JHU is retarded. The giant lawn in front of the library is called the Beach. People tan out there like it’s a beach. It’s not a fucking beach. It’s a lawn.

I need some way to eat and sleep at the same time. Yeah, I know that sounds like some fat guy’s dream, but I just want to be able to nap without skipping any meals.

Here’s today’s Chalkboard Manifesto:

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Apparently, the US military has been training dolphins to shoot toxic dart guns at terrorists. No, really: Armed and dangerous – Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina. If I saw this in a movie, I would just find it ridiculous and laugh. This is more proof that reality is stranger than fiction.

I have to admit it: I think grammar is interesting; I’m intrigued by the syntactical differences between languages.

Here’s today’s Chalkboard Manifesto:

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“It was sucked.” This speech error from a drunk person was even funnier the second and third time.

Why can’t I work late at night anymore? I feel old.

Ain’t it funny? Cindy Sheehan was supposed to represent a watershed. She was supposed to tip the nation towards a Vietnam-style loss on the homefront. She was the next Rosa Parks.

Some liberals sure have a short memory. I got this flier while going to the Cindy Sheehan thing (which I walked out of) about a Baltimore school board protest, a nationwide strike day, and a national march, and whatnot. They got some funny bullet points, let me reproduce most of them:

• Don’t let them kidnap our youth for the military!
• Don’t die for the Pentagon & Big Oil!
• Turn our outrage over Katrina into a movement — On the 50th anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks sparked the modern civil rights movement — Dec 1 Nationwide Strike — teach-ins, marches, sit-ins — Saturday — Dec 3 mass marches Wall Street to DC
• Baltimore School Board — Honor Rosa Parks Day — No school!

Turn our outrage over Katrina into a movement? Just like the movement that Cindy Sheehan started?

And: Kidnap our youth for the military? These volunteers?

No wonder protesting doesn’t do anything anymore. These people have a very skewed view of reality.

I was talking to someone before the Cindy Sheehan thing and she said that she didn’t think we should have invaded Afghanistan. That shows you the mentality of those severely lacking an understanding of geopolitics.

One of the persons on stage did some type of rap about 9/11. He said 9/11 was justified. That really pissed me off.

They rattled on about Iraqi self-determination. They say we need to get out to let the Iraqis govern themselves, while they ignore that without the war Saddam would still be in power. They prattle on about the innocent Iraqis dying, ignoring the fact that the insurgents are the ones killing innocents.

They complain about propaganda from the right. They complain about our soundbite culture. Yet, their soundbite says, “The war is a lie.” They don’t understand that you can go to a war for multiple reasons: to establish democracy, to take out an evil dictator, to find weapons of mass destruction, oil, and more.

Go to a mass grave in Iraq and tell them that our American soldiers died for nothing. Tell it to an Iraqi mother who lost her child to Saddam. They say they care about human lives, but they’re hypocrites. Selfish hypocrites. Whither liberalism! These same people who say that we’re one global family say we should turn to isolationalism. They don’t care about their brothers and sisters suffering in Iraq! They don’t care about women being oppressed in foreign countries. All they can do is love their neighbor (and, for some of them, hate their country).

I don’t think this applies to liberalism in general. So, why are these whackjobs the spokespeople for the left?

I went to the thing, but they were talking and talking, and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I left.

I’m gonna see Cindy Sheehan at JHU tomorrow. One of the sponsors is the “Hopkins Anti-War Coalition.” I know I’m going to go in there and disagree with her. What I really want to know is if she’s freaking crazy, or not… All these pundits think they know what she’s all about when they’ve read transcripts and selectively picked out quotes. I’m gonna see what’s going on for myself.

I saw just about everyone heading out to have some fun this Saturday night. I feel a bit sick tonight, though, so I’m not going out. You can’t help but feel a bit like a loser for not going out, but when I started a coughing fit, I realized that there is a time for everything (and a season for every activity under heaven): a time to party, and a time to stay home. This is just one of those nights when I need to stay home, and get some sleep, so I can get better.

It’s so freaking hot… I’m dying. It was overcast this morning, and it felt so nice. But I could see the sun beginning to sneak its way through, and my smile dimmed.

My throat kinda tickles. I can’t tell if it’s allergies, or disease. Frankly, I think it’s the humidity too. You walk up one floor, it’s 10 degrees hotter. Up on the third floor, I can barely breath.

It’s way too hot to sit up here and weblog, so that’s all you’re getting for today. Besides, it’s a Friday. Go out and have some fun.

Look at this from MSNBC: Major quake could be worse than Katrina. Finally, people are figuring it out… no, wait, they aren’t.

Yes, we need to upgrade buildings to be more earthquake proof, but that takes a lot of time and a lot of money. It’s money well-spent, but it’s not going to happen all at once. It takes time to do that. An earthquake could strike long before that gets done. And what if the earthquake is so big it renders older retrofitting defunct? Will we put ourselves in an endless engineering arms war against earthquakes?

Let me stress once more, this earthquake retrofitting needs to be done. However, we can’t make ourselves 100% safe this way. We need money on disaster response. Things will fail; we need to be able to respond and adapt. Just retrofitting buildings is an example of brittle security. If it fails, we’re fucked. The city and state needs plans on how it can take care of people, on how to get around if a bridge collapses, etcetera.

I’ve found all that needs to be said. Sure, there are lots of issues, but deciphering the web of mythocracy is unneeded. All you have to do is cut through it with the truth.

How to make us safer: Katrina and Security from Bruce Schneier. If you don’t want to read the whole article, there are two things that we need to fund: emergency response and intelligence gathering. That will make us safer in the wake of all disasters, natural or otherwise.

Too bad the LA Times is getting rid of Michael Kinsley. He says all that I wish I could say about the fetid aroma of hindsight. But I’m young, in time, I’ll develop a more eloquent style.

The hindsight geniuses didn’t get the necessary changes done to prevent this disaster. In that sense, the little New Orleans Times-Picayune series, and the pork-consuming representatives failed New Orleans despite their supposed prescience. Thus, we need a different approach rather than I-told-you-so. That approach? Emergency response and intelligence gathering.

Remember.

If you leave the door open for about thirty seconds, the fire alarm goes off. The fire alarm goes off quite often, and let me tell you, it is quite annoying. More annoying than the guy who has to yell, “Shut the fucking door.” You know what? If the fire alarm is going off, it’s already saying, “Shut the fucking door.” Because it sure ain’t saying, “There’s a fire.” If there is a fire here, we are all going to die. Instead of evacuating, we’ll be consumed by the flames, all the while wondering why no one shut the door.

Baltimore is not as diverse as San Francisco, I don’t think. However, it’s more diverse than I thought it would be. I learned that they actually have Thai restaurants in Baltimore. I have seen a fair amount of Asians, but hardly any Filipinos or Latinos. Instead of seeing these people, I see more African Americans. Instead of mostly Latinos doing the grunt work, like cleaning my hotel room or washing my dishes, African Americans are doing it. I wonder if anyone will construe that as racist. It’s naive to ignore race in this day and age.

We wish we lived in that ideal world Dr. King dreamed of, but we don’t. I think we ignore talking about race a lot of the times in fear of being a racist. Yet, I must warn you… ignoring it doesn’t lead to stasis. It doesn’t mean the problems will stay the same. Ignoring race doesn’t mean racism will go away. Complacency leads to decay, not stasis. And by all means, ignoring race will not make racism go away.

I’ve noticed a lot of race-based comedy recently. I don’t know if it’s really a modern trend, but for some reason, I think it is. If comedians want a cheap laugh, they don’t talk about airport security, they talk about race. The comedians say the things we’re too afraid to say. That’s the importance of comedians in our culture. They approach the issues we’re too afraid to approach. We laugh because we keep these observations bottled up inside. The comedians give us relief.

I turned my observation about the cleaning personnel into a joke when talking to other people. When looked at objectively, this observation isn’t really all that funny. It’s only funny because of the way society is right now. We’re afraid to touch on issues of race unless in a comedic setting.

New Orleans got me thinking. I was flipping through channels in the hotel room. I saw Tucker Carlson and Al Sharpton on, talking (bullshitting) about New Orleans. Carlson said race played no factor, it was class, and Sharpton said it did. Sharpton said this type of disaster wouldn’t have happened in a rich white community; they would’ve all been evacuated. Carlson disagreed with “white” and agreed with “rich.”

I thought, but these rich white mutherfuckers wouldn’t be forming mobs. They don’t know how to form mobs. If they tried, they’d only have to see one police officer and they’d think, “Oh crap, we better stop.”

Or rather, they’d see these police officers and say, “Oh thank you officer, we’re so glad to see you.” You think the left-behind population in New Orleans generally look upon the cops as their saviors?

It’s important to notice generalizations for what they are: generalizations. However, generalizations are not useless. Especially when you’re analyzing mobs. People in mobs don’t act as individuals.

Did the looters know that help was on the way? Is that part of the reason why they looted, because they thought they had to help themselves, or die? It’s not simply a question of survival. It depends on if you trust the people who are supposed to help you.

I pose these as questions, not as answers. As an open inquiry into avenues I haven’t seen examined. It’s all I can do. I can’t go into New Orleans and think about these things myself. However, it would be interesting to see a sociological study on the breakdown of order in New Orleans. I think the problem is bigger than local and/or state and/or federal incompetence. It’s naive to ignore the issue of race.

START PREPARING FOR AN SF QUAKE NOW!!!

I know I said I wanted to take things apart before offering any suggestions, but I had to sound the alarm before anyone else did.

This from Slate: “A FEMA study in early 2001 pegged a hurricane in New Orleans as one of the three biggest catastrophes that might strike the United States (the others were an earthquake in San Francisco and a terrorist attack in New York).” [emphasis mine]

Look, a terrorist attack in New York… check. Hurricane in New Orleans… check. Earthquake in San Francisco… oh pish posh, that’ll never happen. “It’s not a question of if but when” is the same thing they say about a meteor; it’s a bunch of alarmist rubbish. *ahem* Don’t let the fucking mythocrats tell you otherwise. We need to start preparing now.

We need a comprehensive disaster relief plan. If our water system is destroyed in an earthquake, how are we going to put out fires? If our highways are destroyed, how can we evacuate people? What happens if our bridges fail? What will happen to oil prices? San Francisco is an important port, just like New Orleans; what will happen to the economy? If our cops can’t keep order, how will we get the military in? We need a Plan B if Plan A fails. We need Plan C’s and Plan D’s, and so forth.

We need to urge Mayor Newsom to start launching an investigation NOW. If you want thousands of lives to be saved, we need to start planning NOW.

The federal level stuff, now that’s the stuff I need to pick apart before I can issue suggestions.

This city planning needs to be done NOW. We need some type of letter campaign.

Turn on the TV, and there’s so much bullshit going on about New Orleans it makes me want to vomit.

I don’t want to try to “debunk” any of it because doing that only adds to the noise. Some of what they’re saying is true, and some of what they’re saying is false. The problem is, these people are just angry talking heads who have no regard for the truth. They just want people to blame, and everyone picks their own demons: Bush, global warming, racism, class warfare, New Orleans government, Iraq, etc.

Let’s take time to frame the situation rationally. I’m not going to talk about what’s going on now, or what we should do now. There are too many people doing that. Let’s try to think rationally about what went wrong. The problem was we didn’t react quick enough.

Why? I can only take this apart piece by piece before putting it together.

Obviously, one of the factors is money. Money that should’ve went to FEMA went elsewhere.

Another factor is the magnitude of the disaster. Sure, we had hurricanes in Florida. However, we have an entire city under water. The infrastructure is completely destroyed.

Lack of foresight is important. There should’ve been some type of plan to deal with this before it happened. Plan A, plan B. Plan A is fix the levees before the hurricane happens. Plan B should be plan for evacuation and relief, not whine about how Plan A isn’t happening. Obviously, there wasn’t some type of plan created before hand, lest this scale of disaster would not have occured.

Now, there are different levels of planning required. There are city responsibilities, and federal responsibilities. Neither of these got done. Federal responsibilities I addressed earlier: Money for FEMA went elsewhere. But there is something else I need to address: The Department of Homeland Security. It seems to me that the current organization of the department of homeland security has made us less secure. More bureaucracy means things happen more slowly. We need to separate the jobs of dealing with natural disasters and dealing with terrorist attacks. The old FEMA director had a spot on the cabinet. Would things have happened differently if we didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security? It’s hard to say, but I think the answer is yes. A man with a direct line to the president can interrupt him during his vacation and say things need to be done.

Well, that’s all I have for tonight. More piece by piece tomorrow. I’ll be putting it all together when I’m done picking it apart.

When I put something in the microwave, it’s done in 60 seconds. When I turn on my computer, I get instant news. We live in an accelerating world.

Unfortunately, rebuilding an entire city takes time. Disaster relief takes time. The mythocracy likes to make you think that if they were in power, they could solve all the world’s powers just like that. They couldn’t have averted the hurricane. They didn’t cry and cry for preparing New Orleans for this disaster, and yet they say that everyone saw it coming. Some want to completely crush the looters with guns and tanks; some want to let the looters run free. Neither of those are perfect solutions.

This isn’t SimDisasterRelief. You armchair mythmakers probably couldn’t do a better job than FEMA is doing now. The world runs in real-time. Anything you say that should be done takes time and money. Real time, real money. That being said, there could have been better preparation for the disaster. But where were you hindsight geniuses before the disaster?

Some of them proclaim doom, saying oil prices will destroy us. I don’t think the international community would let them happen. It wouldn’t only affect the US, so we will see foreign aid. However, the choke point is refineries. It doesn’t matter how much oil we get if we can’t refine it.

There’s a certain amount of cruel irony in this situation. We were trying to guard ourselves against another 9/11, and instead we got hit by a hurricane. Funds that should’ve went to FEMA went to Iraq. The Department of Homeland Security focuses on terror, not natural disasters. Net result: America is less safe.

A doctrine of preventative war will bankrupt us. We won’t have money to deal with other real problems. In the end, it’s a net loss.

I’ve decided to post the latest Chalkboard Manifesto comics on this weblog. Here’s today’s!

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Is it just me, or is cynicism starting to become the status quo? Crap. Now what do I do with a name like “Agnoiologist” for my weblog?

Maybe I’ll go for humility. The study of human stupidity — including my own. That’s the ticket.

Are humans inherently good or evil? No. Let’s break it down. Are humans inherently good? Yes. Are humans inherently evil? Yes. All humans are both inherently good and evil.

Does it make sense any other way? If we were all inherently good, then why is there evil in the world? Why is there suffering? Why do some people choose to harm others? Why do some people choose to act selfishly?

The same applies if we are all inherently evil. If we are, then why do have tendencies to do good? Why do morals and ethics exist in every society? Why are there some people who choose good, like Gandhi?

I can only conclude that to be human is to be simultaneously inherently good and evil.

The story doesn’t end there. That means to be good, one must continually fight the evil within himself. It takes effort to be good; it takes suffering to be good. However, the most important thing is that to be good, it requires one to choose good.

I like this quote from this article, UK rejects Iraq link to London bombs, seeks new law:

“I think that people who think that terrorists pick and choose discriminately don’t understand how it works. The United States had done nothing on September 11 when it (the attack on America) was done,” Rumsfeld said.

I write down little snippet thingies that come to my mind on Post-Its. Often, it doesn’t even reflect my belief. It just sounds interesting, so I write it down. Here’s something I wrote yesterday:

“They say life is a gift, a blessing, but it is a curse, and you best treat it as such.”

I heard an advertisement for The Situation with Tucker Carlson on the radio. It featured a guy with “News ADD.” As if the common man should be afflicted by this! As if this is something to be proud of?! Oh woe, what has our society come to? Can the news only be digested in 10 second segments? Does it become stale before you can finish uttering the headline? Has no one the attention span to care?

Nay, if you actually know something, you’re boring. The American people want conflict/drama — bold declarations, not debate. You can’t afford to be convinced of anything in this country anymore. If you aren’t perfectly right from the beginning, you’re a flip flopper, you’re a horrible person with no convictions, no morals, no backbone. The Americans value the truth. They just won’t pay/vote for it.

Well, fuck your societal pseudo-disease.

I’m the last person to be a conspiracy-mongerer. Well, unless you count my sarcastic conspiracies, but this one is far from sarcastic, I tell you.

On all lights where they put cameras, they decrease the time of the yellow light. They put a camera up, and make the yellow light shorter, so the city can make more money. It’s true! I’m sure of it! Don’t even bother trying to run the yellow light. You won’t make it.

And so, the camera intersections are more dangerous because of this.

That leaves two things to do. One: Get the crash statistics on intersections with cameras versus intersections without cameras. Two: Time the yellow lights. I wonder if there’s a law about how long they’re supposed to be. If they aren’t as long as they’re supposed to be, can the city be sued?

Oops, did it again with my latest entry. Had more fun with rhetoric, and didn’t really care about reason. If people aren’t paying attention, they can be swayed by really shoddy reasoning. That’s an argument against real-time opinion gathering…

Imagine a debate between two presidential candidates. Imagine a TV with full interactivity. Imagine the candidates being judged in real-time by the people, with bar graphs in the corner of your screen. One candidate tells a lie. The people don’t know. It’s a real zinger, and the approval shows in the graphs.

Usually, you don’t even have to resort to lying. The way you frame an argument can totally confound an opponent, even if your argument wouldn’t make sense under further scrutiny.

So, further scrutiny. That’s one thing the world just has too little of. With the faster news cycles, there’s no time to analyze anything anymore. You post your opinion right away before the news story becomes stale. As a result, your opinion is not as solid as it could be. You miss a lot in order to get a point across.

Of course, no one cares, the debate dies before it can be resolved because another debate arises too quickly. Nothing ever gets solved anymore.

Must we agree to disagree? Then, how does the world move forward? You convince enough people to your side to overpower the other?

“It’s all about perception.” That’s one of my guiding Post-It notes. Does it even matter if I resort to rhetoric instead of reason? Do people care?

Well, I care. This weblog is a medium for experimentation and self-improvement. If I make a mistake, I’ll call myself out on it and make changes. Even if the news story is stale.

I’m wondering how I should go about things now. Should I hold off with my opinions, form them, revise, and then finally post? Or, should this process be transparent? Should I engage in a debate with myself?

This is a weblog. A place for experimentation. The first option I’ve done for years: It’s called an essay.

Let’s see what’s behind door number two.

I often cannot make my argument as strong as I would like. In this particular case, instead of rewriting my entire old entry [add link later], I would like to add an extension. What I wrote is still valid, it just needs reinforcement. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t call this “Part II”, but whatever.

And now, for something completely different… just kidding:

Let’s consider the case of the faked Bush Guard memos. I wrote this back in 2004, “When the errors were pointed out so quickly online, you have to wonder how much they really looked into the authenticity of these documents…”

Back then, I wrote it really caustically, implying that it was perhaps done with more vicious motives. I now have a different outlook. I tend to agree with this line from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we supose.” Thus, I question the validity of my previous implied allegations.

Still, the line does raise a valid point, if you ignore the tone. How much did they really look into the authenticity of those documents? Of course, the answer is “not very much,” otherwise, they would’ve figured out that they were fakes and never aired them in the first place. Well, this does leave two possibilities. Either they intentionally aired fake memos, or they did it unintentionally.

Humor me for a second if you believe the former, as this is important information and may still be valid even if they did post fake memos on purpose. The next logical question to ask, if you believe it was unintentional, is “How could they have done this?” Well, this Dan Rather trusted the producer, the producer trusted the lower-downs (as opposed to higher-ups), etc, etc, random people tossed in here and there, another etc. I guess the real question is, “Why didn’t anyone question this?”

If you believe it was unintentional, the only explanation is media bias. For the people of CBS, this memo confirmed what they thought had to be true about Bush. They believed he hadn’t finished his Guard service and that there was a cover-up. The problem in this memo scandal is that they didn’t even think to question the validity of these documents.

Therein lies the problem of media bias, even if you think Rather did it on purpose or even if you think Karl Rove planted the memos. The problem is a cocooning effect. Certain assumptions are made and never questioned. It seems like it should be true, so they post it. The problem runs to the left and the right: Koranic abuse, well, it fits the pattern with Abu Ghraib, let’s post the news story based on one anonymous source at the Pentagon speculating about what may be in a future report; Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda, yeah, let’s air it.

The issue of media bias is important for the long-term viability of news organizations. 60 Minutes II went off the air due to ratings issues. There’s no doubt in my mind that these ratings issues can be partly attributed to the memo scandal. With bias, it’s more likely that someone will slip-up, and bam, there’s goes the trust, and bam, there goes your audience. Guess what? People aren’t trusting the media as much as they used to. It’s not some hypothetical scenario… it’s already happening.

And so, the reasoning behind a more balanced hiring scheme is revealed. I can now better explain my last paragraph of the previous entry. The hiring of liberals and conservatives will create a culture of skepticism that would not exist otherwise. The risk of another memo scandal is reduced. Certain things trigger alarm bells in some people’s heads, like those headlines in my case. A culture of skepticism reduces the risk of this. The people working for you will have alarm bells go off in their heads, and things can be fixed.

Certainly, some things will slip through the cracks. But that’s no excuse to leave things the way they are. When it’s more balanced, things will slip through left cracks and right cracks. The allegations of systematic bias will be less sticky because they’re less true. Less alarm bells will go off in weblogger’s minds. The meme of media bias will begin to die out in the blogosphere. Trust goes up. Sales won’t slump as much. And you can go back to writing your sensational headlines without me complaining about them.

[Note: add in links to previous entries]