IED is an MMA

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MMA: Mendacious Military Acronym

We are given to understand that IED stands for Improvised Explosive Device, the things that Iraqi insurgents use to blow away US troops. There’s just one problem: there is nothing improvisatory about them. I heard a radio interview with a high level U.S. military guy who sounded like he knew what he was talking about. He described how the people who create these “improvised” devices have adapted them to changing defenses. For example, the devices used to be hard-wired. So the U.S. started training guys to spot the wires. So the IED developers switched to wireless. The U.S. started armouring the vehicles more heavily (a stroke of genius there, don’t you think?), so the IED dudes started packing bigger payloads. To my mind, this is anything but improvised — it is carefully planned, deliberate, systematic, methodical.

Here’s what the improvised in IED really stands for. It means whoever built it had the audacity to build it himself instead of being a good citizen and buying it from a respectable, world-class arms dealer such as France, China, Russia, Israel, or the USA.

gansta version of Christmas is coming

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I know I am a little ahead of the curve here. Hell, even Buy Nothing Day is still a couple weeks out. Nonetheless, the Muses dropped this little gem on me the other day and I feel duty-bound to share it:

Christmas is coming
Yo goose be gettin phat.
Won’t you please put a pennny
In a nigga mothafuckin hat?
If y’all ain’t got no penny
A haypenny will do.
Y’all ain’t got no god damn haypenny
I’m a fuck yo ass up.

“Explanation of Benefits”?

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It seems that several times a month my so-called Health Maintenance Organization Blue Cross/Blue Shield finds a reason to send me a document they call an Explanation of Benefits.

I don’t think I am a total and complete moron. I can read and write; I have two Masters Degrees; I have to my credit one or two other intellectual accomplishments that require a certain level of cognitive functioning. But I cannot for the life of me decipher the Explanation of Benefits, and not for want of good faith effort. You see, many “providers” and all insurers will fuck you at every turn if you let them — that’s my philosophy — so I really want to know what they are trying to tell me, and I can’t figure it out. Perhaps the oddest thing they do is tell you that you both do and do not owe the provider $228.73. Which is it?

Sure, you can call Blue Cross/Blue Shield during regular business hours and navigate the voice mail tree, eventually coming to a recorded disclaimer that tells you — with breathtaking chutzpah — that whatever the human “customer service” drone is about to tell you may be a lie. That pretty much goes without saying these days, doesn’t it?

Finally you start to question your assumptions. They call it an Explanation but you can’t understand it despite your best efforts. Perhaps it’s not really intended as an explanation at all! And the typical purpose of this non-bill is to tell you how much they will not pay — quite the opposite of Benefits. The very name of this document, Explanation of Benefits, is a lie. The only honest part is the preposition “of.” Let’s strike Explanation in favor of Obfuscation, and… let’s see, what’s the opposite of benefit? Harm, calamity, misfortune, infliction, detriment… I think I will call it an Obfuscation of Detriments until I come up with something better.

Donate to Iraq reconstruction?

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I hear that USAID is asking private citizens to pony up donations for Iraq reconstruction in addition to all the tax dollars we are spending on trying to rebuild it in addition to all the tax dollars we spent destroying it. Can you believe the chutzpah? Jeez, suppose we had simply not destroyed the place in a criminal war of invasion and occupation in the first place — think of the savings!

I am glad I bought my bus ticket to the anti-Bush demo in D.C. on Saturday.

Six Feet Under, The Finale

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If you are planning to see it and haven’t yet, DO NOT READ THIS.

Some of my friends say it was depressing, a tear-jerker. There were certainly moments that got me choked up, but I thought they gave just enough comic relief to keep it from being too heart-breaking. Consider the makeup in that final sequence. It seemed they were serious about aging David, but some of them literally looked like a joke. It’s like they put a silly wig on Brenda and said fuck it, that’ll do. And she expires as Billy is doing what? Running his mouth, as is his wont when he’s in that mode. Even the way Keith gets wacked seemed more cartoonish than tragic, as if to say, hey, somebody has to die of unnatural causes.

One of the many things I loved about the show was the dialogues with the dead. Normally I hate anything remotely supernatural, but from the start I understood these conversations with ghosts as metaphors for interior dialogues, a means whereby the living character works out his problems. That’s why Nate was far nastier as a dead guy than he ever was in life:  it wasn’t him but Brenda’s problems with him that were speaking. One of the things I learned years ago from my stepmother is that when a loved one dies, he’s dead, but the relationship you had with the person continues, since it always was an abstract, intangible thing.

When it was all over I felt completely satisfied. It was a superb ending for one of the greatest shows in TV history. I think it was psychologically healthy for a lot of us viewers , and immensely entertaining.

That night I stepped into the bathroom and saw myself in the mirror looking older than I have ever looked before. Then it occurred to me:  I am, in fact, older than I have ever been before. Tick tock tick tock my friends, we’re all gonna die. Is that so terrible? I think not.

The Joy of Being Two Years Old

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My two-year-old daughter has a pretty good deal, if you ask me. My wife’s full time job is to take care of her, and she does a superb job of it.

That means young Gabriela has her own full time chauffeur, chef, personal assistant, wardrobe consultant, nutritionist, personal trainer, bodyguard, tutor, nurse, hair stylist, manicurist,
pedicurist, travel agent, social secretary, and a hundred other things that I can’t think of right now. Every day she is on some fabulous vacation with an extraordinary tour guide who handles everything seamlessly. Nice job, mami.

Want to stop Judge Roberts?

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I have two really great suggestions for stopping Bush’s Supreme Court Nominee:

  1. Impeach Bush.
  2. If that doesn’t work, hire Karl Rove to set Roberts up with a thirteen-year-old boy! That is, if a public servant of Mr. Rove’s ethical stature and integrity can be persuaded to stoop so low, and if he moonlights. Hell, if he gets fired he won’t have to moonlight and can work on our project full time. How will we raise the money for Karl’s fee, you ask? Easy. Get those MoveOn.org boys and girls on the job and have them send ten emails a day to their loyal base.

Bush/Cheney Impeachment unimaginable? Not for me

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In a recent Nation editorial they say something like, whereas a few months ago it was “unimaginable,” a successful impeachment movement is now merely “improbable.” Dudes:  improbable shit happens! Don’t be defeatist.

From the Downing Street memo and WMD lies to Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo, the justification for impeachment of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld is now more than sufficiently documented. And knowingly leading your country into an illegal war based on lies has got to be more serious than lying about what you did with your dick, don’t you think? They need to be impeached, removed from office, and tried for war crimes. Why is this so unthinkable? How can we not think it and still pretend to care about democracy?

So let’s all pony up our dollars and contribute to http://www.votetoimpeach.org/ (as I just did) and start thinking ahead to September 24, when there is going to be one kick-ass demonstration in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Let’s not just be pissed as hell. Let’s do something about it.

Linux distros, religious wars

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A Beginner’ s Guide to Linux Distros provides an illuminating comparision of several of the most widely used Linux distributions. The problem, for typical non-technical windoze users looking for relief, is that their eyes will glaze over upon reading this, and they will likely be intimidated and confused by all the geek jargon.

I’ve been there, having started trying Linuxes in 1996. I have been through half a dozen different Linuxes with successively greater degrees of success (as they installs and hardware support improved). I think it’s now reached the point where there is really no reason why an average windoze user can’t learn to use a distro like Ubuntu. I don’t know if many would have the cojones to install it, but if you give them a machine with Ubuntu already on it, I can’t help but think they could be happy, or learn to be happy. Yes, Gnucash is different from Quicken, OpenOffice is different from Miscrosloth Office, and so on. Users have to want to leave the abusive relationship with windoze enough to put up with some migration pains.

I recently replaced my aging Red Hat 9 on my home desktop with Ubuntu, and it runs faster than the old Red Hat, everything works, it’s pretty, and there’s just nothing not to like. In the endless religious debate over distros I now take the side of Ubuntu for beginners and even intermediate users who want something that just works.

Changing OSes is no trifling matter for ordinary mortals. The author of the Tipmonkies piece describes himself as having been a “distro whore” trying new Linux distributions all the damn time. Who has spare computers and enough spare hours to squander fucking with those computers? I procrastinated for months before upgrading this box of mine for fear that hair-pulling and struggling with problems would eat up too much time. (Fortunately, Ubuntu is good and I was not unlucky.) But if I had that kind of time, I think I might try to catch up on the hundreds of books and movies I need to read and see, improve my French, learn to scuba dive…