|
Archives
|
2007:02:01:10:42. Thursday. EVERYONE, BOW YOUR HEADS AND PRETEND TO BE SERIOUS. 
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2006:03:04:13:13. Saturday. WHEN YOU PAY DOWN DEBT, YOU CHARGE WITH HITLER. A Rhode Island man has been investigated by the Department of Homeland Security for paying off his credit card:
They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.
And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable. And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs. They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast. After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed. So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called. "When you mess with my money, I want to know why," he said. They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking. They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted. Coincidentally, I just paid off a large chunk of credit card debt with MBNA. As far as I can tell there was no delay, but short of demanding records from them or DHS I really have no way of knowing.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:09:18:11:00. Saturday. FLAME ON. Did you know that on September 9 & 10, 14 Governors received exploding envelopes? Unless you read the New York Times, you did not.
Envelopes containing matches that were rigged to ignite when opened have been received through the mail at the offices of at least 14 state governors in the last two days.
The mailings, under investigation by the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, bear a return address that names two inmates at a maximum-security prison in Nevada. But a Nevada corrections official said it was unclear whether they were the actual senders. Aides to several governors, including Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, said they had been told by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the case was being treated as one of domestic terrorism, and Jennifer Meith, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Fire Marshal's Office, said that was her understanding as well. ... The governors who were sent the envelopes are Democrats and Republicans alike. In addition to Mr. Romney, of Massachusetts, and Ms. Martz, of Montana, they are George E. Pataki of New York, Rick Perry of Texas, Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho, Mike Johanns of Nebraska, Gary Locke of Washington, Olene S. Walker of Utah, Bill Owens of Colorado, Theodore R. Kulongoski of Oregon, Dave Freudenthal of Wyoming, Kenny Guinn of Nevada, Linda Lingle of Hawaii and Janet Napolitano of Arizona. Thank Vishnu we've got these ridiculous memo stories to keep us from having to think about this stuff.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:08:05:18:04. Thursday. KINGS OF FEAR.
The day we left New York, heightened security went into effect due to the "new" "revelations" about potential terror attacks. We didn't realize it at the time, but the armored cops we saw at the NYSE were probably part of the lead up. Now, we know that the attack information was, at best, shoddy. It gets worse. Ken Layne has this:
After getting through the insane security at CitiBank Headquarters -- caused by four-year-old Evidence of Terror Plans released Sunday to scare the bejesus out of you -- you get to say "Hi" to Laura Bush in the lobby! That's neat.
It's true. Laura Bush was in the Citibank building during the time when the Bush Administration supposedly believed it was about to be blown up. Layne has a picture. Meanwhile, we are now told the attacks are really scheduled for September 2, the last day of the Republican convention -- no, seriously! Can any reasonable person continue to believe that these warnings are legitimate? That anything the Administration says has any relation to truth? No.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:03:31:10:50. Wednesday. HUMP DAY ROUND-UP. Here are some things that are going on. In San Francisco, the Giants' baseball stadium has gone WiFi:
Baseball fans bored by the slow pace of a game or wanting more statistics and information will be able to connect computer devices via wireless computer networking, or WiFi, at San Francisco Giants home games this year, the team announced on Tuesday. The Giants' stadium is, after all, called SBC Park, for telecommunications giant SBC Communications Inc.
"We've created, if not the largest, one of the largest hot spots in the world," said Larry Baer, the team's chief operating officer. "We're the first professional sports facility to provide people universal WiFi connectivity." The article doesn't address security at all, which is surprising. After the Day Everything Changed, security at stadiums and arenas became a really big deal. Are Giants fans going to have to stand in airport-style lines while people ahead of them turn on their laptops for the rent-a-cops? Meanwhile, in krazy konservative Grand Rapids, MI, the city that gave us Acting President Gerald Ford and where my dad was born, police have begun infiltrating anti-war protests and physically intimidating protesters:
When opposition to the war in Iraq began to mount last year, Grand Rapids Police sent undercover officers to anti-war meetings and rallies, collecting intelligence about the aims of activists, the department's chief confirmed.
"We are living in a different time now. It's a different day," said Grand Rapids Police Chief Harry Dolan. War opponents say their surveillance came closer to tyranny than protection from terror. In one case, they say, police threatened the job of a protester and said they would arrest her if she identified undercover officers she knew from her work as a Spanish interpreter at the Kent County Courthouse. ... Undercover officers called her over to their car, Puls recalled. The man on the passenger side took her hand, then squeezed it hard enough to force her to tell them her full name, she said. ... Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell said he is "very concerned" about the alleged incident involving Puls. Heartwell said he recognized the need to investigate threats against public safety but warned of "the tightrope you walk" when police conduct undercover operations. This does not surprise me. Grand Rapids has always had a big inferiority complex because of its proximity to Detroit and Chicago, and I can very easily see its police deciding that the next terrorist attack would involve peace activists taking out the Gerald Ford Museum. Lastly, a study has been released which shows no effect of file-sharing on sales of popular music and only a slight negative effect for niche records.
Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales, the researchers found after tracking sales of 680 albums over the course of 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data with activity on the OpenNap file-sharing network, they concluded that file sharing actually increases CD sales for hot albums that sell more than 600,000 copies. For every 150 downloads of a song from those albums, sales increase by a copy, the researchers found.
"Consumption of music increases dramatically with the introduction of file sharing, but not everybody who likes to listen to music was a music customer before, so it's very important to separate the two," said Felix Oberholzer-Gee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and one of the authors of the study. Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina's Koleman Strumpf, also said that their "most pessimistic" statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002. "From a statistical point of view, what this means is that there is no effect between downloading and sales," said Oberholzer-Gee. For albums that fail to sell well, the Internet may contribute to declining sales. Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf found that albums that sell to niche audiences suffer a "small negative effect" from Internet piracy. They don't track things like concert ticket or merchandise sales, however, which is where small artists and likely to gain a lot from file-sharing. If you're on a major label and only sell 100,000 copies, you're making nothing from that record -- you're probably losing money, in fact. However, if file-sharing gets people interested enough to sell more tickets and t-shirts, you're getting a pretty sizeable cut of some significant new money.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:03:18:13:23. Thursday. THE SOUND OF COMING DOWN. Given The Onion's occasional hiatuses, the site I've consistently visited on a weekly basis for the longest is Glenn McDonald's The War Against Silence, a column-qua-record review that rarely fails to fascinate me. McDonald is a superb writer, a master of modifiers who would likely vex Elmore Leonard to no end. He puts a new column up every Thursday, and this week's strikes me as really significant. It's a review of electro-avant garde duo Trans Am's new Liberation, a blatantly political record, though largely devoid of audible lyrics. The idea that Trans Am wants to get across allows McDonald the opportunity to discuss not just the current political environment vis-à-vis vocal dissent, it allows him to wonder about the very nature of political and civic thought in art. The column itself provides a terrific companion piece for the one dated September 20, 2001, the first to be written after the attacks. Then, McDonald seemed shaken, nervous and angry in a way he was uncharacteristically muddled about. Now, the nerves have settled and the anger has crystallized. Like many of us on the left, he understands how the past two and a half years have pushed out-groups further out and allowed in-groups to go so far in that they have superceded the structures they once occupied. McDonald's taste in music is often superficially similar to mine, though I will never understand his love of Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette, but the way he writes about music is far more enthralling than the music he writes about. I only wish there were somebody doing such a terrific job of dancing about architecture.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra |
