The blog is closed. My stalker's use of blog posts is making my professional life too difficult. I was going to have to curtail posting when my son arrives anyways; this just moves the decision along quicker and more widespread. Thanks for reading.
You've got to love the American approach to homo economicus these days: caveat frigging emptor. Instead of a nice, mutually understood premise -- I pay you money, you give me what I'm paying you for -- you get the customer acting on one premise and the business deciding whether or not to honor it. Take, for example, my latest foray into the fun world of corporations killing my intrinsic polyphasic field just a little:
My wife wanted to send her mother flowers for Mother's Day. So, she ordered "Pure Enchantment," a bouquet of lilies and purple flowers in a glass vase, from FTD.com. What her mother received was pink and white carnations in a plastic vase. Now, there's a certain degree of "we can't guarantee full seasonal availability" to this, which any reasonable person will accept. That, however, is not the problem here. My wife called up FTD to discuss the complete and utter failure to deliver a bouquet remotely resembling the one we paid for. After being offerred copious coupons for percentages off of future orders -- as if that was a reasonable response ("Spend more money, please, so we can apologize!") -- she called the florist in Albuquerque directly.
Now, what the florist had to say is what got my blood up. Apparently FTD does not provide a style book to its florists, or detailed instructions, or pictures, or even something along the lines of "hey, put a bunch of lilies and some purplish stuff in a glass vase." Nope. There's no real way, apparently, to be guaranteed you will get even an appropriate approximation of your order. The florist told my wife that the order states the name of the bouquet so, if you're lucky, the picture of the bouquet is still on the website so they can at least look the damn thing up. We were unlucky, and the Mother's Day bouquets were off the site by Mother's Day, when the damn thing was to be assembled.
Bravo, FTD. Good job sending our future business to 1800flowers.com.
Sometimes the trolls actually step out from the Internets and make real life difficult. Some craven individual -- my employer chose to honor their request that their letter remain "confidential" -- sent a letter to my executive director with excerpts from 10 or so posts from this blog. "See what kind of person works for you?" is, I am told, the tone of the letter. Unfortunately for this individual, who has apparently never heard of multitasking or the "save draft" function, there are absolutely no issues with my work productivity -- I'm as up to date as anyone and handle extremely difficult cases with my customary tenacity. My job is not in danger, nor, it appears, is the esteem of my superiors.
I'm about 99.9% certain I know who it was. On the .1% chance I'm wrong, I'm not going to publish his name, since he's the vindictive sort anyways, whether this specific incident is his work or not. But let's face it: we both know it was you. You've never been able to call my work into question, given that it is at all times beyond reproach and in keeping with my responsibilities to the children and young adults I have entrusted to your care as a vendor. You've never addressed any problems to my face, or even in a direct email to me. Having failed to find satisfaction by whinging to my superiors or unprofessionally "snubbing" me at meetings -- as if I gave a crap about your manners -- in front of parents and sister agencies, and having no grounds to call my professional life into question, you chose to try to impugn my personal life, in the hopes that my superiors were as petty as you are. Unfortunately, for you, I work for people of character.
Whether you're who I think you are or not, you're a coward. You're not even a bully -- bullies, at least, try to confront their targets. If you have something to settle, let's settle it like men, instead of this penny-ante adolescent girl crap. Hell, an adolescent girl would at least be effective in trying to stab someone in the back. What's next, filming me singing in the shower and posting it on YouTube? Whoever you are, why don't you speak to my face? There's a comments section appended to this post -- bring it here if you're too weak and afraid to do it in person.
Sadly, you do get to win a little: My language will be a bit more circumspect from now on, and in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety, long-form post drafts will be published when completed, instead of saved from my nighttime writing jags and published throughout the day. If readership falls, so be it. So, coward, go ahead and read that sentence a couple more times while pleasuring yourself. At least it'll be better than slamming your fist into your crotch repeatedly to kill your erection while Googling my name.
Well, I guess I wasn't quite done being less than moderate in tone. The challenge stands to my craven schoolgirl, though: You can email me, comment here, call me, hell, even walk up to me. We can take it into the parking lot. Or you can accept that your sad, pathetic obsession with me has led you nowhere, and move on. Me, I have better things to do.
Congress moves to overturn the will of the people of the District of Columbia. [h/t Matthew Yglesias]
Cornerite Peter Kirsanow declares Dick Cheney the adult supervision: "As a friend succinctly puts it, 'When that big asteroid finally heads toward Earth, who's the person you'd most want to be in charge?' I suspect Cheney would score at or near the top."
What's he going to do, tell someone to hold its head underwater? Shoot it in the face and make it apologize to him? Lock it in that man-sized safe?
Idiot.
“A standing army is like a standing member – it promotes domestic tranquility but is likely to lead to foreign adventures.”
-Unattributed quote from the Constitutional Convention
"Governmental mandates are pushing complex curriculum downward, onto younger and less-developed brains each year. And regardless of whether or not the students are developmentally and neurologically capable of performing these increasingly complex tasks, the standards rise and so we must teach. When the public learns that these curricular requirements are not being mastered, no one asks why, they just raise the standards and further increase the pressure on teachers. A politician steps up to champion the cause of our youth, sets the problem on the backs of those who must be careless incompetents in front of their classrooms, writes mandates in some legislation, calls it a win for kids and himself and our nation, ad nauseam. Yes, when kids fail in school, we all do. But politics driving curriculum, not neuroscience, developmental research, is a recipe for students' and teachers' perpetual failure.
"When government standards are aligned with scientifically-researched and developmentally-appropriate curriculum, and utilizing funding sources which are as malleable and expansive as the needs schools have, educational progress, teacher salaries, and retention of quality teachers can be addressed, and not before. Parroting that unions of the professionals in this system are somehow to blame for its relative quality while ignoring the archaic mechanism by which our schools are run is little more than a naive and politically expedient shell game."
-Anonymous correspondent at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish
Sometimes, there are only a few words that can adequately describe a story. And sometimes those words are very naughty indeed: Jesus fucking Christ.
Donald Rumsfeld is one scary mo-fo. That link will lead you to GQ's Flash collection of pages from actual intelligence briefings created and hand-delivered by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to then-President George W. Bush in the early days of the Second Gulf War. They feature images of American soliders, headlined by Biblical quotations. Check out April 3, 2003. [h/t DougJ at Balloon Juice]
Today, California's Governor Schwarzenegger announced a further $234 million permanent spending reduction in Regional Center services to infants, children, and adults with developmental disabilities to begin July 1, 2009, on top of the $100 million in permanent spending cuts previously announced and put in place at the end of last quarter. Factoring in lost federal matching funds, this amounts to $500 million in permanent cuts to the Regional Center system.
This is equal to the total costs of running two entire Regional Centers.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em. This is going to get ugly.
Now, granting that I have little patience for flowery -- or worse, pseduo-flowery -- language, doesn't this look like Georgia just declared its intent to dissolve the Union should Congress pass another Assault Weapons Ban or various sundry other laws they just don't like?
Rod Dreher is pissed that pretty soon the deeply religious might not enjoy the same ability to discriminate against others. I will now consider the merits of this outrage... Okay, done.
Further: It occurs to me that perhaps I should elaborate on my dismissal of Dreher’s concerns: I find that any argument in favor of discrimination that is predicated on religious belief professes adherence to an ethical system that is archaic and reprehensible. I have neither the inclination nor the mercy to hold myself aloof from criticizing any attempt to justify the hatred of someone for ineluctable characteristics like ethnicity or sexual orientation. Adherence to a faith is a choice, and if that choice is of a system of beliefs that -- no matter its other admirable tenets -- justifies oppression and hatred of another person for nothing more than being who they are, then your choice is far more damning, far more contemptible, and far, far more worthy of condemnation precisely because of your willing acquiescence to tenets that do little else but place a gloss of respectability on good, old-fashioned tribalism than worrying about who puts their penis where.
I don't normally read Glenn Greenwald, as he tends to trigger even my high-set TLDR threshold. That said, you have got to read his ninja-kick to the journalistic-ovaries of Jeffrey Rosen.
