Double Fault
Ok…we’re back online. District 30 and it’s server were having issues. Unfortunately, they were not the type that could be resolved by moi from thousands of miles away. A shame, too, because there was a lot to blog about this week.
Re-lo and defense contracts
Hot on the heels of a couple of posts defending corporations when they relocate, the corporation I work for announced they were relocating most of the Denver-based workforce including my job. You like apples?
Luckily, I have been offered to keep my job, providing I move to another company location (Siberia, in the sense that only a few other people out of 200 or so will also relocate there). But obviously I could stay and attempt to find work for another company in Denver, too. And, as if my decision, I now have people in two camps: those who want me to move and those who want me to try to find a job in Denver.
Now, Denver, it seems, is a friendly place for several types of companies, one of those being Defense Contractors. (I hesitate here–the term seems to me to be a bit misleading. While some of the inventions thought up in the halls of the Defense Contractors are surely defensive, others, and perhaps the most prominent ones, are clearly not. Now perhaps you could make the argument that just owning such inventions is a deterrent to attack from others. Nonetheless, it does not seem apt to categorize a company that builds devices to be used in war as a Defense Contractor.) Some have suggested that I could work for one of these companies. It’s tough to say, “Well, I don’t believe in what they do,” because someone is going to come back and remind you that we all owe our freedom to the existence of the very innovations in which such companies specialize. But it all seems like such a waste. (In fact I wrote my very first post on this topic.)
I thought this monologue from Good Will Hunting serves my point.
WILL
Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? That’s a tough one. But I’ll take a shot. Say I’m working at the NSA, and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I’m real happy with myself because I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East, and once they have that location they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding, 1500 people that I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are saying “oh, send in the Marines to secure the area,” ’cause they don’t give a shit, it won’t be their kid over there getting shot just like it wasn’t them when there number was called because they were off pulling a tour in the National Guard. It’ll be some kid from Southie over there taking shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from and the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job ’cause he’ll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price, and o’ course the oil companies use the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices (a cute little ancillary benefit for them), but it ain’t helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They’re taking their sweet time bringing the oil back o’ course, maybe they even took the liberty o’ hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fucking play slalom with the icebergs. It ain’t too long till he hits one, spills the oil, and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy’s out of work, he can’t afford to drive so he’s walking to the fucking job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he’s starving because every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they’re serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I’m holding out for something better. I figure, fuck it, while I’m at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.
(After I spent all this time transcribing it, I see that it’s already been done and is posted on IMDB. But the fun part is, as I type this, IMDB has a headline about the movie Why We Fight which mentions Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech. It brings the topic close to full circle.)
Public Airwaves S.O.S.
The Denver Post’s radio and TV columnist takes a look at the demise of a radio station.
Not that we needed any more proof of the industry’s propensity toward sameness. It’s disappointing that a radio station could go off the air because it is ranked 20th in the #22 market, especially when it’s replaced with one of the whopping four varieties of music in the market (those being tired old “alternative”, tired old “classic rock”, Latino and country.) It’s even more disheartening when you realize the sameness largely covers the non-profit end of the dial as well. One self-proclaimed jazz station does occasionally play music along the general lines of what the departed R&B station played, as well as blues and Latino made accessible to the non-Spanish speaker. But your chances of finding an FM station playing music from any other genre that you haven’t heard often enough to sing along with (if you’re not too busy changing the dial) are next to null. (And music companies wonder why CD sales are flagging.) Things are slightly better in Boulder (if you like non-commercial country or heavily playlisted college rock.)
One imagines a scenario in which the portion of the population that actually wants to hear Message in a Bottle for the 101st time listens to one of the 50 stations that play it every other hour and broadcasters wonder why they can’t get their listenership any higher.
Maybe when I get my bill for satellite radio I should send it to CBS radio.
DeLay’s adversaries
Plenty of people are counting DeLay’s decision to step down as a victory for Democrats. The left should be careful in celebrating–it’s not as if their politicians are immune from shady dealings with lobbyists.
But that’s neither here nor there. More frightening is that, in his comments to fellow Republicans, DeLay suggests that their “adversaries” are trying to “divide and distract” House Republicans. Adversaries meaning the left. What a very unpolitical thing to say. Do we really want a guy who can’t even pretend to want to work with others to help lead our country?
