one side. And then, when corporation after corporation pops up with readjusted earnings, when we find out dozens of people manipulated companies for their own short-term stock option gain, when we see that the lying and cheating and stealing went on all over, everywhere, at the expense of the community and the workers and the stockholders, we raise our hands to our cheeks and say, but how could we have known?

Please.

Don't be stupid. Don't expect me to be stupid. I don't really care about punishment and jail time and the amount we'd have to spend to prosecute some of these yahoos. But I do want something. I want them to stand up and say:

You were right and we were stupid.

Posted by debco at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Note:I first saw mention of this--phones for dogs--last Friday, then when I went to blog it, I could find no trace of it anywhere. Not via Google, not via blogdex, nowhere. I was really worried that my unconscious had made it up out of whole cloth for some unfathomable reason. This isn't the original article I saw, but at least it exists...

In Finland they are now selling a combination mobile phone and GPS system to help hunters keep track of their dogs when they're out hunting.

The GPS is to locate the dogs and the mobile phone is to listen to their barks and, presumably, their breathing so the hunter can tell if they're going fast or slow or if they've found a bear (hey, I don't make this stuff up). They were originally designed so the hunters could talk to the dogs, but apparently this just annoyed the dogs so it isn't an option in the final version.

Posted by debco at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In their September, 2002 issue, Scientific American has an article on:

How to Build a Time Machine

All right! I'm cleaning out my garage!

Though I have to say, this part looks a bit daunting for the home hobbyist:

A formidable problem that stands in the way of making a wormhole time machine is the creation of the wormhole in the first place.

Posted by debco at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here's a cool site:

Edo Japan, A Virtual Tour

I'm not sure I've even scratched the surface of it yet, but it's got beautiful artwork and a wealth of information on the Japanese city of Edo (the historic name for Tokyo).

Posted by debco at 09:13 PM | Permalink

United Press International has several articles discussing whether the anti-malaria drug, Lariam, played a role in the cluster of murders that recently took place at Fort Bragg.

Official spokesmen for the Army say the drug has no adverse side effects. But soliders say Lariam, or mefloquine, causes side effects that can include aggression, depression, paranoia, hallucinations and suicidal thinking.

Although the Army has said that they believe domestic problems are the most likely explanation in the killings, none of the couples had a history of violence.

A followup article at the UPI site indicates that the Army had warnings about Lariam as early as 1996.

Posted by debco at 10:19 PM | Permalink

Democracy is like Soylent Green--It's people.

Posted by debco at 09:55 PM | Permalink

A couple of days ago there was a discussion going on across several weblogs, including TalkLeft, on jury nullification. Clay Conrad, author of the book, Jury Nullification, weighed in.

Among his comments:

Jurors have a role to play as a pressure valve, as a regulator, in the American system of justice. We shouldn't try to seal off the safety valves too tightly, because when the pressure builds up it should be released. Thanks to the war on drugs and our increasingly prosecutorial society, the pressure can get pretty intense sometime.

We keep trying to remove 'the people' from we the people, from of the people, from by the people, from for the people. We make sure protestors are cordoned off somewhere well out of sight, restrict elected officials' appearance to staged photo opps, talk to 'community' and 'business' leaders, but never to regular people like you and me.

We reduce the role of the people to binary choices in a world that, except for the chip inside the computer, is not binary. You can find a defendant guilty or not guilty, but you can't say this is a stupid, anti-Constitutional law that should hever have existed in the first place. You can vote for this guy here or this other guy over here, but you can't have a real voice in the process (or at least if you do have a voice, no one will hear you when you use it). You can express your opinion in polls, but you can't ask thought-provoking questions and we won't answer you anyway.

The people are the process. Collectively, we can make decisions of great fairness and complexity. We can also make remarkably stupid decisions. But, you know what? Everyone does, including the three branches of government, the military, law enforcement officials, and the super-rich heads of corporations. And, you know, it is a pain to have to get input from your fellow couuntry men and women. It's messy and noisy and tiring. But it is also right. No, it's not merely right, it's the fundamental underpinning of democracy. It's what we signed on for!

Posted by debco at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, I'm standing in line at the grocery store and things are moving pretty slowly. On the rack to my right are batteries, bag clips, breath mints, and electric toothbrushes. On one of the toothbrushes there's a label:

Try me!

And I just have to say: EEUWW!!!!!

Posted by debco at 07:02 PM | Permalink

I mostly go to the coffeehouse on weekends, but sometimes when I take the day off from work, I'll go there on a weekday.

The going-to-work crowd leaves between 8 and 8:15. About nine or so, a group of older men come in to sit at two tables pushed together and drink coffee and talk. They are doctors and professors and they talk in loud voices, not as if they're hard of hearing, but as if they're using to lecturing or giving orders, as if they expect to be listened to when they say something.

They are fascinating to listen to. Once, as I was sipping my coffee and writing random notes on the other side of the room from them, they started talking about a recent case in the news, a suspicious death that the coroner had mis-reported.

One of them, a doctor I presume, said he'd once been a coroner in rural Iowa. One day, he got a call, an elderly woman who lived alone hadn't been seen for a couple of days. He and the sheriff drove to her house. They walked inside and found the woman lying on the floor in the middle of her living room.

He walked over to her, he said, knelt down and looked at her, thinking, well, it's already obvious she's had a heart attack. He checked her pulse, checked to see if she was breathing, already figuring in his head what he was going to write on the death certificate. He put his hand down so that he could turn her over and only then did he notice the blood in a pool all underneath her head. And only after he saw the blood did he notice the shotgun that had been lying right next to her all along, right out in the open, in the middle of the floor.

It turned out, the woman had committed suicide, stuck a shotgun in her mouth and blown the back of her head off.

"It's easy to miss things," he told the coffeehouse men, "when you think you already know what you're looking for."

Posted by debco at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. I keep it in my car and I've been mostly reading it when I go out to lunch, which is maybe once a week or so. For that reason, I haven't gotten very far into it yet and I haven't really reached any conclusions about whether I like it or not.

It has awesome description. And beyond that, the world he's created is rich and deep and textured. He has a handy way with words and worldbuilding and there is depth and substance to what he's created.

But...it dwells way too much on bodily fluids. By this I mean not just that there's a lot of description of sweat and snot and spit (a lot of description of spit), though there is, but that all the description, even of more mundane things, has some sort of lingering sense of slime and fluid and gunk.

For example...

Swelling flatly above the low houses beside her was the Flyside militia tower. A vast, filthy pudgy pillar, squat and mean, somehow, for all its thirty-five stories.

And...

The converging rivers on either side ran sluggishly and the water streamed here and there as its currents mixed nameless chemicals into potent compounds. The slop from failed experiments...

And even...

Oozing obscenely over the top of the Flyside tower was a half-inflated dirigible. It flapped and lolled and swelled like a dying fish.

If I wrote a description of the same places, it would sound completely different, possibly dirty, even filthy, but not so slimy. I don't say this is good or bad, though you notice who has published a novel (him) and who hasn't (me). Still and all, I could use a lot less about spit and slime and dripping.

Posted by debco at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I don't always blog stuff that's already been cited in a lot of places.

But this, 110 Stories by John M. Ford, a poem about the World Trade Center told in 110 lines, one for each of the stories in the towers

...this is damn good.

Posted by debco at 07:27 PM | Permalink

Apparently, this story, Tombstone ATM Doles Out Inheritance, might be a hoax. SFgate reports that they can't find a death notice under the name reported.

Me, I found it totally believeable. I have a friend who wants us to put up one of those neon signs with revolving messages when she dies so she can continue to tell people what to do after she's gone.

Posted by debco at 07:13 PM | Permalink

DaveZilla has been told to get rid of his little lizard logo and change the name of his site by Toho, Inc who own Godzilla, the mighty lizard monster feared of man and Mothra.

Ericzilla has a site discussing the whole Davezilla vs Godzilla issue, including links to sites that changed their name in support of the Zilla cause: April GemZilla, BurningZilla, CraZilla Island.

And you can even take a quiz. Can you tell the difference?

Posted by debco at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I like to go to the coffee shop early in the morning and spend a couple of hours reading and writing.

One morning, a women in her late sixties or early seventies comes in. She tells the man who's meeting her there that she's been driving all night from Colorado. She skis, she says, but, of course, she didn't go skiing this time because it's only September.

Later, she tells him that she got caught in a speed trap on I-80 around Omaha. She was going 70 mph in a 60 mph zone. They had eight other people pulled over, she tells him, all in a line.

So, she says, "I did what I had to do."

"What was that?" the man asks her.

"I cried and told them I was deaf," she says. "And they let me off."

I am vastly entertained by this woman and the picture of her zooming through Nebraska, confounding police, skiing. Maybe, I think, she rock-climbs or jumps out of airplanes or bungee-jumps off bridges, too.

The man she's with says, "Why would they let you off because you're deaf? Maybe you just think that's why. Maybe they let everyone off."

"Maybe they let me off because I'm pretty," she says.

Posted by debco at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Rule one, if you recall is: Pain is as nothing.

Today's rule (number two of the Rottweiler Code):

Bad things never happen.

This is why Rottweilers make good guard dogs ("Someone hit me on the head with a stick? When?"). It's also why they don't totally get 'no' and why they're not very trainable with negative methods.

I actually kind of like this philosophy and wish I were better at applying it myself, though you have to admit it must give them kind of skewed world-view....

Posted by debco at 07:38 PM | Permalink

...or John Henry either.

It's always been the defining question for me--why can't dogs read--the separator between why we're human and why dogs are...well, not.

Although lots of people put forth the notion that it's tool use that separates man from not-man, I've seen dogs use tools. And we already know crows do, too.

Even if they wanted to, dogs are physically incapable of forming the sounds necessary for speech (if you ever write an SF story about a talking dog, you'd better take this into consideration). According to this article, Gene Mutations Linked to Language Development in the Washington Post, current research suggests that about 50,000 years ago a particular mutation gave human ancestors the kinds of physical control over mouth and throat muscles necessary to actually talk.

Of course, muscle control alone doesn't explain language. Dogs certainly have an urge to communicate (mine generally try to do it by staring at me as hard as they can--which is actually a strong enough communication device to wake me from a sound sleep) and they can learn the meaning of words and sentences and relate one action to another, seemingly unconnected, one. And contrary to popular opinion, dogs have at least some understanding of past, present and future.

But dogs are really all about the concrete, all about what they can see and feel and touch. Dogs are not philosophers. And it's the abstract stuff and the need to articulate it rather than, 'Game here, go kill now,' that leads to language.

Posted by debco at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's a certain high-geekiness factor to this post (you have been warned!) but it does fall under 'democracy.'

Phil Windley, CIO of the State of Utah, has a weblog. In a recent entry, he talks about eGovernment maturity and he says that there are four levels to the development of eGovernment the way it ought to be (he has tables and everything--you should go check it out). The first level is a simple website, the second level is 'online government' including some online transactions, and the third level is 'integrated government,' which starts to move beyond department-based transactions. The fourth level he calls 'transformational government' and describes it thus:

In the fourth level of eGovernment maturity, the services offered are built from the citizens' viewpoint to service individual requirements and needs...the organization of government has been subjugated to the service need of the citizen.

My boss says you can't describe level 4 because we're not there and that if it is truly transformative then we will be transformed, too, and thinking differently than when we were building level one or level two or even level three. So, it will be different (level 4) than we can imagine in our pre-transformed state.

What I think is that there's a fifth level that takes us beyond service, which is what all these initial levels are about--providing first-class service from the government to you, the citizen. Life in a democracy is more than that, though, and interaction with government is more (or ought to be more) than getting quick feedback when you fill out a form.

Level 5 is where we talk and listen and are heard. Level 5 is about dialogue. People need to have more interaction with 'government' than voting on the first Tuesday in November. Service, even first-class service, gives us, the recipients of that service no power except in griping. That and voting are our only ways to be heard in a government that believes it's all about 'serving' us. But, it's our government--you know, of the people, by the people, for the people--there ought to be more.

And we need a voice.

Not, to agree with all decisions. Not, to complicate the process even further. Not to create a direct democrary rather than a representative one. To participate in the discussion, to be more to elected officials than conglomerated numbers in a poorly-written poll. It'd be difficult, figuring out how dialogue would work, how to avoid the tyranny of the loudest voices, how to help people articulate their thoughts and feelings in productive ways, how to encourage enough participation to generate an ongoing synergy. I think technology can help, can continue what it does now outside government, improve our opportunities for conversation.

Not everyone wants 'the people' to have a greater voice than they do now. And some will say, well, you know, people will never agree on this or go against their self-interest on that, or understand all the nuances of this other thing. But, that's not the point. The point is being part of the complex, endlessly gray-shaded process. The point is the conversation.

Because when people participate, when they know, in particular, that they've been listened to and considered, they can often not only accept the final decision, whatever it is, but participating in the process increases trust and understanding and builds social capital that helps us handle the next big thing even better than the last one.

Posted by debco at 10:34 PM | Permalink

Man Conquers Space envisions an alternate space program based on a series of articles published in Colliers in the 1950s.

What if all that cool stuff really happened?

...via BoingBoing (which is where all cool stuff resides)

Posted by debco at 07:20 PM | Permalink

Three years ago today, my best friend, who happened to be a dog, died.

She died at six o'clock in the afternoon on Friday the 13th. She died of cancer, the second type of cancer she'd had in her life.

What follows here is the endpiece, slightly paraphrased, of an essay that I finished recently. The essay itself is about taking Riley to Colorado in 1996 for radiation treatment.

As for what this particular portion of the essay is about...this is who we are:

When I got Riley, I'd lived alone for five years. I'd lived without dogs for twelve years. I did a lot of research. In my family we believe that anything can be learned from books. My father and my uncle once butchered a steer with the help of a book they got out of the library. Before getting Riley, I read books on breeds, books on things to look for, books on Rottweilers, books on puppies, books on obedience, and books on tricks you can teach your dog.

After much list making and agonizing and searching, I found a breeder some sixty miles away. I drove over one night and saw the puppies and met the mother (I can admit now after having Rottweilers for twelve years that after all my careful research on What Kind of Dog Would Be Best for Me, my first reaction to seeing the mother of the puppies was--oh my GOD, that dog is BIG!). The puppies were bold and energetic and busy.

The next week I drove over with a friend of mine and brought Riley home.

Here are things I've written about her over the years:

I have a picture I took [of Riley] the night I brought her home. She's lying on the floor with her chest out and her front legs spread and she looks just exactly like herself. She was a wild, uncontrollable, but completely joyous puppy. She has a tremendous prey drive which would lead her to come running up behind me and bite me as hard as she could on the back of the knee. If I was sitting on the couch and she wanted to go out, she'd come up to me, look at me for a second and--POW!--pounce right on my chest with both front feet. She had Rottie jaws of steel which were a big shock to someone who grew up with labs and border collies and she could demolish anything in a under a second. She liked to carry huge things when she was really small, like big tree branches and the fireplace poker. We'd go for two, three, even five walks a day. Riley was never tired. Years later, I met a man and his son in the park walking a Samoyed puppy. "We went to puppy class and they said to tire her out, but we've been trying and trying and look at her,"; the man said to me. Welcome to the ride.

There are times when Riley has so much personality--the way she looks at me, the way she approaches a problem, that she seems human (not human, really, but I can't think of the right description--she seems real, intelligent, alive--but those aren't quite right either). And yet, this personality of hers is all dog. There's no human there. Living with a dog is living with an alien. It ought to be possible to learn something from that.

I read something today, I can't remember where, a retired endocrinologist said we need three things--companionship, health, and money. That's pretty hard to argue with. Riley is my companion. I wasn't lonely before I got her, but I would be lonely now without her. She's not perfect. There are lots better dogs, lots easier dogs to live with. But Riley's Riley.

I believed when I bought Riley that it was my responsibility to turn her into a well-socialized decent dog, that if she failed to make it in society that it was my failure, although she'd be the one to pay the price for it. I learned a huge lot of things from Riley...but one of the most important things I learned was that if you want something badly enough and you make a strong enough commitment to it, then it doesn't matter that you start out abysmally ignorant, and it doesn't matter that you have no timing or coordination or any natural dog training skills whatsoever. You can still get there one small frustrating step at a time and when you do get there, man, what a ride you've had.

I wanted Riley to be a dog I could take places. That, from the beginning, was my dream. The dogs in television movies or books for children who go on trains and to other people's houses and sit with tongues lolling at softball games. Riley was wild. And a Rottweiler. And the first dog I was wholly responsible for. And the only dog I'd ever had when I wasn't living at the end of a dead-end road ten miles from town. I took her everywhere, but she chased people, she barked at men who didn't approach her correctly, she barked at dogs she didn't like. She wore a muzzle at the vet's. She made me cry. She'll be seven years old in three weeks. And in that time, she's changed and I've changed. And suddenly I have the dog I wanted nearly two and a half years after I'd given up that dream completely....She still barks at other dogs. She still picks up on my feelings and if I'm nervous, she's the one who acts out my feelings to the world. But I give her more space to make her own decisions, which makes her less anxious. And she has more confidence. And I like going places with her. And she, as she always has, through all the years and all the ups and all the downs, loves people and excitement and rock music and rabbits. And me--I'm pretty sure she loves me too.

I would have done anything for Riley. I would have given her anything. And it didn't matter that she was just a dog.

Because she had given me her Heart.

Posted by debco at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As long as I'm on the copyright theme today, I might as well put up the links to singer-songwriter, Janis Ian's excellent articles on intellectual property, file sharing, and the music industry:

The Internet Debacle--An Alternative View

and

Fallout--A Followup to the Internet Debacle

Posted by debco at 08:26 PM | Permalink

Dan Gillmor, in harmony with Lessig's talk cited below, tells us about why we must engage in the copyright debate. So far, the entertainment industry has been successful in debating the issue on their own terms and there's much about copyright and our own rights to the future and our culture that are getting lost along the way.

His advice:

• Don't let Hollywood frame the debate
• Don't forget that users of copyright--readers and scholars and viewers--have rights, too.
• Resist the idea that culture should be centralized and commodified and held as property for longer and longer periods of time.

Gillmor suggests that the time is now to look at alternatives. We need to reestablish the balance between creators rights to compensation and the public citizens' rights to own their culture and build upon it. And we will need to involve everyone (you and me and that guy over there), not just big companies.

...also via Boing Boing

Posted by debco at 08:20 PM | Permalink

Here's a movie of Lawrence Lessig's talk (slides and voice) at OSCon. It's about copyright and culture and why 'limited time' is an important part of the mix.

Excellent stuff. Though it will take a long time to download on a dial-up connection.

...via Boing Boing

Posted by debco at 08:15 PM | Permalink

A democracy requires free citizens.

Now, some people will say, yes, well, it's axiomatic--a democracy has free citizens. Or, they might say, free citizens are part of a democracy. But as with so many things, it's a whole lot more complicated that that.

There are at least two parts to being 'free'--social and economic--and they intertwine, the social and the economic, in ways that are difficult to see or to understand. To be a full social citizen of this country means that I can live where I want to, say what I want to, vote without fear that someone will stop me. Not all of us have this freedom, at least not all of it, at least not all the time, but most of us do. We recognize the loss when it is not there. And we know it is important to fight for and maintain.

Full economic citizenship is equally important. If you lose your ethics for fear of losing your job, if you don't say certain things, or fight for certain rights, or you vote a certain way because you might lose your job or your company might leave the country, then you have lost your rights as a full economic citizen in this country.

And don't give me crap about choice--words so often said in a prissed-up, pinched-nose way by people who either still have economic citizenship or are so comfortably well-off they don't know or don't regret that they've lost it. Sometimes the choice is worth the principles and sometimes it is not. Some of us are stronger and some of us are not. But mostly--speak up or lose your job or don't speak up and don't, is not a real choice. It's the great reality of death-to-economic-citizenship masquerading as individual choice, conviction and responsibility.

If there's no economic independence, then there are no economic citizens. If losing your job means starving or losing everything you've worked for or losing your family or your community--and if these are the choices then--There Are No Choices.

And if there are no choices, then we are not democratic citizens in any way that matters.

Posted by debco at 08:46 PM | Permalink

I am a Speaker to Geeks....

According toThudfactor: The Polygeek Test my geek percentage is 46%.

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.

Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend.

You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines!

Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals!

You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Frighteningly, I actually do have this kind of job. And occasionally have conversations just like the one above.

Posted by debco at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Crows can use tools.

I wish the several thousand who hang out in the trees outside my house would hare off and build a village somewhere.

Posted by debco at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

...so say a team of Australian scientists who according to a WiredNews article, Was Einstein Wrong?, have proposed that the speed of light may not be a constant.

It's the nature of physics to change--Newtonian properties, quantum physics, waves, particles. Some of the explanations scientists claim, are elegant, but some of them are just plain messy and give us clear evidence that there is more to the universe than we have yet discovered.

Posted by debco at 08:47 PM | Permalink

I bought a DVD player--nothing fancy, not terribly expensive, but I've heard about all the extras and the great picture and the fact that some things come out on DVD now rather than videotape. And of course the DVDs themselves are smaller and take up less room on the shelf.

But here are the things I didn't know when I bought it. I can't hook it up to my television because my television has only one hookup--for coax. My television is not that old, it's a perfectly good television, it works fine and I don't want a new one.

I do have a VCR that does hook up to my television and it was two sets of video/audio connections. So, just like I hook up my cable box (when I have a cable box), I should be able to hook up my new DVD player. Like this: DVD-->VCR-->television. Except--oops!--because the rights part of copyright and particularly fair use are under attack. And because it apparently is easier and certainly more potentially lucrative to assume everyone's a criminal. And even more certainly without any benefit to me, the person paying for the bloody machine, my VCR has been 'enhanced' with copy protection so the picture from my DVD player when hooked up through my VCR is dark and distorted and altogether unwatchable.

So now--unknown to me when I bought my DVD player, unknown to me when I bought my VCR, unknown to me when I bought my television--I have to buy more stuff. I have to spend money I shouldn't have to spend because we have decided that it's acceptable for the entertainment industry to treat us all like criminals, to interfere with my use and enjoyment of things I legally own.

Well, I say 'we,' but I didn't have a say in it (did you?). The first I knew about it was when I tried to hook up my DVD player in a perfectly reasonable useful to me, the owner, way. I couldn't have protested. I didn't know, wasn't asked, wasn't considered important enough as a mere consumer to be involved in the discussion.

Here's an important bulletin--I don't want copies of your damned DVDs! Except possibly for archival purposes which is--check it out--my right. And if I did want to make archival copies of my DVDs (my right--see above), I sure wouldn't want to copy them onto tape.

Get this straight. I am not a consumer. I am a citizen. As a citizen I have rights--the right of fair use, the right of first sale, the right to have a say in things that affect my ability to exercise these rights.

Aaaah, you say, don't buy this stuff if it bothers you. If people really care, the market will take care of it. Let me say this again--I didn't know.

And I will not apologize for not knowing. How would I have known? Why should I not expect that a product will work in accordance with my fundamental rights as a US citizen? Why should I not expect that if it does not work that way that truth in advertising would result in it stating explicitly on the box the rights I give away, the extra equipment I have to buy, the hidden charges?

Call me naive. Call me a loser. But market does not trump citizens' rights. And deceit does not trump the Constitution. Defending those who attempt to do so with the argument--oh, they were just trying to make money--gets no truck from me. I am just trying to live as an honest, ethical citizen in a democratic country that I love. The least they can do is do the same.

Posted by debco at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I seem to be renting movies in thematic batches.

Two weekends ago...
The past doesn't change--the future can
Monster's Ball
The Royal Tenenbaums
A Beautiful Mind

Last weekend...
Men who recently lost their wives
Dragonfly
The Mothman Prophecies
The Shipping News

Posted by debco at 10:06 PM | Permalink

Just Finished
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
Black Lotus by Laura Roh Rowland

Just Started
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig
To Perish in Penzance by Jeanne M. Dams

Posted by debco at 09:59 PM | Permalink

I was reading a book by Jo Bannister called Echoes of Lies. I can't say I finished it because I didn't, but I'm through reading it. Here's what happened: A young man is kidnapped, tortured for two days, then shot and left for dead. As far as the men who kidnapped him are concerned he is dead. They meant to kill him. They shot to kill. They are murderers.

Turns out the men who kidnapped him and tortured him and killed him are the father and grandfather of a little girl who has also been kidnapped and is currently being held for ransom. They have been joined in their efforts by a professional man specializing in torture. At the end (yup, skipped to the end again) the father (who, it turns out, is also the kidnapper) gets off pretty much scot free. The tortured guy lies to the police and refuses to turn either the father or the grandfather into the police. The professional man who specializes in torture, on the other hand, gets beaten within an inch of his life and will go to jail for a long long time--something he deserves, but not, in my opinion, any more than the others.

It's all right, you see, to abandon every moral principle, break every law, treat other people like discarded tissue--innocent people!--as long as it's all done for a child. Now I agree that there are a great many lines that can be crossed in defense of family and particularly a child, who has an innocence the rest of us can't match. But killing an innocent man is not one of them. We're supposed, I think, to ignore the killing part, ignore the fact that it's a twist of fate, not any effort on the kidnappers' part that saves the tortured man's life. The father and the grandfather of the little girl did nothing--not one thing--to ensure that he remained alive.

But, as soon as we know a child's involved, it is no longer murder. It's referred to as 'trying to kill me.' The main male character says it--you tried to kill me. No. They didn't. They killed him. In their hearts and in their minds, they did it. These are lines that can't be crossed. Not for a child. Not for anyone. A few years ago, on the television show, The Profiler, the team surrounded a man, a serial killer. 'Kill him, kill him, kill him,' a mother shouts. She wants his heart to save her son. The man is a serial killer, you could make a case that he deserves to die. But what about the mother? Do you want to know that your mother murdered someone so you could live? What does that make her? And what if you know that the serial killer's killings were to find organs to transplant into sick people? The same thing the mother, in the name of being a good and wondrous mother, wants to do to him. What circumstances make it okay--murder in the name of saving a child?

We do not live in a world that is parent- and child-separate, each one from every other one. While you might sacrifice more for your own child than for another child, while there are some rules that clearly must be or should be or can be broken when it's a child's welfare at stake, you can't kill in cold blood or kill an innocent man, just to save a child. Or at least (because, given, it's always your choice), you can't do it and expect that there are no consequences, that the world just goes on. And there, for certain, ought to be consequences in fiction, particularly mystery fiction. Because mystery fiction in many ways is about how we want to go on, or wish we would go on. And even in some of the darkest mystery fiction, there are codes to be adhered to. Mysteries are about the justice we wish we had in our everyday lives.

When men murder innocent people and walk away, even if we're told that their life is in shambles and they feel like, really, really bad about the whole thing--that's not justice. It's cheating.

Posted by debco at 08:57 PM | Permalink

Don't lie. Don't lie. Don't lie.

For those of you needing remedial instruction, let me elaborate. If your close female friend with a somewhat fragile ego walks up to you with a tremulous smile on her face and asks if the hideous orange dress with lime green trim and bell sleeves looks all right, you tell her, yes, it's a great color or the sleeves are interesting or it's a very flattering cut. If your company earned a billion dollars less than you reported, if you used insider information and got caught, if you helped purge voters from the rolls who shouldn't have been purged, then stand the hell up and say so!

Don't lie before (the company is doing fine). And don't lie after (I didn't do anything wrong. And those records are secret, secret, secret).

We accept regulation because it's needed, but we accept less of it when we trust the businesses we do business with. We don't trust people who lie. We don't trust companies who lie.

Once on New Year's Eve day, I was running errands with my dog. I turned into the credit union parking lot, a steep up-bump, and the left front axle on my car broke. Just broke. Gone. I managed to limp home, thanks to four wheel drive and the lucky fact that I live about a mile away, and put the car in the garage until after the holidays.

Monday morning, I called my car dealer, which is located some 45 miles to the south of where I live. We'll send someone with a flatbed, they said. I'd already cleaned out my car. It was ten years old; I'd had work done on the axles two or three times before and I figured that the current, pretty extensive damage wouldn't be worth fixing.

Shortly after noon, they called me. 'It was totally and completely our fault,' the service manager said. And then went on to tell me how it was, indeed, all their fault. 'Thank you,' I said, 'Thank you for telling me.'

They could have told me nothing. They could have said, 'we feel bad, we don't know what happened, we worked on your car just a couple of weeks ago and everything looked fine, but we feel bad so we'll split the cost with you.'

What they said was, 'It was totally and completely our fault. We're sorry. We'll do everything we can to make it up to you.' That's what not lying means. That's how you hold your head up and show respect for your customers. That's what ought to happen by choice and example and is even more important on the large scale than the small.

Well, yeah, you say, but if companies lie, you just take your business elsewhere. Sticking point here--you don't always know they're lying. If my car dealer had given me the 'we'll pay half' line, I wouldn't have known. But they would have been lying all the same. When Big International Corp says we made this much money this quarter, that's what we know--what they tell us.

We have to say it's not all right. We have to mean it. And we have to write new values into the system that rewards small businesses, creative businesses, and honest businesses.

Posted by debco at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Charming Billie got spayed this week and so I am once again reminded of this important tenet of the Rottweiler code:

• Pain is as nothing

...especially when one must bark at the mailman or chase a squirrel.

Posted by debco at 07:37 PM | Permalink

...I'm pretty sure they would spend an inordinate amount of time talking about squirrels.

Stephen Budiansky has an interesting book called, If Lions Could Talk, on animal intelligence and some of the flaws of current research in the field, in particular how often we overlook the idea that animal intelligence and animal 'values' may be fundamentally different than our own.

I think he also misses some important things--the role of scenting ability in how animals interpret information and solve problems--but it's an interesting book with loads of good information.

Posted by debco at 07:27 PM | Permalink

A recent article at CNN.com comes to the conclusion that: Dogs are smarter than people think

This is such a profoundly stupid article that I'm stuck as to where to begin.

One group of researchers find that dogs use a range of barks to convey meaning. Well, duh....

The article goes on to describe this research:

The canines were shown treats and then a screen was lowered and the goodies were left as they were or some were added or taken away.

If a treat was added or taken away the dogs looked at the treats much longer than they did when the goodies were not disturbed, presumably because they had done their sums and the numbers did not meet their expectations.

I mean, really.

Once, John Henry and I stayed in a cabin for a week. One night a mouse crept out of the broom closet and munched away on John Henry's food while we were sleeping. I could hear it in the kitchen happily eating, while John Henry was lying on the bed next to me, oblivious. The next morning, he stood in the kitchen, looking at his food bowl, looking at me, looking at his food bowl. Little did I suspect that he had counted each piece before he went to bed and was counting them again to see how many were missing.

Maybe dogs can tell when we swipe food out of their bowls. But how can we tell that they're counting by how long they stare at it? What if it looks different? What if it smells different? What if they're just wondering about the state of the universe or the effects of global warming on the continued regularity with which they will be fed?

Posted by debco at 04:19 PM | Permalink

I read somewhere recently that many left-liberals eschew the phrase, patriot. Now, I have to admit that if whoever first used the word had known it would be used to stand for United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, I'm sure he'd have been excused if he'd reconsidered ever using the word at all.

ABC news says that although several cities are saying to hell with abusing our liberties in the name of liberty, most people are in favor of the USA PATRIOT act, but I can tell you that my impression is that ABC news hasn't actually been talking to much of anyone or maybe they haven't been asking them specific enough questions. Although a large number of people don't really know what's involved in the act, most everyone I talk to is not in favor of losing the basic freedoms that constitute this country. And they are not in favor of the federal government grabbing rights willy-nilly from good law-abiding citizens. The only reason there isn't a bigger outcry is because a great many people trust other people to behave the way they ought to behave.

We take freedoms for granted and in the general way of things that's good. It speaks well of all of us that our freedoms are universal enough and protected enough that we can take them for granted. But one of the prices of freedom is vigilance and not vigilance in the form of faulty face recognition at airports. Vigilance against encroachments on those very freedoms that we take for granted every day. Because the erosion of freedom can be a subtle thing. It can start with attacks on people we hate, perhaps with good and sufficient reason, then people we fear, then those who just aren't really like us. But always and inevitably, if we are not vigilant, the freedom's that we lose are our own.

Posted by debco at 08:43 PM | Permalink