bogen.org

The Bush administration is at it again.  As a recent article in the Washington Post revealed, many
scientific committees in the government are being disbanded or changed.

“The Bush administration has begun a broad restructuring
of the scientific advisory committees that guide federal policy in areas
such as patients’ rights and public health, eliminating some committees that
were coming to conclusions at odds with the president’s views and in other
cases replacing members with handpicked choices.”

Who are these new committee members?  “One new member is a
California scientist who helped defend Pacific Gas and Electric Co. against
the real-life Erin Brockovich.”  Of course, “bad
science” (i.e., scientific conclusions that are at odds with the views
of the current administration), has been a problem for the Bush
administration since they took office.  Now that the administration is
stacking the membership of the committees, they don’t have to worry about

“bad science” any more.  Now Bush/Cheney can simply tell the
committees to what conclusions they should arrive.  That should, to use
a favorite word of the administration, “streamline” the scientific
process considerably.

I’m sick with my first cold of the season.  Whee!  I always
seem to get colds in the spring, summer, and fall, rather than winter.

Over the weekend, I drove to Minneapolis to be a part of a friend’s
birthday party.  Along the way, I drove by the city of Eau Claire,
Wisconsin.  This city’s billboards along the highway proclaim that the
city is “up to something FUNN!”  The problem is that I
don’t understand why they have to spell fun with two n’s.  So, instead
of thinking of the area as fun, I think of the area as having a giant
spelling problem.  Probably not the intended purpose of their
advertising campaign, but that’s the consequences of deliberately misspelling
words without an obvious reason as to why.

Ira got his first taste of pumpkin this morning.  A couple of days
ago I put a whole, small pumpkin in his pen to see if he would eat it. 

However, after sniffing around it, he basically ignored for three
days.  So, this morning, I carved out a small wedge and put the wedge
on top of his normal breakfast greens.  After some initial caution, Ira
decided that he really likes pumpkin, so he ate as much of that
pumpkin wedge as his little tortoise belly would allow.

As if we needed more evidence that recent “security” procedures
have more to do with tracking and controlling Americans than terrorists, the
San Francisco Chronicle is reporting how a new no-fly list contains, coincidentally enough,
the names of anti-war activists!  Peace activists from several
states, including Maine, California, and Wisconsin were detained before
boarding flights (and often barred from boarding flights) until they were
subjected to thorough searches and questioning.  This not only occurs
at the passengers’ origins, but also at any stopovers.  Why were these
people stopped?

“Federal law enforcement officials deny
targeting dissidents. They suggested that the activists were stopped not
because their names are on the list, but because their names resemble those
of suspected criminals or terrorists”.

The activists
mentioned in the article all have names like these: Gordon, Oden, Lawinger,
and Adams.  Oh, so these people weren’t targeted, they just happen to
have unfortunate last names?  They have such uncommon last names,
too.  Especially the folks named Adams and Gordon.  God forbid the
names “Johnson” or “Williams” ever end up on the
list.  If the government isn’t lying about why these people were
targeted (which they are), “security” forces would be forced to
stop people on every flight because their name was “similar” to a
name on the no-fly list.  In Wisconsin, a group of twenty peace
activists (including nuns and the elderly) was detained because a single
member of the group had a name that was “similar” to a name on the
no-fly list.  Police decided to detain and question the whole group,
including the elderly and the nuns, rather than just stopping the
unfortunately named individual.  This is the same sort of governing
tactic used by totalitarian regimes:  if one member of a group or
family is guilty of something, including disagreement with the government,
then all members of a group or family are guilty of the same offense, no
matter how tenuous the ties between them.  Of course, government
agencies also deny maintaining a no-fly list, which prevents people from
working to get their names taken off this list.  Isn’t freedom under
the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft regime wonderful?  Oops.  Better watch
what I write.  I wouldn’t want to be accused of harboring un-American
thoughts by our peace-loving, patriot President and Attorney General.

The long process of switching this site over from a mish-mash of legacy
HTML to a more modern HTML codebase has begun.  The more recent pages
of the site were easy to switch over, as they already used cascading style
sheets.  For the old pages, I wrote a ninety-five line perl script
which did most of the work for me.  Of course, I took the opportunity
to put in some text delimiters and whatnot that will make this text easier
to plug into a database someday via another perl script.  Some pages
are still the legacy code and whatnot, but those pages will be brought into
line soon.  Hopefully, the new color scheme will agree with
everyone’s eyes.

Heard on the radio in a voice usually reserved for announcing monster truck rallies:

Akron’s Tuba Christmas!

I just about fell out of my chair I started laughing so hard when I heard that.

Today, I spent some time revising my weather-report.html script to bring it into the present.

Great speech yesterday by Senator Daniel Inouye on the Senate floor.  An excerpt:

“To attack a nation that has not attacked us will go down in history as something that we should no be proud of.  It is American to question the president.  It is American to debate the issues.”

Inouye, who lost his right arm in WWII combat, was responding to the President’s words that the Senate was “not interested in the security of the American people.”  Apparently, Bush/Cheney believes that he can tell the Congress what to do and then expect them to hop-to without discussion or delay.  Of course, that’s the same relationship that many tin-pot dictators and their for-show Congresses have, too.

We bought fresh cranberries at the farmer’s market yesterday, so I made
cranberry muffins last night.  They were really tasty. 
We’re going to save some of the cranberries in the freezer and make
non-canned cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving this year.

The weather here has been pleasantly crisp and cool the past two
days.  After living somewhere that didn’t have fall for over three
years, it is nice to experience some pleasant fall weather again.

Last night we attended a lecture given by Alice Waters at the university here in
town.  While I agree with much of what Alice preaches, her speech
itself left much to be desired.  Her presentation was ordinary at best,
and the speech itself was simply recycled from a talk she gave two years ago
to a different audience.  Perhaps the best parts of the lecture were
the tangential anecdotes that she sprinkled throughout her talk as she
occasionally left the words written on the paper.Today, Sarah and I tried to attend the UW women’s volleyball game against
Tulane.  However, the “guards” would not let us into the UW
Field House because we each had a backpack.  If we lost the backpacks,
they would let us in.  However, there is nowhere within blocks to stash
a pair of backpacks, and since we came on our bicycles, we couldn’t just
stash them in a vehicle.  So, to insure the “safety” of
others, we took ourselves and our backpacks (full of horrendous weapons like
books, bicycle pumps, flashlights, cell phones, and the like) to a nice
terrace where we had a beer and fed popcorn to the birds.

I’m really getting tired of all the restrictions on our lives in the
interest of our
“safety.”  As William Langewiesche writes in the Oct. 2002
issue of The
Atlantic Monthly, “The reason given publicly for this new arrangement
was ‘safety,’ a term so often used to mask other agendas in modern America
that it caused an immediate, instinctive reaction of disbelief.” 
You would be hard pressed to find anyone who truly believes that all these
restrictions on our lives are for our “safety.”

Oh, don’t buy books from a bookstore or borrow them from a library if you
don’t want the government to know what you’re reading.  That wonderful
USA Patriot act now allows the government to obtain a warrant from a secret
court to compel bookstores and libraries to give up any information they
have about your reading habits.  The best part:

Unlike other search warrants, these warrants do not require the officer to
show that evidence of wrongdoing is likely to be found or that the target of
its investigation is involved in a crime.

Yes, that’s right.  The government needs to present no
evidence to this secret court that you might be involved in a crime or that
they are searching for evidence of the same.  The government can compel
bookstores and libraries to give up your reading list just because they
feel like it.  Make sure to thank your Senators and Representatives in
Congress, along with President Bush, for giving the government unprecedented
power to snoop into your life.  Of course, they will all claim that
this is being done for your “safety.”

Forty-seven days after our telephone line was connected and no less than
four phone calls later, the monolithic monopoly that is SBC (18th largest company in America with 193,000+ employees
and $45 billion in revenue and $7 billion in profit last year)
finally managed to deliver a phone book to our house.  The job finally
fell to a scruffy looking fellow driving a well-used (and abused) Nissan
pickup who casually tossed the phonebook almost onto our front steps, but
the job finally got done.  Nice to know that America’s large
corporations are only getting more efficient.

For the last three years, I had DirecTV and the NFL Sunday Ticket which
allowed me to see nearly every single Vikings game.  So, when we moved
to Madison, I decided to take advantage of DirecTV’s inappropriately named
Mover’s Advantage program.  The program supposedly provides for free
professional installation when you get to your new residence, providing that
you agree to keep the service for one year following the installation. 

Well, after no less than ten phone calls with DirecTV, numerous half-truths
and lies on the part of their employees, and being billed for service that I
wasn’t receiving, I decided to close my account without ever having gotten
service installed at our residence in Madison.  Well, now that I’ve
left the fold of the company’s clients, they can’t do enough to make sure
that I stay away.  So far, they’ve sent me letters (dated after I
closed my account) to inform me that
they’ve scheduled my installation (uh, huh), called me no less than twice to
pester me about why I left the company (“The reason I dropped your
service is that you don’t know the reason I dropped your service,” which is a
paradox that those working the phones will never figure out), and generally
have gone out of their way to reinforce my opinion that the company is
staffed by those who just weren’t incompetent enough to work in the banking
and telecommunications monopolies of our day.

The next time that a telemarketer calls me, I’m going to say, “This
call is being recorded.  If you do not agree with this policy, please
hang up now.”  I’m interested to see how many telemarketers press
on with their spiels after that.

“At the same time, Bush indicated yesterday that he would not
hesitate to move against Iraq without the backing of the United
Nations.  ‘If the United Nations Security Council won’t deal with the problem, the
United States and some of our friends will,’ Bush said.”  Boston Globe, 20 Sep 02

“We are also guided by the conviction that no nation can build a
safer, better world alone.” George Bush, The
National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September
2002

Does the Bush administration speak out of both sides of its
mouth?  The answer seems to be, unequivocally yes.

From the “Your Tax Dollars At Work” file:  Ashcroft’s Justice Department wants to fingerprint Master Gardeners?  Are we
worried that terrorist Master Gardeners are going to unleash a fearsome wave
of animate cacti?

Next time you hear Dick Cheney talk about what a terrible risk to
national security Saddam
Hussein is, and how the U.S. should be completely focused upon toppling
Hussein, think about this:

1. After the Gulf War, Cheney told oil industry executives that he was
   emphatically against toppling Saddam Hussein.
2. Halliburton, under Cheney’s leadership, was primarily responsible for
   rebuilding Iraq’s oil fields.

Perhaps no one was supposed to remember those details.  Apparently,
the foreign news media (with less ties to the existing ways of doing
business here in America) has not forgotten those facts and has been
running stories about them.  It’s too bad that none of the domestic
newspapers are running those stories, as well.

If yesterday clarified any one issue in my mind it was this: 
America seemingly has no great orators or speech writers anymore.  All
across the nation yesterday, speeches were made, or read, and in many cases,
the speeches given were originally given sixty-plus years ago by men with
names like Roosevelt, Churchill, and Lincoln.  What, exactly, does the
Gettysburg Address have to do with terrorism?  The Gettysburg Address
is a great speech, perhaps even one of the greatest speeches of all time,
but much of its poignancy is derived from the context in which the speech
was originally given.  Churchill’s pronouncements are powerful today,
but were 100 times more powerful in their present.  FDR’s speeches were
often memorable, but spoke about a great World War, not a conflict between
shadowy characters and a nation’s value system.  It is clear that Bush,
Bush, and Clinton (a law firm specializing in corporate interests) are and
were not great orators, nor did they have great speech writers.  While
the local newspapers may have carried the complete text of Bush’s address
yesterday, no one paragraph, sentence, or phrase was particularly
resonant.  Bush’s delivery is too choppy and uneven for him to do
justice to a great speech anyway.  Even when I read his speeches in the
paper, I can hear his voice chopping up what could have been longer, more
florid speech, into easier to pronounce, bite-size chunks.  Our
politicians don’t give speeches anymore, they merely string together tens of
sound bites and hope something sticks.  Rather than swaying public
opinion through oratory, politicians now depend on swaying public opinion
with televions advertisement and campaign gimmicks.

Well, as much as I dump on Bush for trashing the environment, being a
hypocrite, coddling large corporations, wrecking the budget, trying to drag
the US into a needless “war” with Iraq, I’m almost happy that he’s
a lazy man.  If you read the article in Washington Post recently that laid
out where Bush has been spending his time, you already know the
following:

• Bush has spent 250 of his days as President at any one of his three
  “leisure” destinations:  Camp David, Kennebunkport, and his
  Texas Ranch.  That total of 250 days is 42% of Bush’s term in office so
  far!
• Bush has participated in more rounds of golf (15) than solo news conferences (6).

There are numerous statistics in the article that show where and how the
President spends his (really, our) time.  So, that begs the question:  Would we
better off if Bush worked more diligently and didn’t delegate so much to
his subordinates or would we much worse off because Bush is very much
behind these politics of environmental destruction, Gestapo-formation,
corporate wrongdoing, war mongering, and fear?

If you missed it, the Bush administration recently claimed that it was
American freedoms that were under attack when terrorists blew up the World
Trade Center towers.  That is, by blowing up the towers, terrorists
were striking at American freedoms of speech, religion, the press, and
such.  Uh, the biggest threat to those freedoms of late has been the
American government.  Terrorists were striking at American global
hegemony and foreign policy, not the Constitution.  However, while the
terrorists failed, the Bush administration has been happy to strive
towards the same goals.  Did you know that when you apply for
home-owners or life insurance now that the insurance companies are required
to run your name through the USA Patriot database and report you to the FBI
if anything “suspicious” comes up?  Big Brother wants to know
who is insuring their house.  Apparently, terrorists are big into life
insurance.  Uh, huh.  This stops terrorism how?  Oh, and
don’t forget that the Bush White House wants Congress to form and fund the
new Homeland Security Department in a hurry.  Then, the Bush
administration wants Congress to remove itself from jurisdiction over the
newly formed department so that Homeland Security is only answerable
to the executive branch (just like the KGB, the Gestapo, the NKVD, and all
other secret police organizations throughout time).  Oh, and remember
that the FBI, Customs, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, the US Marshals,
and all other federal law enforcement agencies will all ultimately answer to
this newly formed agency that Bushies want placed outside of normal checks
and balances.  The Bush administration, using the military, is already
holding American citizens (and otherwise) indefinitely, without charging
them with crimes, refusing to release the names of those held, refusing to
list where people are being held, and refusing lawyers to those who are
held.  Just like Stalin’s secret police did.  One member of our
household maintains that Bush plans on keeping the Invasion of Iraq issue on
slow boil until just before the next election, when the issue will be turned
up in the hope that a war will help get the current administration
re-elected.  Scary, but probably true.

Oops, I forgot that the Bush administration has also proclaimed it
Un-American to criticize the government’s methods and goals.  Stalin
used to claim that Soviet citizens who criticized the government’s methods
and goals were counter-revolutionary or that those who did not do their part
to further the government-drafted Five Year Plan were wreckers. 
Wreckers and counter-revolutionaries were often never heard from again once
the Soviet Homeland Security department (the KGB) moved in to
“question” those who spoke up.  Those who do not learn from
history are doomed to repeat it.

We took in our first UW-Madison sporting event today:  women’s
volleyball.  We saw UW play Texas A&M at the Fieldhouse.  The
game was certainly fast-paced and was the best game of volleyball that I’ve
ever seen live.  We also got a small initiation into the many
traditions that persist at UW sporting events.  Most of these
traditions seem to revolve around songs, so we’re doing our best to pick up
the songs and the traditions as we go along.  The game itself was
really interesting, but the Fieldhouse was a bit on the sweltering
side.  We had to sit up near the top of the first tier of seats and it
was plenty warm up there.  I can’t imagine how warm the upper
tier of seats would have been.  Regardless, we enjoyed the game and
will probably try to attend another match or five before the season
ends.

We also bought tickets to the UW/Ohio State football game today. 
That should be a truly interesting game.  Supposedly, football
games are just one big song, dance, and tailgating fest wrapped around a
football game.

You must, at all costs, avoid watching the movie The
Sweetest Thing.  This movie is a horrible, awful, time-wasting,
money sucking, tasteless, humorless, plotless waste of good celluloid.

If you have United Air Lines frequent flier miles, I suggest that you use
them in the near future.  UAL appointed a former director of Dynegy,
Glenn Tilton, to
run UAL yesterday.  How does this affect you?

1. This Tilton character has helped run two energy companies (Dynegy and
   ChevronTexaco).  What does he know about running an airline?  If
   UAL really wanted to succeed, they should have gotten someone to come over
   from Southwest, the airline that is helping United to run itself into the
   ground.

2. Dynegy, the last company at which this Tilton guy worked is also on the
   edge of bankruptcy.  While this guy wasn’t “The Guy” at
   Dynegy, he was one of “The Guys” and it seems reasonable to load
   some of the blame for Dynegy’s bad financial decisions on him.

We made salsa again today.  Wow.  Homemade salsa is
really good.  I don’t know why we waited so long to try it.

It is good to know that our President has not taken the whole summer off
(it just seems that way).  No, Bush made time to stop by
Pennsylvania to visit the nine miners who were rescued from a collapsed mine
earlier this summer.  One media account of Bush’s visit:

Bush went to Pennsylvania to
meet with the nine coal miners rescued earlier this summer to congratulate
them. He also cut the budget for the Mine Safety and Health Administration
by $4.7 million out of $118 million total: enforcement was cut, the chest
X-ray program was cut entirely, as were mine inspections for coal dust,
which causes explosions. Bush filled five of the top positions at MSHA with
coal industry executives.

That’s Bush for you.  Hard at work taking with one hand and

“giving” with the other.

We started getting the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (newspaper) delivered to our
house this week.  That only took two weeks and six phone calls.

Sarah and I have been looking for a dog to adopt of late.  However,
our landlords have given us such silly standards that we’ve all but given up
trying to find a dog that fits them.  The standards that our landlords
gave us are:

• Must be at least one year old.
• Must weigh no more than twenty pounds.

Most dogs that are anything more than mountain lion bait weigh more than
twenty pounds.  Dachshunds generally weigh more than twenty
pounds.  Beagles weigh more than twenty pounds.  Generally
worthless breeds, however, do weigh less than twenty pounds.  These
worthless breeds include, but are not limited to:

• All “toy” dogs
• Chihuahuas
• Bichon Frise and all similar Mobile Fur Piles
• Yappy little annoyances not falling into one of the above categories

I call these sorts of dogs mountain lion bait because of a postcard that
we saw in Montana or Wyoming (I forget which).  The postcard had a
picture of a woman out walking a little Mobile Fur Pile on a leash. 
The caption was something along the lines of “Trolling for Mountain
Lions in Wyoming.”  Sarah and I both generally dislike little
yappy good for nothing Mobile Fur Piles so we got a big kick out of the
postcard.  Anyway, in addition to these overly strict conditions, the
landlords want us to pay them an additional $20/month.  Apparently, the
landlords are afraid that any dog we get is going to cause damage to the
house.  So, not only do we “get” to have an annoying, yappy,
easily stepped-on, threatened by Ira, Mobile Fur Pile, but we get to
pay $240/year for the privilege?!?  Where’s the line forming for that
great deal?

Why is it that landlords always worry about dogs trashing
apartments?  Humans are capable of much more inventive, sustained, and
devastating destructive moods than dogs.  A quiet, alcohol-fueled
party of ten could gut an apartment over the course of an afternoon, all
within the bounds of a lease.  Sure, the security deposit would be
forfeit, but if the renter was willing to pay that price, that’s an option open to
him/her.  A badly trained dog, on the other hand, might chew up the renter’s
furniture or other household goods, or maybe scratch up a door in the
course of an afternoon.  However, since leases can’t legislate human
behavior, landlords like to legislate dog ownership instead.  I guess
that makes landlords feel like they are more in control of the situation
somehow.