Halloween Updates

• Off the bat, this is something that you should try not to hang from public trees.

• Halloween officially has an anthem and it's about time.
  
  Featuring weirdos like David Cross, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's, Beck and Arcade Fire, "Do They It's Halloween" is not exactly Ashlee Simpson or the Destiny's Child Christmas album.
  
  Originating as the indie parody and response to the condescension of Bob Geldof's first-world holiday pity song "Do They Know It's Christmas," "Do They Know It's Halloween" is a goofy and fully self-aware send-up of the horribly un-self-aware original.

Snitch of the Week: 10/22 - 10/29

(Anonymous Wal-Mart employee)

Following the success of last week's Snitch of the Week feature, it's only right that there be a follow-up.

Wal-Mart, my least favorite, multinational, publicly-traded corporation caused a lot of confusion recently when they lowered the price for workers to participate in the company's health care plan, demanded that Congress raise the nation's minimum wage and vowed to switch to renewable energy sources.

Of course Wal-Mart employees still have a $1,000 deductible, (which is a large percentage of the $18K the average full-time Wal-Mart employee makes) a minimum wage increase helps the buying power of their customers and the environmental pledge seems like an image ploy. But it was still oddly positive for Wal-Mart.

Proud Wal-Mart haters such as myself, had to pause with concern. Where to direct my unabated hate for Wal-Mart? Where is the Wal-Mart I used to know?

The one that used child labor, chained its doors to prevent workers from taking breaks at night and helped spread horrible country boy bands with its $7.88 Lonestar CDs?

Well the answer is they didn't go anywhere.

An internal memo (PDF link) leaked to Walmartwatch.com by an anonymous Wal-Mart insider, detailed how the company plans to the lower their health insurance costs after the seemingly benevolent move of lowering the price for its health care plan.

By making everyone do hard physical labor, from the obese check-out clerks to the elderly clean up lady, they aim to discourage the weak and the sick from applying. They have other old school evil tricks to cut costs as well as some positive ideas, such as increasing discounts on health foods (not a bad idea at all)

Besides Wal-Mart being evil, the deeper issue here is the American health care system. People are getting older, fatter and sicker and your job doesn't want to pay for it anymore. While Wal-Mart's approach wasn't the slickest one possible, it underscores an ugly reality more and more Americans will have to face as we compete internationally for jobs with countries they will pay health care.

Anonymous Wal-Mart employee, we here at Start Snitching commend you for outing Wal-Mart's bullshit PR campaign and hopefully bringing health care into the American discussion.

Today sucks (for India mostly)

While my personal day is going alright, the larger world is having a rough time as evinced by my BBC home page.

As if the currently ignored India/Pakistan earthquake wasn't doing enough damage to the region, terrorist bombings killed at least 50 in India.

And if that all that wasn't enough a train derailed in India killing over a 100 travellers as they were en route to celebrate Diwali.

Oh, and some stuff blew up in Iraq.

Kinda makes the 40 degree weather a little more bearable.

1998, 1999, 2000...

(With no shortage in sight)

In one of the more macabre countdowns of recent times, the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq has officially passed 2000 (there is talk that the Department of Defense only counts those who die in the Middle East and many more are flown out to later succumb from fatal wounds, but aren't counted as official casualties.)

With the presidential ban of coffins in the news still in effect and the concentration of death located out of the sight of the large city media centers, namely rural America; the human cost of the war is largely unknown and intangible to most. For many, the only connection is a number. With no personal ties to the military, I have tracked several sites out of curiosity. The best are Anti-War Casualties and ICasualties. With constant stream of bad news it's hard to avoid the feeling that these numbers become akin to baseball statistics.

For example, the rate it took to 18 months to get to the first 1,000; compared to 14 months for the second 1,000.

Marines disproportionately make up the most deaths.

More white soldiers died in the second thousand than the first as Blacks flee from the idea of military life at a faster rate than whites. As recruitment numbers for Blacks fall the percentage of Blacks in the military begins to reflect their real world percentage. Etc.

The liberals hype up the numbers to force awareness. There were a bunch of white activists at the Flatbush Ave. station yesterday, engaging angry Jamaican women with a banner about the Iraqi civilians (bore-ring) casualties who have no official death count and civilian casualties ranging from 10,000 to 100,000)

The conservatives cry foul, because the obsession with numbers bypasses the humanity of the losses. That is only true when there are other means to express the loss. The attempt to ban Ted Koppel of Nightline from reading the names of the war dead read last year and the fact that Americans cannot see the soldier's coffins on the news shows otherwise. These realities mean that numbers are the only way to capture a fickle American audience. That's why the death of 1,372 or even 1,500 soldiers weren’t a news story.

Like the $3.00 gallon or the 10,000 Dow Jones Average, the 2,000 casualty toll will lose its urgency as the weeks past. As with all psychological barriers, once they are broken, they lose their sense of shock and awe, so to speak.

Don't despair; the countdown to 3,000 has already begun.

And the counter is already up to 2006.
2007, 2008, 2009...

That's that chick from the Outkast video! Right?!

Rosa Parks, or that lady who did that bus thing and had the Outkast song named after her, passed away on Monday at the age of 92.

Fifty years after her personal stand got real public, there is very little to add to the story. However there are two things that are particularly interesting about her life that stand out.

• She did not boldly sit in the "white" section of the bus. She was in the "colored" section of the bus and was ordered to go further to the back and stand in the back so a white person could take her seat. The recap is here. Maybe the Barbershop joke that sparked so much controversy wasn't so wrong.
  
  
• She was robbed in August 1994 by an "African-American youth" as the article puts it. I would use another term.

This second incident is so perversely ironic and indicative of the state of the modern Civil Rights Movement, which is sadly, but honestly, dead.

Blacks have lost all perspective of their historic efforts and achievements. The Civil Rights Movement has been relegated to ancient history. There are people still alive who have survived lynchings.

Segragation doesn't need to be illegal, it has circumvented the law and manifested itself through economic reality and unspoken winks and nods between school boards, governments and surburbia. You're lucky if you still see that one black kid in the class anymore (if you're wondering, I was him. Chris Rock feels me.)

At my old high school's football game this year, there was not one black player on the team. I found out the Black percentage decreased from 5% when I was there to about 3% now. If you don't have enough black people in your school to get one on the football, you have problems.

Perspective time

• In 1955, after refusing to give up her seat, Rosa Parks received death threats for months on end.
  
  
• In 2005, after marrying a white woman Taye Diggs and his wife, Idina Menzel, receive racist death threats threatening castration and other forms of unpleasantness.
  
  
• Increasing in logic, bi-racial Derek Jeter receives racist hate mail, last September, telling him to stop betraying his race by dating white women (you can't blame him though, it worked out pretty well for his dad.)

It's good to see we're going in the right direction.

What took so long?

Coming just in time for the holiday season, but a little too late for me, the iBelieve Shuffle case runs $12.95 for one and supposedly $2 from each sale goes to charity.
When Apple Computers became a charity, I'm not sure.

Alway humble, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, simply asked for a S to be added at the end of the Book of Job.

I got dirt on you doggy!!!

In an textbook example of "Watch what you name yourself," Killa Cam was almost the killee near a nightclub in D.C. this weekend. Refusing to give up his (pink?)



Lamborghini to a car jacker (what means the world to you...) he was shot through both arms as he sped off. What the hell kind of JFK magic bullet that was able to do this, I have no idea.

Luckily, Cam'ron recovered quickly so there is still a chance he will drop more nuggets of wisdom on the world, similar to those he dropped on Bill O'Reilly in this classic clip (Windows Media Player link.)

After a quick recovery, Cam'ron was released and on his way out the hospital he said to the news cameras, "It was a sloppy job."

So all you interpid carjackers out there, get your shit straight.

It's

1. Pistol whip driver that fool while he's talking slick on his Sidekick
2. Snatch out the driver, preferably through the window as Camron did in "Paid In Full"
3. Drive away

Don't ask them to get out, Killa Cam could have told you this.

Snitch of the Week (and that's a good thing)

On Thursday, 10/20, Marty J. Bahamonde, the only FEMA official in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, testified to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about his attempts to alert his superiors about the immediacy of the situation escalating in New Orleans.

Mr. Bahamonde also refuted prior testimony by former FEMA director, Michael Brown in which Brown stated that a dozen agency employees were in New Orleans before the storm, including an emergency response team.

Bahamonde's testimony was not disputed by anyone at the Department of Homeland Security.

Bahamonde warned that hospitals were running out of oxygen and tried to get various officials to take the growing crisis seriously. He was ignored until he decided to email FEMA head, Michael Brown directly.

His email read,

"I know you know, the situation is past critical, hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water."

Too busy ignoring the Superdome chaos, an aide of Brownie managed to respond hours later saying, "... the director would need a restaurant in Baton Rouge that night. It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner."

For your honest and straight-forward testimony in our current environment of responsibility shifting and pathetic dissembly, we here at Start Snitching, honor you with our first ever Snitch of the Week award.

Droppin' knowledge

I passed on this gem of tech news to Engadget today.

It won't be long before I steal all of their interweb traffic.

Tell the blogosphere to stay alert.

Start Snitching is coming up.

Hop it, take the other 50% off

No sooner than the MTA announced plans to reduce fares for the holiday season they have been hit with criticism over their seemingly generous fare cuts. They are hoping the reduced fares will ease traffic during the holiday season (we all know how smoothly the MTA runs during rush hour) and that commuters would rather line the coffers of the crooked MTA rather than those of crooked Arab nations through gas prices.

Everyone in New York as well as all the non-taxi using tourists can tell you the MTA is garbage. From unexplained train shutdowns at Times Square, never-ending weekend construction to small families of mice playing beneath my bench and Christian women throwing Bibles at you, it's hard to commute in peace.

The MTA has already started to turn me into a savage. I literally hand-checked some short Mexican bitch who thought I was the person in the bus line she should cut not too long after I got into a verbal argument with what may have been a junior high school girl who decided that resting her head on my hand was a good idea.

When I heard first heard of the half-price plan I thought the fare was going down to $ 0.75 because I still haven't gotten over the fare raise from $1.50. Dammit, I still remember when fares were $1 and the paper passes from school. I helped lay the tracks for the 2/5 line dammit. That's how old-school I am.

Fare reductions are deserved and well-earned for the unexplainable inflation in price paired with the degradation of service. But I trust the MTA like I trust that trenchcoat dude in Macy's trying to sell me his own watches. No one should forget the debacle where they raised fares claiming to be in debt, only to have revealed, another set of accounting books showing a large surplus.

Reducing the fare over the holiday is short sighted solution and generally stupid. It's your typical MTA solution. I'm not sure if it's a Bloomberg ploy to generate some goodwill in his direction following his failed Jets Stadium bid, but it solves nothing and using the gift of foresight, it will probably make things work. The MTA still forsees debt in its upcoming budget years and has plans to raise fares in 2007 and 2009.

Good idea or bad idea, please believe I will be in line to buy the 40 day $76 pass on November 23.

Damn homie

Thomas Friedman is a decent columnist for the NY Times who pretty much nailed the reason why countries shouldn't run other countries unless their country is perfect.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 19, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 (Iraq News Agency) - A delegation of Iraqi judges and journalists abruptly left the U.S. today, cutting short its visit to study the workings of American democracy. A delegation spokesman said the Iraqis were "bewildered" by some of the behavior of the Bush administration and felt it was best to limit their exposure to the U.S. system at this time, when Iraq is taking its first baby steps toward democracy.

The lead Iraqi delegate, Muhammad Mithaqi, a noted secular Sunni judge who had recently survived an assassination attempt by Islamist radicals, said that he was stunned when he heard President Bush telling Republicans that one reason they should support Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court was because of "her religion." She is described as a devout evangelical Christian.

Mithaqi said that after two years of being lectured to by U.S. diplomats in Baghdad about the need to separate "mosque from state" in the new Iraq, he was also floored to read that the former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, now a law school dean, said on the radio show of the conservative James Dobson that Miers deserved support because she was "a very, very strong Christian [who] should be a source of great comfort and assistance to people in the households of faith around the country."

"Now let me get this straight," Judge Mithaqi said. "You are lecturing us about keeping religion out of politics, and then your own president and conservative legal scholars go and tell your public to endorse Miers as a Supreme Court justice because she is an evangelical Christian.
"How would you feel if you picked up your newspapers next week and read that the president of Iraq justified the appointment of an Iraqi Supreme Court justice by telling Iraqis: 'Don't pay attention to his lack of legal expertise. Pay attention to the fact that he is a Muslim fundamentalist and prays at a Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosque.' Is that the Iraq you sent your sons to build and to die for? I don't think so. We can't have our people exposed to such talk."
A fellow delegation member, Abdul Wahab al-Unfi, a Shiite lawyer who walks with a limp today as a result of torture in a Saddam prison, said he did not want to spend another day in Washington after listening to the Bush team defend its right to use torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfi said he was heartened by the fact that the Senate voted 90 to 9 to ban U.S. torture of military prisoners. But he said he was depressed by reports that the White House might veto the bill because of that amendment, which would ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of P.O.W.'s.

"I survived eight years of torture under Saddam," Unfi said. "Virtually every extended family in Iraq has someone who was tortured or killed in a Baathist prison. Yet, already, more than 100 prisoners of war have died in U.S. custody. How is that possible from the greatest democracy in the world? There must be no place for torture in the future Iraq. We are going home now because I don't want our delegation corrupted by all this American right-to-torture talk."
Finally, the delegation member Sahaf al-Sahafi, editor of one of Iraq's new newspapers, said he wanted to go home after watching a televised videoconference last Thursday between soldiers in Iraq and President Bush. The soldiers, 10 Americans and an Iraqi, were coached by a Pentagon aide on how to respond to Mr. Bush.

"I had nightmares watching this," Sahafi said. "It was right from the Saddam playbook. I was particularly upset to hear the Iraqi sergeant major, Akeel Shakir Nasser, tell Mr. Bush: 'Thank you very much for everything. I like you.' It was exactly the kind of staged encounter that Saddam used to have with his troops."

Sahafi said he was also floored to see the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that works for Congress, declare that a Bush administration contract that paid Armstrong Williams, a supposedly independent commentator, to promote Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind policy constituted illegal propaganda - an attempt by the government to buy good press.

"Saddam bought and paid journalists all over the Arab world," Sahafi said. "It makes me sick to see even a drop of that in America."

By coincidence, the Iraqi delegates departed Washington just as the Bush aide Karen Hughes returned from the Middle East. Her trip was aimed at improving America's image among Muslims by giving them a more accurate view of America and President Bush. She said, "The more they know about us, the more they will like us."

(Yes, all of this is a fake news story. I just wish that it weren't so true.)

Yehaa for Yahoo!

In the Bloods vs. Crips battle of internet search engines I ride with Google over Yahoo any day of the week.

However Yahoo! has a new service (new as in I just found from my boy) that has me switching colors, at least temporarily.

I knew Yahoo! did the radio thing but I didn't know it could be personalized and had such a good variety of music.

You login here with your Yahoo! ID and choose what genres and artists you like. Be sure to allow explicit content and whether you want a detailed 0-100 point scale or simple 0-4 star system.

It will then play songs based on what artists and genres were selected, trying to match your tastes. Tell it what songs, artist and albums you like or never want to hear again. I almost slapped my computer off my desk when it tried to play Musiq Soulchild and Smashmouth. After a day or two of tweaking it will get it right and throws new music into the mix.

Where else can you get Rush, Marvin Gaye and the Motown gang, Elephant Man, Pearl Jam and Mint Condition's 3 good songs?

In typical Yahoo! fashion something is wrong, it only works in Internet Explorer and the display occasionally freezes, but it still saves me from having to rip my entire CD collection and putting Windows Media Player on random.

Throw yo Y's up, for now.

37 years ago today

In 1968, almost halfway through the Vietnam War and slap dab in the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two track athletes, decided to say something at the Olympics.

They were banned for life.

Surprisingly, Peter Norman, the seemingly frightened white dude on the left, wore an Olympics Project for Human Rights Badge in support of their cause.

He was not banned.