Only a Lousy $25 Million!!??

Thu   13 Jun 2002   7:35 by Kevin McGehee 0 comments [Here's Your Sign] [blogoSFERICS]

I've just received in my e-mail what must be the seventh different offer to use my bank account to launder a wad of "overlooked" African money. This time it's Dr. Adebayo Jones (sounds like a character played by Daffy Duck in a 1950s cartoon), "chairman of contract award and review committee set up by the federal government of Nigeria under the new civilian dispensation to award new contracts and review existing ones." He writes, "I came to know of you in my search for a reliable and reputable person to handle a very confidential transaction, which involves the transfer of a huge sum of money to a foreign account." "Reliable and reputable"? Okay, which one of you jokers has been telling lies about me behind my back? The notable thing about these scam spams is that the alleged money involved accumulated through either a fraudulent deliberate overbilling, or an accidental overbilling, of some poor sucker of a multinational corporation, and that the scheme involving the recipient of the message is a fraudulent attempt to avoid returning the money to its rightful owner. I suppose that's why the victim is always a multinational corporation -- stealing from them is mere justice, right? Anytime I've tried to write back to whoever sends me these things, the message always bounces back as undeliverable. Seems kind of pointless to try to get confidential information from me about my bank accounts, and not provide a valid reply address to receive the desired information. Or maybe after they send the message they discover that I only have 98¢ and a month-old ham sandwich in the bank, and they close the e-mail account before I can reply...

Trenchant Observation Dept.

Wed   5 Jun 2002   15:46 by Kevin McGehee 0 comments [Here's Your Sign] [blogoSFERICS]

Stupidity must be quantifiable. Some people have a demonstrably large amount of it. Today I saw a person trying to back out of her driveway onto a four-lane highway -- despite having a driveway long enough and unconstricted enough that she could very easily have turned around and come out front-ways. Because she was coming out backwards she was stymied by traffic that would not have been such an obstacle had she simply used some of that wasted gray matter taking up space inside her noggin.

Watt a Way to Go
Fri   24 May 2002   22:56 by Kevin McGehee 0 comments [Here's Your Sign] [blogoSFERICS]	The next time a Darwin Awards message starts making the circuit, this item (fourth on the page) may cause you to say "Ohm my!" Seems this braggart came up a little short when he tried to make good on his boast. Turned out he was just a flash in the pan. (via Best of the Web Today)

In Sunny California, the Storm Gathers

Sun   12 May 2002   10:02 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Here's Your Sign] [Flyover Blogdom]

Software Deal Shakes Up California Governor’s Race reads the Fox News headline on an article about the now-heating-up scandal over Gray Davis’ corrupt deal with Oracle—seems to me from what I’ve read, using the word “corrupt” in any sentence containing either Davis’ name or the name “Oracle” is redundant. “In the past, the state would procure a component at a time, project at a time,“ said Elias Cortez, the director of the state’s Department of Information Technology. Not so this time, and Cortez has been suspended after claims that inexperienced negotiators botched a deal that would have saved the state money by buying the software in bulk. But critics say incompetence was just part of the problem. Charges of corruption now loom over the administration of Gov. Gray Davis. As the deal was being negotiated, Oracle donated $25,000 to Davis’ re-election campaign. “It looks like it was more than a quid-pro-quo. It smells like a payoff,“ said Shawn Steel, chairman of the California Republican Party. Davis claims he knew nothing of the deal or the donation. And after ordering an investigation, he sent the highway patrol to guard trash at the DIT to make sure no documents are shredded. “No one’s more interested than I am to find out exactly what happened and get to the bottom of it and make it right,“ he said. Thursday, he returned the $25,000 to Oracle, and he is trying to rescind the contract and contain the damage. He received resignation letters from two state workers close to the deal. But as the fall campaign season approaches, Davis’ $30 million warchest — and the way he raised it — will come under scrutiny. Not mentioned here is the fact the big contribution was promised months in advance of the contract, yet—as noted in the quote—handed over only afterward.

Dirty Laundry

Sun   5 May 2002   11:46 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Here's Your Sign] [Media Ochre] [Flyover Blogdom]

First it was Jon-Benet Ramsey, then Nicole Brown Simpson, then Chandra Levy, and now Bonnie Lee Bakley. If it’s lurid, it leads. Some might choose to add Monica Lewinsky to this list, and not without justification; the legacy media, which had an enormous investment in Bill Clinton, did report that story not for any constitutional ramifications, but as a celebrity sex scandal. That twist is a common thread in all these stories. The Ramseys may not have been celebrities before their daughter died, and there may not be any obvious sexual overtones (aside from the practice of putting a six-year-old girl into a beauty pageant), but there was enough there to turn the tragic murder of a child into a lurid, sensational story that still hasn’t gone away for good, I fear. O.J. Simpson most certainly was an established celebrity before his ex-wife was found stabbed to death. Reports of an affair between Gary Condit (celebrity by virtue of being a blow-dried blond, blue-eyed congressman from California) and Chandra Levy would have made that a celebrity sex scandal even if they hadn’t turned out to be true. And of course Bonnie Lee Bakley was selling nude pics of herself over the Internet. Celebrity, sex, and blood. The three most marketable things in American pop culture—and any two will turn an otherwise innocuous story into a years-long reporting frenzy by bubble-headed bleached blondes with a gleam in their eye. Too bad they overshadow what must be the very real anguish of the very real human beings involved in these events. The Ramseys have themselves been fingered as suspects in their own daughter’s murder by much of that segment of public opinion that found the story titillating. Simpson is still walking free thanks to the spectacle made of his criminal trial. Chandra is still missing, and it’s taken months for an arrest to be made in Bakley’s murder. Honor and justice have yet to be satisfied in any of these cases, because legacy media find it more important to satisfy the public’s appetite for a salacious spin on a tragic story. At least Bill Clinton didn’t get off altogether scot-free. He is, after all, still married to the Shredder from Chicago.

Dueling Opinions on High School Thongs

Fri   3 May 2002   14:52 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Here's Your Sign] [Flyover Blogdom]

Earlier in the week there was a news report out of San Diego about how a high school vice principal (female) was checking girls’ underwear as they tried to get into the prom. Now, I will admit I was as outraged as the girls’ parents were as I read the article; although there is certainly no justification for jailbait girls to be wearing thong underwear under short skirts at a dance, I figure it’s up to the girls’ parents to police whether their daughters are going to go out dressed like the Hooker Youth Korps. Michelle Malkin offers a different take, and I have to admit I can see her point, but I still don’t think school officials have any business doing this kind of thing just because parents are abdicating their own responsibilities. In my opinion the high school should address this problem by formulating a dress-code policy for events like this, making sure parents as well as students are aware of it, and then simply turning away students who don’t comply. There will just as surely be an uproar for this as there was for the skirt-lifting, but at least the school’s position will be more secure. I do find it ironic that girls who wear these teeny-tiny straps in place of real clothing are so outraged that “everyone saw everything”—isn’t that the whole point of dressing like a streetwalker? But the vice principal might have done better to go down to the border crossing and borrow one of those little mirrors on the end of a long handle. It would have been less spectacular than pulling up skirts in front of a crowd.

Briefly, About Jenna Bush

Fri   1 Jun 2001   12:00 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Here's Your Sign] [My Two Cents]

Part of the deal when it comes to The Daily Routine is that those who wait breathlessly for the latest in the JonBenet Ramsey saga, or which relative is dissing whom in the murder case of Robert Blake’s better half, or any other such story that is 99 percent gossip, will forever leave this table unfed.     Our society has become so addicted to the comings, goings, doings and sayings of the well-known-for-being-well-known that it is one of the reasons Big Media does such an abysmal job of informing the American people about what’s really going on in their world. When you only have 110 minutes each week to tell people the news, and you have to spend 45 of those minutes gossiping about somebodies who would be nobodies if this were a just world, you naturally shortchange the important stuff. Fortunately, that lowest-common-denominator audience is so well served by the unthinking liberals of Big Media that alternatives are able to flourish by bucking the trend.     Sometimes, though, a gossip story arises that touches, however lightly, on important events. One of these was the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, and another was the perjury committed by then-President Clinton in a deposition for the Jones lawsuit. Sadly, gossip and prurient detail became a matter of constitutional importance when the question of perjury was investigated — not because the Independent Counsel wanted to write an X-rated report to Congress, but because the perjury in question happened to be about a sexual matter and he could not pursue the case without asking questions that Kenneth Starr would not have wanted asked of his daughter (if he has one).     The boundary between gossip and substance can be a touchy one, but the Monica Lewinsky matter helped to pin it down somewhat.     Where, then, does the line fall when it comes to Jenna Bush?     As a daughter of the President of the United States, her comings, goings, doings and saying are only of consequence in light of a nation’s natural tendency to regard the families of the powerful as part of a national family — just as other celebrities are regarded as members of an extended national neighborhood. Jenna Bush has no power over policy, no power to order the boys and girls in uniform into harm’s way for reasons good or otherwise. The value, such as it is, of the emphasis some are placing on Miss Bush’s adolescent efforts to procure alcohol, lies entirely in the discomfiture it is expected to inflict on the President and First Lady.     George and Laura need no advice from me about Jenna’s misbehavior, but if I were George I would inform Jenna that since Texas law calls for six months’ jail time in the event of a third offense, she should not expect her father’s position to shelter her from that consequence should it arise. It would be the right thing to do as a father, and as a President. Using the presidency to protect her from such consequences, however, would be an abuse of power, and that would be a legitimate story.     Unless and until such an abuse happens, that’s all I have to say about the case — and I honestly doubt anyone else has more. That’s not likely to stop Big Media from whipping up story after story about it, but those who hunger for such empty confections won’t find them here.

A Latter-Day John Brown?

Sat   12 May 2001   12:00 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Here's Your Sign] [Media Ochre] [My Two Cents]

The other day I heard something that literally made my day.     While running some errands, I had my car radio tuned to WGST, the Atlanta station that carries the Rush Limbaugh show. During a break, the station ran a public-service announcement that went, in the absence of a verbatim transcript, more or less like this:     “With so much in the news recently about Timothy Veigh, we here at WGST would like to take a moment to remember his victims.” After a moment of silence, the announcer went on, “At times like this, it helps to be reminded that sometimes the two sides there are to every story, are Right and Wrong.”*     That was a risky thing for a radio station to say in this day of political correctness and the near criminalization of judgmentalness. Yet it seems that McVeigh’s crime is one of those rare birds in post-modern America: something we can all pretty much agree on. There aren’t many things that can even aspire to that status. Slavery is one, and the event of nuclear war another — but not much else. Abortion? The environment? The right to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labor? Some days we can’t even agree on whether the sun rises in the east.     That there is a consensus on McVeigh is all the more curious because the penalty to which he was sentenced is viscerally opposed by a small but vociferous segment of the public — some of whom are conservatives. My own view on the death penalty is that it really isn’t killing — it’s just chlorinating the gene pool. But even a lot of death-penalty opponents are holding their peace when it comes to the Butcher of Oklahoma City. The only controversy seems to be whether he acted as much the lone wolf as he claims, or whether one or more as-yet unidentified persons were more involved than is currently accepted. I still don’t think the whole story has been discovered, and I doubt McVeigh will tell any more of that story than he has. And that’s because Timothy McVeigh seems convinced that his cause is more important than his own life, and that he can still further the cause even as a corpse.     Most people would like to think that the men they send to kill or be killed in their nation’s defense would be willing to lay down their lives for that cause, if necessary. And the cup of military history runneth over with examples of heroism on that scale. But the willful quest for martyrdom is not something Americans are accustomed to. In our age, that mentality is left to Middle Eastern suicide bombers — just as a previous generation associated it with Japanese kamikaze pilots. Americans just can’t get their minds around the idea that someone could actually want to die for his cause even when he doesn’t have to.     Timothy McVeigh is not the first American to display such a level of fanaticism, though. More than 140 years ago there was a man whose devotion to a cause led him to take up arms against his lawful government, years before any Southern state opted for secession and made armed rebellion against the United States a quasi-legitimate exercise. And this man’s cause was one with which Americans today are in 100% agreement: the abolition of slavery. John Brown, late of “Bleeding Kansas,” led a raid on the Army arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), was captured, tried, and sentenced to hang. And hang he did, decrying with his last breath the evil that would yet lead to Civil War and a century and a half of hard feelings between North and South, black and white, centralists and de-centralists.     McVeigh insists that he was right to kill 168 innocent men, women and children as punishment against a U.S. government that committed murders under color of authority at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas, just as John Brown insisted with his last breath that he was right to challenge the lawful authority of the United States over slavery. I don’t say that “McVeigh believes” the government committed murders, because it’s not a matter of belief — any more than John Brown’s condemnation of slavery was a matter of belief. Both men committed their crimes because they were outraged at crimes being committed by, or under the protection of, the government.     Given how popular opinion must have reacted to the raid at Harpers Ferry, you would think that America would have shrunk from the abolitionist cause for some time afterward — but the raid occurred in 1859, only two years before the outbreak of Civil War. Back then, most people could understand the difference between an atrocity, and the belief that led to its occurrence. In all, the effect of Brown’s action seems to have been a wash — slavery was ultimately abolished, after an armed challenge against the U.S. government, but it came neither because of the raid nor in spite of it. Or perhaps it would be better to say both because of and in spite of it.     Whatever reforms may come to our government today in light of the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco, there will probably be elements of both “because of” and “in spite of” when it comes to the relationship to Timothy McVeigh as well. His atrocity helped empower and re-elect a hopelessly corrupt President, whose tenure and departure has nevertheless reintroduced such notions to public discourse as “Right and Wrong.” His prosecution has brought to light yet another in a series of faults in the conduct of the FBI, which bore a share of responsibility for both incidents that McVeigh thought he had a right to avenge. Perhaps this will prove to be the catalyst for such reforms as may restore public trust in federal law enforcement agencies, or perhaps it will serve merely to erode that trust even further.     There are of course major differences between John Brown’s cause and that of Timothy McVeigh. Slavery was an offense on a grand scale compared to the mere incompetence, recklessness and dishonesty that surrounds Waco and Ruby Ridge. Millions were enslaved, compared to the relatively few victims of Elmer Fed whose screams drove McVeigh over the edge. And as shocking as Brown’s raid must have been in 1859, his victims were soldiers — able and willing to fight back — while McVeigh’s victims, civilians and their children, had no such opportunity. Bombing a building full of children is not the act of a heroic would-be martyr, but a display of malicious cowardice for which there is a special place in hell.     It may be, though, that history tailors its shocks for the times. Maybe a society that sanctions infanticide to protect a woman’s standard of living isn’t as easy to shock as one that tolerates slavery. Some will bridle at that suggestion, but a greater proportion of slavery’s victims survived it than do abortion’s victims.     Sometimes the two sides there are to every question, are Right and Wrong. If we as a society needed to be shocked, there are certainly enough reasons. Editor’s Note: You’ll notice this took place four months, almost to the day, before 9/11.

Bully THIS

Wed   14 Mar 2001   8:00 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Here's Your Sign] [My Two Cents]

At the risk of being targeted for psychiatric evaluation, I confess here and now that, when I was in school, I was picked on by people whom most today would reasonably conclude were bullies.     I certainly thought so at the time, and so did many of those adults who were aware of the activity. I doubt the bullies thought of themselves that way then, though maybe in the wake of the mass shootings at high schools in recent years their consciousnesses have been raised. Without a doubt, the notion of having one’s favorite taunting target suddenly turn the tables with a gun, tends to focus one’s attention on one’s own behavior. But whatever guilty thoughts may be passing through the minds of those grown men (and yes, women) today, doesn’t change what happened back then. And what happened back then was, they survived. And so did I.     It wasn’t uncommon in those days for my complaints to teachers about bullying to be futile. Sometimes I was even accused of deliberately inviting the torment: kids wouldn’t focus so much on me if I weren’t doing something to provoke it. In retrospect, I can see that such responses were from people who thought I could get along better by being more like everybody else. I wasn’t just different, I was an individualist despite not even having heard of the word yet. I knew that I had a right to think for myself, to make my own decisions about things that were nobody else’s business, and to enjoy things that gave me pleasure — like knowing the right answer when Teacher asked the class a question.     I also knew I had a right not to be pressed and formed into a Kid McMuffin by any school administration, classmate, or even (had it been an issue) my own parents.     It may startle many public-school reformers to know that the conformity factories where most of this early unpleasantness took place, sometimes it seemed with tacit adult approval, were not government-owned schools. I did attend government-owned schools for the three years now deemed “middle-school,” but nine of my twelve pre-college school years were spent in Catholic schools. To be fair though, the one time I had a schoolmate hold a knife to my neck — a puny X-Acto knife, no real danger — was at a government-owned school. So I guess it sort of evened out.     The talk about bullying today seems oddly antiseptic compared to my memories of what used to happen to me. Maybe bullying has been defined so far down that it now includes having someone sneer at one’s shoes in the hall. When I was bullied, usually a fight ensued — if not immediately, eventually. It wasn’t always one-on-one. I rarely if ever had anyone take up for me; those who weren’t against me felt safer just watching. Sometimes I sought to even the odds, or even gain advantage, in unsporting ways. Once I unfolded a tiny pocket knife, scarcely more dangerous than the aforementioned X-Acto, and of course I never touched the kid with it — as soon as he saw it, he lost all desire to fight and ran home. That was about the time I began to understand the concept of deterrence.     It was during those “middle school” years that I began to make headway against it all. I gained confidence in my ability to defend myself physically, even though early on one of my most decisive defeats was by a girl in my class. Every once in a blue moon someone who targeted me for a pounding would wind up with a fat lip, a black eye, a bloody nose — and maybe even a new attitude. Once a guy I was fighting accused me of having something in my hand when I hit him back, but my hand was empty. Hey, not only could I hit, I could hit hard.     Not every challenge could be met physically though. One boy threatened, quite credibly I thought, to beat me up fiercely on the last day of school — so on that day I told another bully something uncomplimentary that the first one had said about him. I’m sure the Klingons would not have approved.     By the time I got into high school, while I may not have become a widely respected member of the pack, I was more or less free of the fear that I might have had about the way the others treated me. Also, it being an all-boys school at the time, I didn’t have to worry about getting beat up again by a girl…     The advent of testosterone undoubtedly affected how I dealt with would-be tormentors in those years. In a blind rage one time, I chased one the entire length of the school before he realized who he was running away from. He stopped, threw a punch that I ran right into, and then he had to take a step back and start talking fast when I kept coming. He promised to take up the matter with me after school, but he never showed. One who did show, inadvertently broke my nose and when he realized I was unfazed by the torrent of blood running down my face, decided it must matter more to me than to him, and walked away.     In the long years since I have occasionally run into someone I knew back then, including people whom I would once have hated for their treatment of me. Turned out, it mattered a lot more to me than to pretty much any of them, and now it doesn’t matter to me at all, except as fodder for an article on bullying. Given how it all turns out, the overall memory is actually kind of pleasant. I got in trouble a lot. I bled a lot. I was humiliated and terrorized and sometimes feared grievous injury. And I outsmarted them, threw a scare into them, actually inflicted educational pain on them, and later became friends with them.     These days I hear about how people long since grown up are still traumatized by what they went through in high school. Yeah, those nasty remarks about your shoes must have been terrible.     The Columbine/Santee phenomenon isn’t caused by guns, nor is it caused by bullying. It’s caused by a national epidemic of inability to Get Over It.

What Kind of a Nutcase Does It Take…?

Tue   9 May 2000   15:13 by Kevin McGehee in Coweta County, GA 0 comments [Our Times] [Here's Your Sign] [My Two Cents]

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the one who runs the Nanny State? My job involves taking payments from customers and making sure the money is applied to the proper accounts. The vast majority of the payments I process are left in the night drop, which means the customers aren’t there to answer questions about their accounts. Most of these payments include the bill stub with the account number on it, but many don’t, and I wind up having to play detective, using what information I can get off the check. It was once a somewhat enjoyable game to dig up the right answer based on scant clues, but after seven months it’s become exasperating. More and more I get the feeling that I’m performing this service for the same group of people, month after month, because they just can’t be bothered to do the small, simple tasks that we reasonably ask of them. If I stop playing detective for these few people, their accounts will go delinquent, service will be stopped, and they’ll come complain to me because as far as they’re concerned they paid their bill. And I can’t help wondering what must be wrong with people who actually want others to be totally dependent on them. There’s a saying, “It’s nice to be needed,“ but there’s a limit and I’ve long since reached mine. I’ve touched before on the subject of people who want to have other people take care of them—the pathological childishness of such a mentality. But I’m becoming convinced that those on the other side of this transaction, the people who want to step in and run other people’s lives for them, are downright psychotic. Raising kids is one thing, because eventually (one hopes) kids grow up and start taking care of themselves, and when you get too old to take care of yourself they (one hopes) will take care of you. But the people I’m taking care of in my job are not children or the elderly infirm. We’re talking about grown men and women with families and jobs and car loans. This doesn’t even include that class of people who are always behind on their bills and always having their service stopped and restarted practically every month. You kind of expect the chronic delinquent customer to be a little hopeless, but what about the people who drop off their payments the day after they receive their bills—but don’t include the bill stub, nor put their account number on the check? When you deal with people of this caliber on a daily basis, you quickly realize that the polls that still say Bill Clinton is doing a good job as president, are not cooked up out of nothing. These are the people who still get almost all their news from broadcast network television, and believe what they’re told. These are the people who look at Elian Gonzalez and think “father’s rights” without any glimmer of “parental responsibility” (such as a parent’s responsibility to spare his son a lifelong indoctrination into a political ideology that has failed everywhere it’s been tried). These are the people who get their income tax refund and think it means they didn’t pay taxes. These are the people who reflexively equate government-owned schools with education despite all the evidence. They scare me, but not as much as the people who want them, and all of us, to be the same way—so they can take care of us. Hopeless adults are pathetic, but Big Nanny wannabe’s are absolutely creepy. And I’m proud to say that I don’t share their psychosis.

Page 77 of 78 pages « First  <  75 76 77 78 >