Selection 2004: Iowa

Quoted from the January 22 issue of The Stranger:

I run across [Howard Dean-supporter Ray] Minchew, who is wearing a jacket and tie.  “It’s the triumph of the bullshit media,” is the first thing out of his mouth.  “It’s fucking bullshit.”  Minchew is referring to negative coverage Dean encountered in the last few weeks.  As he was sailing toward the nomination, the media became increasingly critical, pumping out a series of “gotcha” stories, from Dean’s support for a wife-beating security chief to Newsweek and Time’s recent cover stories about Dean’s temperament.

I agree.  On Monday evening (when I had been on a plane most of the day), when my mother told me about the Dean upset, it’s the first thing I thought.

For the past few months, Dean has been pretty much the only candidate getting any significant coverage from the media.  (And this includes the right-wing media: they have nothing good to say about any of the Democratic candidates, but 95% of their negativity has been aimed at Dean, marking him clearly as the one they fear the most.)  How imbalanced has that coverage been?  Well, I would certainly be able to identify Kerry and Dean and Lieberman in pictures; I might be able to pick Gephardt and Kucinich out of a police line-up; I can only identify Braun, Sharpton, and Clark after seeing pictures in the last week (Clark on the cover of The Advocate); but I couldn’t begin to tell you what Edwards looks like.  (I’m pretty sure he’s a white guy with no facial hair, though.)

For the past couple weeks, it’s like “Tally ho!” and the hounds are after Dean the Fox, ready to tear him to bits.  They are aided by a couple negative things Dean had thrown to them, but the appearance is totally that of a need to chop the legs out from under the one they’ve been carrying thus far.  The media realized that he was the front-runner because of them.

In Iowa itself, and elsewhere, I doubt that the negative stories really had much effect on the people already dedicated to Dean, or to the other candidates.  What I see is probably 50,00 caucus-goers who had made up their minds a month ago, and 75,000 who paid as little attention to what was going on as possible until the week before they had to vote.  At that point, they looked around, saw massive negativity about Dean, and a little positive coverage of Kerry and Edwards, and they made their decision based on the headlines and little else.  (Much though we would like it to be otherwise, I think that’s exactly how half or more of the country votes: negligible forethought, and then vote for who their party or newspaper suggests, or even just the name they recognize the easiest.)

What happened to Gephardt, who won a previous caucus in Iowa, I don’t know.  (Sure I do: no coverage at all = no votes at all from the “pay no attention” segment.)

We’ll see what happens in New Hampshire, and then for Super Tuesday.  Will the Media Hounds keep chasing Dean?  Or will they catch the scent of Kerry as the new quarry, letting Dean catch his breath?
 

Here’s Mud Pie in Your Eye

(Mis)adventures in eating food.  These might be funny if they happened to someone else.

• When I was home for the summer from college (years ago), my parents took me out to a local restaurant.  My father bit into a pepperoncini, which squirted spicy brine right into his eye.
   
• I learned long ago to be cautious when eating donuts.  I tend to inhale when taking a bite.  One quick breath with the white ones and I’m on the floor, coughing out puffs of powdered sugar.
   
• Not that I’ve ever learned the lesson above.  Today I was eating a Thai dish, inhaled at the wrong time, and a few inches of rice noodle went through the back of my throat and into my sinuses.  Wriggly noodles slurping back out are bad enough, but this was coated with 3-star spicy chili flakes.
   
• I occasionally get a cold (or the like) which blocks my salivary glands.  As a home remedy, I’ll drink a spoonful of lemon juice or white vinegar; the result is a major squeeze of the glands which seems to help unblock them.  But one time I sneezed just as I sipped, sending a tablespoon of vinegar (acetic acid) into my sinuses and out through my nose.

Letter of Comment — Spousal Equivalent

My latest letter to the editor leads off the January 22, 2004 issue of The Stranger, titled in their Letters column as “TOM’S CHEW TOY”:

I found the multiple references to City Councilman Tom Rasmussen’s “boyfriend” in the most recent issue curious.

Obviously, he and his company seem to have had an effect on Rasmussen’s campaign beyond that of other candidates’ spouses, and may warrant calling out for that.  And in this era of societal changes regarding gay and lesbian relationships, noting that a gay man is in a relationship is probably a good thing.  [Next sentence edited out of published letter: (But might it maybe have a counter-effect?  Any gay man whose partner isn’t mentioned may get inadvertently tagged as a stereotypical bar-hopping, promiscuous slutboy simply because he isn’t in a relationship “worthy” of mention.)]

I’m most curious, though, about the choice of term: “boyfriend”.  It tends to carry with it a notion of “short term” (months rather than years) and youth vs. adult, and perhaps a “they don’t live together” impermanence.  Is “boyfriend” the term the couple uses for themselves?  [Edited out: (In which case it is unquestionably the best on to use!)]  Or is it part of The Stranger’s editorial style guide when referring to same-sex couples, preferred to terms like husband, [Edited out: fiancé (which would be a man pledged to marry at some future point, even if it’s not possible [not legal] at the current time),] partner, life partner, longterm companion, fuck buddy, sugar daddy, chew toy,… the list goes on.

[Edited out: (Oh well, “boyfriend” is certainly better than the dreaded “roommate”.)]

And the response:

ERICA C. BARNETT RESPONDS: The issue of what to call a gay partner can be a confusing one.  As Rasmussen himself notes, “boy-friend” is often interpreted as “boyfriend du jour,” whereas “‘partner’ tends to convey permanency.”  Nonetheless, Rasmussen says he uses the terms “boyfriend” and “partner” interchangeably when referring to his significant other (and presumably, chew toy), Clayton Lewis, whom he’s been with for 12 years.

Hopefully needless to say, I’m thrilled by any reasonable term being used, and my letter was aimed more to poke fun than to criticize.  And I voted for Rasmussen, too.
 

Gay Marriage: State of the Union of Two People

For those who missed it, the entire 2004 State of the Union speech is transcripted here.

Here’s the “gay marriage” portion:

A strong America must also value the institution of marriage.  I believe we should respect individuals as we take a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization.  Congress has already taken a stand on this issue by passing the Defense of Marriage Act, signed in 1996 by President Clinton.  That statute protects marriage under federal law as a union of a man and a woman, and declares that one state may not redefine marriage for other states.

Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives.  On an issue of such great consequence, the people’s voice must be heard.  If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process.  Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.  (Applause.)

The outcome of this debate is important — and so is the way we conduct it.  The same moral tradition that defines marriage also teaches that each individual has dignity and value in God’s sight.  (Applause.)

Items of note:

• Nowhere does he say what the issue is.  You have to know what he is talking about to know what he is talking about.  Certainly can’t mention gays and lesbians!
   
• This is the only place Clinton was mentioned in the speech.  Implication: “Look, Dems!  Even your hero was against this!”
   
• Technically, the Defense of Marriage Act just says that State A doesn’t have to respect what State B says about same-sex marriage-type stuff.  That’s a bit different from State B is not allowed to redefine what marriage means for other states.
   
• I’m sure there are people who believe DOMA is constitutionally valid simply because it hasn’t been challenged in the courts.  When there’s been nothing to enforce (until Massachusetts), there’s been nothing to challenge.
   
• “Activist judges” are anyone who doesn’t decide in the way you want.  As opposed to, say, judges who decide that votes don’t really have to be counted.

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Updated on November 12, 2010
 

Bloody Vikings!

On some level, spam e-mail is just like junk mail.  Why can’t people just use their Delete key and get rid of it, just like tossing (or recycling) paper junk mail?  That’s what I do.  (And it doesn’t even waste paper.)

On the other hand, let’s look at some of the negative issues which surround it:

• There’s an awful lot of it.  I have a half-dozen or more e-mail addresses I deal with every day, and I get a minimum of 50 spam items a day, probably closer to 100.  But I also make use of spam blockers at work and with my home e-mail ISP.  The former blocks maybe a dozen a day, while I check the latter every three weeks and clear out more than 1000 items each time, making for another 50-plus items each day which I don’t have to delete directly.
   
• I have DSL at home and a LAN at work, so the impact of getting a single spam message — or even a few dozen — is minimal, a matter of seconds to download it all, usually in the background while I do other tasks.  My mother, on the other hand, uses dial-up with a 56K modem, so the impact for her of getting spam is 10 times as much or more.
   
• Spam items are usually just a text or HTML message, but some contain graphics.  Again, for me with high-speed connections, downloading a 100K spam e-mail is a matter of a few seconds, but for someone on dial-up, it can be a minute or more for each message like that.
   
• I’m on a lot of e-mail lists and Yahoo! groups, so I get a lot of legitimate e-mail every day, probably 4-5 times as much as the spam I get.  As a result, dealing with the spam is a small part of my e-mail time, especially since I don’t need to reply to them or otherwise deal with them in depth.  If my daily amount of real e-mail was in the range of only a dozen or so items, a couple dozen spam e-mails would drown out and hide the real stuff.
   
• I’m a very process-oriented person, and I’m quick to pick up on patterns.  (Dealing with a couple hundred e-mails every day, you have to be.)  As a result, I can usually tell just from the subject line that it’s spam and thus never have to open it.  (Anything saying “girls”, “viagra”, “xanax”, or with no subject at all is spam.)  Less savvy people may open every item to be sure it’s not legitimate, and thus take half a minute with each item where I take half a second.
   
• Many spam items come as HTML with embedded graphics, content which doesn’t come with the e-mail but gets downloaded from a server at open time, just like visiting a web page.  Thus, what takes 2K to download as e-mail can then load hundreds of KB more when you view it, making people wait wait wait that much longer.
   
• Once the item is in your Inbox, it appears to take the same amount of space as anything else (one line per item), but if you look more closely (and have the mail program UI set to show it), you can see the size listed for each item.  Comparing to junk mail, that would be like seeing your mailbox stuffed with envelopes, but when you pull them out, finding that some have cleverly concealed bricks inside.
   
• HTML-coded spam sends a request back to a server, especially is the graphics are server based rather than embedded.  That request may be able to carry the e-mail address the message was sent to, and thus just by opening the message to see what it is, you send a message saying “We’ve got a live one!  Send more spam!”
   
• Paper junk mail is often legitimate on some level: it was sent by a real company which is trying to sell you a real product or service (admittedly, sometimes a scam, but typically real), but they are doing it basically blindly, since they don’t already know you are someone who might be interested.  Some spam is like this, but most has false return addresses, subject lines intended to mislead (not that “check enclosed” or “date-sensitive information” on junk mail aren’t in that class, too; if the envelope says “this is important!”, it probably isn’t), and spam messages point to sites unrelated to what the message is about.
   
• There’s an awful lot of porn flying about.  Really, my mother isn’t interested in making her penis larger or in seeing Suzy do it with a Great Dane.  (Frankly, neither am I.  I’m gay, not into animals, and my a penis is already long and thick enough, thank you very much.)  Imagine if junk mail delivered by the post office had such text splattered all of the envelope!

In the end, most (99.9%) spam is intended to mislead, to block the ability of ISPs to send and deliver legitimate e-mail, and generally to bring down the infrastructure of the Internet.  Somewhere between malicious and terrorist, frankly.  (Yeah, that last term is extreme, but realize the effect these spammers have.  While not intending to cause fear and terror, they sometimes are attempting to disrupt international communications and destroy legitimate commerce.  That ain’t the equivalent of jaywalking.)

I met one of the spammers (as he called it, “e-mail direct marketing”) who was active around 1997 or so.  He tried to use marketing “Dilbert-isms” to explain why his sending unsolicited and unwanted e-mails was a good thing, but in the end, he was unconvincing: the spammer was just a scammer.  The ones today deserve to have the book thrown at them.  (Make it a heavy one, please.)

[Weblog title reference: Monty Python’s Flying Circus did a sketch involving the breakfast meat SPAM.  It involved Vikings in the background singing about how lovely and wonderful SPAM is, until they get so loud and abundant that they drown out the rest of the sketch.  And thus junk e-mail is called “spam”.]

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Updated on November 2, 2010

These days, I’m up to 10 or so e-mail accounts I get mail from every day — different types of messages go to different accounts.  I no longer check the spam filters (my old ISP no longer even makes viewing the filtered spam doable), except at work when I know something I sent there form one of my own accounts didn’t come through.  (Those are usually messages with just a picture or a URL attached — high on the list of potential spam, although of course they aren’t, but the computer can’t reliably know that.)

I removed a bullet point above which implied that virus packages could come with HTML e-mails.  I don’t believe that was ever true.

An additional term has been created for e-mail messages which you in theory expect to get, but which clutter your Inbox because while you want them, you don't want them now: bacn (“bacon”).  Things falling in this class would be Facebook updates, specials from your favorite airline, ads from the candy company you ordered from last Christmas, etc.  (I get at least three a week from Shepler’s western wear, which results in me never reading any of them.  If it was one every two weeks, maybe I would order something, but why would I ever bother with this frequency?  I complained once, but they said they couldn't change the setting.  Really?)

Conflicted about the Conflict: Ace in the Hole

I’m sure it’s purely coincidence.

There’s been this rumor for some time that the U.S. government has actually had both Saddam and Osama for a while, just waiting to announce their capture.  And now they have announced that they have caught Saddam.

Since a story like this can be expected to have good for just over a week, the date of Saddam’s capture looks suspicious: twelve days before Christmas and capture on a Saturday ensures that the story keeps hitting strong for the first couple business days following, and then slopes off just right to ensure that people have a good feeling about the conflict and the Troops (and the President, of course) right up to and thus through Christmas.

A few days earlier and there would have been a news focus gap before Christmas during which something anti-Bush could have snuck in.  A few days later, and the media would have had to force the story to die off quickly so as to not impact the feel-good crap that has to be projected for Christmas.  (Can’t have war impact the holidays!)  A few days further yet and it would have had to be reported at Christmas, which would be a double-big no-no.

Okay, fine, so they caught him.  Now would you please get the country stations to stop playing that damn Toby Keith song, “American Soldier”, every time I turn around?  How about a nice piece of Lee Greenwood über-patriotism instead?

[Weblog title reference: Hussein was the Ace of Spades in the deck of “most wanted” cards issues by the U.S. military, and Hussein was found in a “spider hole.”  “Ace in the Hole” is a country song by George Strait.]

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Updated on October 27, 2010
 

Punishment is a Capital Idea

The Death Penalty has always been one of the more controversial pieces of our penal system.  On some level, it hearkens back to Biblical punishments: “An eye for an eye.”  Some deem it a way of providing closure for victims’ families, especially in light of our system’s parole methods, whereby a killer can sometimes eventually go free before having served an entire term (although they have to convince a board that they have learned their lesson, are sorry, have changed, etc.).

Opponents like to put up four primary arguments against it.

• First, that we know our system is flawed, and we sometimes unfortunately put innocent people in prison.  And given that that is bad enough, how much worse is it to kill someone for a crime that they did not commit?  This is really the most cogent argument against the death penalty, that it raises major moral and ethical dilemmas.  I tend to think that we should not use it if there is the barest shadow of a doubt; in my college days, I was much more willing to to discard some innocents in the name of disposing of the truly bad ones, but I know more about the real world today.  Fortunately, with DNA evidence techniques and such, we are increasingly able to toss that shadow of a doubt.
   
• The second standard argument is that European countries have almost to a one done away with the death penalty, and so should we, in order to become more civilized.  Unfortunately, this ignores the question of why the Europeans have discarded it.  I don’t think it is only because they are more “civilized” (whatever that means).  I think that because of their smaller societies, different diversity of populace, language, and thought, different legal structures, and so on, that they simply have a lower incidence of such extreme violent crimes.  (Statistics bear this out, from what I’ve seen.)  As a result, they simply don’t have either the number or percentage of criminals involved in death penalty-level crimes, and thus perhaps less need to deal with them in extreme ways.
   
• Third is the claim that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment.  Hello?  The person (assuming they are actually guilty) killed someone.  (In most cases.  I don’t know that the death penalty is appropriate for violent or serious crimes which don't result in death or maiming.)  I suppose you can argue that some of the death penalty methods (electrocution, hanging) may be more painful than others, and thus more “cruel” (but then again, some death crime methods are also more painful than others), but in the end, the criminal is getting what he or she dished out.
   
• The fourth — and my “favorite” &mdash argument against the death penalty is that it doesn’t work.  Not that it fails to kill people, but that as a deterrent, it doesn’t work.  Follow that thinking through: despite having the death penalty available as an option (in most states), people still kill, and thus the death penalty doesn’t serve to stop anyone.  Do you see the fallacy in there?  Let’s try it with a different violation of the law and a different penalty.
  
  There is a fine associated with automobile speeding.  The more you speed, the higher the fine, and it may be increased further in construction zones, school zones, and under other circumstances.  But people still speed, don’t they?  Does that mean that the deterrent of the fine doesn’t work, that the existence of the fine doesn’t stop speeding?  What if the fines were ten times as high: speed and you face a $2000 fine.  Would that stop speeding altogether?  No.  What if the penalty was the extreme: death.  Would no one ever speed again?  Heck no.  What you would find is most people would pay really close attention to their speedometer, and a heck of a lot of people would abandon their cars completely, to prevent the accident.  A small minority would still speed, most of them probably only a little (like many of us do now, 3-5 miles over the speed limit), with the expectation that they would not get caught, or they would be able to legally wrangle themselves out of the extreme punishment.  But so long as there were cars and speed limits, people would do it, no matter what the penalty.
   

So back to the death penalty for capital crimes…?  The question isn’t whether the death penalty is a deterrent at all, it’s whether the death penalty is an effective deterrent. We know there will always be extremists (of whatever stripe) who will commit the crimes.  But will the existence of major penalties slow them down any?  Will it stop any of them?  Has there ever been a single person who, because of the death penalty as a potential result, decided to cool his or her head and thus did not kill someone?  I don’t know, of course, but I sure do believe that it’s likely to have happened at least once, and thus probably actually fairly often.  (On some level, every time you, a non-criminal, give any thought to the penalty, it is doing its job as a deterrent, reminding you of the extreme result that extreme actions can have.)

So then we’re left with the much dicier question: given that the death penalty presumably does act as a deterrent, for some people and in some cases, can we measure how good a job it does?  (I suppose we could try to find similar populations in states which do and do not have the penalty and compare violent crime rates, but I suspect that the cognizance of “There’s no death penalty in this state, they can’t kill me for this crime” really doesn’t enter into things to the degree that “The death penalty means I could get killed for this crime” does.  Even if a given state doesn’t have the penalty, the thought probably is that the country as a whole does, and that’s sufficient.)  And the parallel question: is it possible to shift the way our system operates so that the deterrent of the death penalty is more effective, such that people will both be aware of it and won’t believe that they can get off with a lesser penalty for the crime.

Needless to say, I don’t have an answer for these.  So I’ll just settle for recognizing that the argument that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent is flawed and doing my best to make sure the opponents of it are aware of that.  In my experience, on many social issues, neither proponents nor opponents have genuinely thought through their support/opposition to it; rather, they just parrot a simplistic phrase about the subject that they got from someone else, someone who had an agenda to conflate a deterrent which isn’t 100% effective to one which isn’t effective at all, or someone who is just over the top with regard to punishment in general.

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Updated on October 26, 2010