Cleansing the Gene Pool

There seems little doubt that the gene pool needs a little cleansing now and again.  This assertion can be affirmed countless times as we traverse life’s roads and observe the idiots among us.

On my appointed rounds Friday, I observed what I believe to be one of the better examples of how some people should not breed, lest their substandard genes be transmitted to another generation.

I was headed south on Seminole Highway, which is more of a street than a highway, and has no real connection that I can determine with the native American tribe which originated in Florida and now mainly resides in Oklahoma.

Several hundred feet ahead of me in the oncoming lane was a young man on a motorcycle.  I don’t know a lot about cycles, but I could tell it was smaller than the Harley-Davidson machines I know a bit about, but larger than the scooters that one encounters frequently in the campus area.

I could see the young man did not have on a helmet; his choice; I’m not here to preach about wearing helmets.  I could see the cycle drifting slowly toward the center line.  As we closed to within a few hundred feet of each other, I could see the young man had no hands on the handlebars and seemed to be concentrating on something he held in his hands.

Frequent readers of this blog know that my daily-driver is a huge, foreign-made, gas-sucking SUV, not at all a fair match for a cycle.  My behemoth tips the scales at 4,960 pounds with half a talk of gas and nobody aboard, so I’m at least two-and-a-half tons, approaching approximately 500 pounds (guessing 350 for the bike and 150 for the rider) at a closing rate of around 60 mph.  So, I slowed and steered right as the bike, now less than a hundred feet away, continued to drift toward me.

I got far enough to my right to insure there would be no experiment in the physics of the collision of inelastic objects, and as cycle-boy passed me, with his head still down, I could clearly see that he was texting.

It won’t be long and this moron will be cleansed from the gene pool.

...beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

My friend, Tom Bier, Station Manager at Channel 3 in Madison, gives a compelling presentation regarding broadcast news to various civic groups and assemblies. Every time there’s a trial like the recently-concluded Casey Anthony trial, I think of Tom’s presentation, when he’s talking about covering high-profile trials, and after some exposition, asks “so….do you think we should have a law that forbids all media from covering trials until after the verdict is rendered, and then only if the accused is found guilty – show of hands?”

Without fail, just about everyone’s hand goes up. (Tom is great at setting this up, talking about things like “media bias” and “affecting the jury pool”.)

Then, he says, “so, you would have been OK with not seeing or hearing anything about the O. J. Simpson trial – he was found not guilty, you know?”

So it is with the Casey Anthony trial. Somebody killed that darling little girl. And somehow duct tape got on her little face. And her body got wrapped in a garbage bag and tossed into the woods. But all we know for sure is that Casey Anthony’s family defines “dysfunctional”.

There are thousands of murders and murder trials every year in our country. The heinous death of the two little boys in Madison, whose bodies were discovered Wednesday morning,  will not likely be the kind of case that garners national attention, like the case of the “disappearance” of Audrey Seiler a few years back.

A pretty young girl is one of the crucial elements that rockets a case to Nancy Grace level; Anthony’s case also involved an incredibly cute and defenseless little girl; and it had the crucial undertone of sex, with the notorious photos of Casey in a “hot body” contest at a bar and the photos of her partying with her young friends.

It’s not likely we’ll ever know what really happened. Because of the intense coverage for the past three years, we saw and heard things that the jurors may not have. And we did not have to sit in judgment of her, with the literal power of life and death over the troubled young woman.

Somebody killed that little girl. The prosecution’s case wavered; the expert testimony was not the kind of stuff you see on CSI; and, to the jury, it was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Casey did it.

And in America, that’s all that counts.

Uncivil Discourse

What sort of horse’s ass goes on national TV and calls the President of the U.S. a “dick”?  Mark Halperin does.  Now, for a few weeks, Mr. Halperin will have to take his views somewhere other than MSNBC, which almost immediately suspended him for what he said, and moments later issued an apology to the President.

There’s nothing at all unlawful about calling the President of the U.S. or anybody else a dick.  Our Bill of Rights pretty much guarantees that.  But it’s tasteless, disrespectful to the office, and while it’s the kind of thing people say in every-day conversation, it’s still wrong to do it in/on the forum Halperin had at the time.

And please, don’t tell me “oh, sure, he gets suspended for calling Obama a dick, but if he’d called George Bush a dick, nothing would have been done.”  That would be an infantile false-choice comparison.

Nationally-syndicated radio talk show host Neal  Boortz told the folks in Atlanta a couple weeks  ago essentially to start shooting thugs and piling up dead bodies to take back the city; this is the sort of thing you hear up and down the AM radio dial these days,  from nationally-syndicated programs carried on hundreds of stations, to local talk-show hosts on puny stations that only cover a few hundred square miles.

Not too much is capable of shocking us any more, particularly if the name-calling is connected in any way to what passes for political discourse these days.  It seems to be a contest of who can say the most shocking or boorish thing, in what my friend Holland Cooke, the number-one AM radio station consultant in the nation calls “living a consequence-free existence.” 

The most discouraging thing to me is that we continue to reward these dweebs with our attention.

(Copyright owner of the image above is The Ohio State University Alumni Association.)

Black Jesus Cometh

You can feel the calm beginning to descend on Madison. The weather has vastly improved. Spirits seem lifted. There are more smiles on the street. Ice cream sales are on an uptick. Politicians seem more willing to compromise for the common good. The detours because of street and road repair seem tolerable, almost pleasant.

Merchants and small business owners are buoyed, and are beginning to hire again. Gasoline prices are dropping. Everyone seems to be losing weight and looking more trim and fit. Crime is down. Even the Justices of the state Supreme Court are greeting each other pleasantly.

Black Jesus is coming to Madison.

His name is Russell Wilson. He stands an inch short of six feet tall; weighs a pound more than 200. He passed for three thousand, five-hundred-sixty-three yards last year for NC State with a completion percentage of 58.4 and has a full year of NCAA eligibility left. And, he can hit a curve ball and field a sharply-hit infield chopper flawlessly.

Judging by the accounts in the public prints and the enthusiastic chatter of local sports broadcasters, anything less than a national championship for the Badgers football team this coming season will be a bitter disappointment.

There’s even a rumor going around that he’s asked Barry Alvarez to tear down that ugly phallic sculpture at the entrance to Camp Randall Stadium, and that Barry, who is now acting interim UW-Madison Chancellor, has quietly let a no-bid contract to a local demolition company to do the job.

Black Jesus is coming and hope is restored. Madison is on the verge of a new era of peace, enlightenment, prosperity, and political accord.

They ALL Have To Go

Our entire state Supreme Court must be impeached and replaced. Not just because of the still-developing news about Justice Prosser physically attacking Justice Bradley and choking her (or, Justice Bradley ramming her throat into Justice Prosser’s hands, if you prefer that spin), but because this latest revelation about the operations of our state’s highest court should become the impetus for the people of Wisconsin to remove all seven of them and consider changing the way we select justices for the highest court.

The state’s highest court has devolved into a politically divided, dysfunctional sitcom which now more closely resembles “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” than “Law and Order.” In short, the court can no longer be trusted to render impartial justice based on law, and every decision made by this court for the past couple years can legitimately be called into question.

The people of our state are probably not aware, at least not yet, of how unprecedented and dangerous it is to have a supreme court composed of two warring political factions, who not only disagree politically, but disagree at such a visceral, personal level, that you’ve got powerful evidence that one of the justices actually physically throttled another, over a disagreement about politics.

Not a disagreement about law, but a disagreement about politics.

Before Justice Prosser’s latest escapade came to light (courtesy of Bill Lueders, in his brand-new job at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism), a story which will continue to make national news this week, there was the unbelievable spectacle of the court’s decision regarding Dane County Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi’s hold on the so-called Budget Repair Bill. The Supremes, in a split decision, said in essence Judge Sumi was wrong. But the minority opinion issued by the highest court said in essence the majority was wrong POLITICALLY, not LEGALLY. BIG difference. HUGE difference.

A few years ago, when Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce purchased a seat on the highest court for Justice Ziegler (the “gut-check” judge) the highest court began drifting toward political partisanship; then when WMC bought a seat for Justice Gableman, full-on partisanship became the rule, and the behavior of the court and the justices descended into public bickering, sniping, and partisanship. This fetid stew of personality clashes was amplified this winter when protests over the budget and the Walker administration boiled over; and this latest revelation about Justice Prosser should serve to push the people of the state closer to not only getting rid of seven of them, but seriously considering how someone becomes a Justice of our state’s highest court.

I don’t know if we should go to merit selection; I don’t know if we should just dump all seven of them and start from scratch; but I do know this: this state Supreme Court is fatally and permanently flawed, and it’s time to start having serious discussions at every level about doing something about it.

Ma Bell Strikes Again

A couple or five decades ago, before the advent of microwave relay towers in the 70’s and satellite delivery in the 80’s and the dawn of the internet in the 90’s, most television and radio network programming was delivered by AT+T Long Lines, not affectionately known in the broadcast industry as “Ma Bell”. If your local radio station wanted to follow the home team on the road, they arranged through the Bell System’s local Toll Test Boards to have a telephone line (“Class D loop”) dropped at the ball park, arena, or field where the sporting event took place, and the announcers hooked their equipment up to the phone line and fed the play-by-play to the local station that way.

Stay with me, folks. I’m going somewhere with this.

Needless to say, since Ma Bell had no competition back then, AT+T was not really a very customer-friendly business. An aggressive congress broke up the huge conglomerate in the 80’s, giving birth to the “baby bells” which served large regions of the nation. Then microwave took over, then satellite delivery took over, and then the internet made things go so topsy-turvy that today, we have only a small group of giant “telephone companies” – and we’re back to where we started.

Enter the politicians.

A couple years back, AT+T wrote a dandy new telecommunications law for Wisconsin, and the politicians copied and pasted it into Bill form, passed it, and the guv signed it. The pols promised a new era of cable and phone competition, with vastly wider choices and “competition” which would force prices lower and lower every year and elevate customer service to a new and fabulous high.

We all know how THAT worked out.

A few weeks ago, the dweebs tried to do AT+T another big favor, by essentially killing WISC-NET. For those who don’t follow closely, WISC-NET is one of these UW entities that provides broadband cable access to rural areas of the state (sort of like that “Wisconsin Idea” thingy they talk about once in a while). The “premise” (under what passes for thinking up there these days) was that AT+T could FAR better serve these rural folks, and, by gum, why would you want a gubbmint operation takin’ away all that potential bizness from a good ole’ private-sektor company like AT+T??? Damn, you’re taking bread out of the mouths of the babies of AT+T employees!!!!

The thing is, that anyone who’s ever sat down and looked into it for one minute has discovered, is that AT+T….or insert the name of any other giant telecommunications company here…is able to cherry-pick the neighborhoods it “builds out” into, and that’s why the folks out in the sticks don’t have broadband internet.

Wanna get AT+T U-verse? Fine, if you live in the right neighborhood of Madison. Not in MY neighborhood, though. I live in ZIP code 53713, but not the RIGHT part of 53713, and the last time I asked AT+T when they planned to deliver fibre-optic service to my neighborhood, the answer was “we really don’t have any plans for that right now.” Yes, my small suburban enclave of VERY nice homes and well-manicured lawns is not “desirable” enough for AT+T to “build out”- even though you can get AT+T U-Verse just a mile from my door. Meanwhile, AT+T serves our neighborhood with “twisted copper pairs”, which is essentially 1930’s technology.

If you don’t have broadband internet (and we do, thanks to Charter) you can’t really participate fully in the 21st Century, and that’s why anybody with a head on their shoulders knows that we’ve got to serve our rural communities with broadband internet, and since the good folks at AT+T might have to actually SPEND some money to MAKE some money, they’re not going to do it.

This is the sort of thing GOVERNMENT is good at: making sure all citizens can participate in progress and democracy. Words like that last sentence really piss off the government-hating crowd that’s in power now. WISC-NET, after all, doesn’t “show a profit.” (Don’t get me started.)

It looks like WISC-NET will survive this putsch by the government-hating crowd up there at the top of State Street, which is a good thing. As the old saying goes, even a broken watch is right twice a day.

Keep Your Morality To Yourself

I’m very tired of being told by politicians, TV networks, and busybodies in general, how I should live my life, and how I should feel about others. No, this is not a libertarian rant about getting gubmint outta my life. It’s just a general rant based on the old golden rule, the one about treating people as you’d like to be treated.

This weekend NBC told me how to feel about the Pledge of Allegiance, when they cut out – not once, but twice – the words “under God” from the pledge during some piece they ran during the big golf event Sunday. They heard about it in a hurry, and of course immediately lied to try and cover it up, saying it was inadvertent and unintentional (both times?); but Brian Williams outed the network on Nightly News Monday evening, admitting it was deliberate, and a lapse in judgment by the network.

I’ll make my own judgment about the Pledge; I don’t need NBC to do it for me.

A lot of people…politicians and preachers…keep trying to tell me how I should feel about gay people, and whether they should be “allowed” to form domestic unions. Yesterday, another one of those damnable liberal left-wing Dane County judges told the state legislature how HE felt about it, and he wasn’t too happy with the politicians, and that it was OK for domestic unions to stand in Wisconsin.
Tough day for that Appling woman and her partner. Like old Freddy Phelps, she wants me to hate gay people. Thing is, it’s not gay marriage. That’s what the judge said. But that’s the way the haters always frame it. Gotta keep marriage “safe” for the heteros. (Insert your favorite example here – Arnold, Newt, Brittney, whomever.)

The politicians in the majority party in Wisconsin want to make it impossible to get an abortion here, so they wrote something into the budget bill that says UW Health can’t use “state funds” to teach abortion to medical students. Problem is, UW Health doesn’t receive any “state funds.” That little fact notwithstanding, the pols want to make it impossible for the med students at UW to learn how to do abortions - which are NOT done at UW Hospital, so the young docs are sent over to Planned Parenthood to learn it – OH NO, PLANNED PARENTHOOD!!!!! – and, well, I guess you see behind the curtain now.

Some dweeb who wants to be President says we need to do away with Amtrak because it doesn’t make a profit. Hmmmm….I guess that means we’ll also have to do away with THE ARMED FORCES, because they don’t show a profit. Why is it so many people can’t seem to understand there are so many things critical to our way of life (education, policing, firefighting) which were never intended to “show a profit” and that “government” is not the same as “business”? How’d that work out when we “semi-privatized” the Post Office?

OK, done rambling, done with this unfocused rant. I just had to get this stuff off my chest.