This is Justice?

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The Dallas county Sherrif’s department has seriously disappointed me. I had an article almost ready to post earlier about it, but the browser glitched and swallowed my post. Since then, I’ve seen Michelle Malkin’s post about how the MSM is up to it’s usual tricks. “All the news that’s fitted to print,” indeed. Only this time it’s the WSJ up to no good.

I wanted to reference that post before resuming with the story I saw in the Chronicle for a reason. Journalism, as performed in the mainstream media, is dead. As if the ghoulish maniac in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had gotten a job as a news anchor, the current crop of so-called reporters and editors wear the skin of journalism’s heyday like an ill-fitted trophy. Amidst all the petulant whining about blogs and self-congratulation for the wonderful job they do, they have failed to notice that the reason they’re zombies is that they report like them. Not like people who care about the subjects they are reporting on. Reporting should be half-education. Instead, it’s 100% showmanship. The ratings race and the almighty dollar have helped political and personal bias in the info-tainment industry destroy what’s left of the MSM’s creditability.
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Oh, suck.

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Just got word via e-mail that Mark, a college buddy of mine, died from a sudden heart attack last Saturday. No warning. A mutual friend wrote with the news this morning; he and another friend were at the house when it happened, but Mark was in the bathroom and they had no idea until it was too late.

He was 44.

Disappointing, But True

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Sad to say, my writing is far more like that of Ted Rall than the Bloggledygook (even if I’m his semi-tropical opposite politically). This may explain why I’ve never been Instalanched.

No, the link to Teddy is missing on purpose. I don’t want to be sued by any reader suffering brain damage from clicking on a link to him. Although anyone clicking a link to Ted Rall on purpose is already brain damaged.

HFD: Don’t Call Us

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The Houston Chronicle has an article discussing the HFD Life Safety Bureau. Seems they’ve been letting the city down, by wasting money, not doing key tasks in todays multi-threat world, and apparently, not doing much at all besides routine inspections. [edit: new article with details.]
This isn’t a surprise to me. I had the misfortune to twice deal with HFD. One of those two times was with this very bureau on a subject that it has jurisdiction over. I was not favorably impressed by the fact that the supervisor would not return my calls regarding a matter of interdepartmental cooperation to enhance fire protection and catch scofflaws.

The other time was over an issue that got somewhat political. My office did a report at that time, which combined information from several sources into an aggregate report produced monthly. HFD was requested to provide some information regarding one of their activities in front of City Council, as it pertained to an issue several citizens had brought up. (I’m being deliberately vague, because even though this was under the Lanier administration, I don’t want to encourage someone to go a’ hunting for me). Well, they dug out the report from my office and gave the figure from it, but the person repsonsible for giving it to the council looked at earlier and later versions of the report, and realized that the number didn’t make sense. The issue should have caused a major impact–in fact, the department was telling the council it had a major impact, yet our report was claiming it didn’t.
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Geeks Are Funny

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Seen on a thread about stopping bot swarms from hitting your server over at LGF:

#rm -r /bin/laden *
nuff said!

I’m pretty sure that one’s made the rounds, but it’s still funny.
More:

“Have you heard about the object-oriented way to become wealthy?”
“No…”
“Inheritance.”

—

Unix are internexuals who have had their servers removed.

Where do they come up with this shit?

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Thomas, over at Good Morning Houston gives yet another example of stupid bullshit themes the media produces by linking to an article written by one “Harry Blount” and printed in The Guardian. (Unless it’s really “Harriet” Blount. Wouldn’t surprise me). As if the spectacle of an American presidential candidate candidate for president (I’ll be damned if a fucking traitor will be described as presidential anything, in this blog) describe himself as a “metrosexual” like some limpwristed Frenchman wasn’t enough, now the geniuses that came up with that wiener winner are back:

Marian Salzman, Ira Matathia, and Ann O’Reilly, the trio of trend-spotters who popularised the term “metrosexual” in 2003, think men are going to have to harden up their act if they’re going to stand up to the continued incursion of women into the male sphere.
The feminist victory is complete: women have taken men’s jobs, handed the baby over to them for a cuddle at three in the morning and got them to work child-friendly hours.

The victory is complete? No shit, Sherlock. That’s the only way I can describe it, if men are now taking advice on how to be men from people named Marian, Ira, and Ann. The only one who might be male is Ira, and I have my doubts about him.

Her.

It.

Whatever.

Despite all this training, men remain emotionally crippled. They still talk for a cold, brutal six minutes in the average phone call, while women talk for an empathetically correct 20 minutes.

These idiots have never met my friend Kevin. I’m an old-school guy. The phone is need-to-communicate. Not need-to-talk. Kevin definately disagrees. He’lll call up anytime he’s driving somewhere…. just driving somewhere is too boring, but conversation is entertaining! So it’s my job to chit-chat for 20 minutes until he gets where he’s going. I don’t mind a call now and again, but if I’m in the middle of an online game, there are people waiting on me. Or maybe I was doing something else. (Kevin knows it drives me nuts, and does not do it as much anymore–now that’s a friend!) Does this sound like a cold, brutal, six-minute conversation? Well, if it were up to me, maybe. But that’s the way I am; I don’t like yakking on the phone for the sake of yakking.

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And Another One Rises

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Well, it’s not something to get overly proud of, but I notice that Houblog rocketed up through the rankings once the TTLB servers ran their search. I’m now a Frippery Fish in the Ecosystem, ranked #18,992. Although, thanks to the redirect page being an old file I adapted and it had an old title I forgot to remove…. I show up as “Choices Ahoy!” But if you click on it, you’ll arrive here.

How much is that’s worth? Add $1.09 for a medium Coke at McDonalds, and you’ll have a Coke. Not a lot when you consider that the #1 rank is temporarily some goofball site no one’s ever heard of, with an impossible total # of links.

Technorati still has the same seven links, and the same problem making me show up as Choices Ahoy! The goofy name should fix itself in a few days now that I’ve changed the file, but it remains to be seen what will happen with my rankings and all that. For some reason, my trackbacks are rarely working. I must be doing something wrong….

Edit @10:45pm: First, the Ecosystem’s #1 rank has been fixed, moving everyone up by one. Second, I’ve just added Sitemeter’s tracker, which is set to ignore my own visits. Heh. It would be embarassing to look at it and see only one visit, if I didn’t think it were so funny. Nothing like a dose of humility.

The Ship’s Going Down…

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I saw Serenity this weekend. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a crowded theater. Making barely another $4 mil, Serenity has so far not even made back 50% of it’s cost, which has to be one of the greatest box office crimes of the century.

This movie is everything Sith (and 99% of other so called science fiction) wasn’t. It was paced properly, something few movies seem to be anymore. It was dramatic. It was tense. It was suspensful. It was exciting. It had great acting, a twisty plot (do not fall asleep in the first five minutes!), a unique soundtrack, and characters you learned to love . . . . or fear. You don’t have to have seen the first episode of the series. Personally, I have seen a whopping total of 40 minutes of one. Everything you needed to know about everyone was in the movie, and it never felt like I was being spoon-fed.

What I’m trying to say is, go see this damn movie. If you like any of the following catagories: Drama, Adventure, Horror, Westerns, Action, Comedy, Combat, Science Fiction — you will like this movie. Notice I put Science Fiction last.

What was this movie about? Simple (well, sort of). Take the Magnificent Seven, only have them together for years. Flip the sex of a few of them. Now have them be disillusioned losers of a civil war, operating beyond the edge of the law.

And in posession of something they don’t want, but the government does. Very, very, very badly.

Wash: “This could be interesting.”
Mal: “Define interesting.”
Wash: “Oh God, Oh God, we’re all going to die?”

Don’t wait on a damn DVD.

Miers Some More

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Just got my “Elite Republican” membership card in, much to my surprise. Amazing, and all this time I thought you had to be rich or in business for yourself. But hey, $31k/yr civil servants must be able to make it, since only elites are criticizing Miers, and since I’m criticizing Miers again, I must be an elite, so $31k/yr civil servants. . . Anyway, you get the picture.

So. Is the Republican Party leadershp really this dense? Running away from Porkbusters, bad enough. Sorry, I find recent pretty words by Hastert very unconvincing (of course, this is Novak writing, so he manages to be totally unclear and never mention the blogsphere.). Not sitting Bush down and bitch-slapping him until he shows some freaking sense over Miers is just dumb. Prominent supporters are flip-flopping to oppose her, and Michelle Malkin has got another roundup.

The more Democrats that jump out to defend her, the more I think she should be defeated. After fifty years of approvals (Roberts is the only SCOTUS justice to be approved by a Republican Senate in that long), there is no way in hell I’m going to approve of anyone the Democrats do.

Baytown v. Houston: Two Approaches to Emergency Staffing

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I’ve been planning an article on Baytown’s treatment of its employees who evac’d ahead of Rita for some time. Now word comes today that the City of Houston is also firing employees who left during the emergency. So are there differences between the two? And what are they?

The City of Baytown and its Public Works superintendant Mark LeBlanc have decided to show the peons what it meant to work for the Baron. “Thou shalt be at thy post at all times.” The number of firings now stands at 12 (no, wait, really, it’s only 11) most from the PW dept., but there may have been others. Channel 11 did the usual media
BS, concentrating on one person’s story in order to portray what they wanted, and thereby leaving more questions than answers. The Baytown Sun has been a little more thorough, but not a lot.

Baytown, in the person of Deputy City Manager Bob Leiper, is claiming that a clause involving mandatory overtime in the job description of every employee was sufficient notice that they were essential personnel. The problem with that is, even so, you have to tell an employee when he is expected to show up for the overtime. Did the City of Baytown? Apparently, in several cases, it did not.

It gets worse. The law is plain on this matter. Employers cannot fire employees for failing to report to work during a mandatory evacuation unless that person is essential and they provide a shelter for the employee during the storm. Frankly, it’s the last that’s going to bite the City in it’s ass; Leiper is going to have to show that Baytown had designated such a facility and that it could reasonably be expected to survive a Cat 5 storm with a 20-foot storm surge, which is what was expected at the time. I’d bet there aren’t two dozen structures in the entire metro area that could do that. (HP has one — they were enjoying catered BBQ at their shelter.) Well, the storm surge is easy, be well inland. Like more than 30 miles, because that didn’t work for parts of Cameron Parish, when Rita struck as a Cat 3. And “inland’ doesn’t exactly describe Baytown.

It defies reason to think that these people would have been fired had Rita come ashore in Galveston as a Cat 5 hurricane, but then, I’ve seen a lot of reason defying BS since Katrina dropped in to visit New Orleans. The trick is, Baytown is claiming that all city employees are essential. Total hogwash. During a hurricane and evacuation, how many people are going to:

1. Pay parking tickets.
2. Visit the library.
3. File a construction application.
4. Need their water meter read.
5. Call about a utility bill.
6…. oh you get the picture.

Citizen reaction in Baytown was entirely predictible. A few stood up to sayYawn. “Those meanies!” But mostly, a vast yawning indifference. Then people wonder why they only get served by rude, uncaring, unmotivated employees at City Hall. Somthing about binding the mouths. . . .

So isn’t the City of Houston doing the same thing? They’re firing people for not showing up. Well, yes and no. The difference in Houston’s case, it’s firing only emergency service providers. Fire, police, and dispatch personnel. Now granted, some or all of these lived in the evac areas. But in Houston’s case, all personnel are informed ahead of time if they are considered essential. So you know beforehand that if a disaster hits, you’re stuck at work. Lets take KHOU’s poster child for unfortunate events:

Tonya Locks works at HEC taking calls from people needing help but when Rita was coming, she says she needed help because she’s the sole provider for her family.

That family lives in one of those zip codes and includes a sick grandmother.

“Basically I should have abandoned my family and been at my job,” she says.

If that’s the case, then the questions become:

1. Why did the employee choose to live in such an area? (Granted, this isn’t entirely a fair question–hang on).
2. Knowing that one is an essential personnel, and living in an evac zone, why would the employee fail to make alternate arrangements with family and friends?
3. Finally, if one is stuck living in such an area, and has no one they can rely on to deal with their own family while they perform essential tasks, why the hell did they take the job anyway?

What the hell is a sole provider doing taking an essential emergency services personnel job??? I have to agree with the final poster in a thread over at the Baytown Sun’s forums, Politically Incorrect:

This reminds me of mothers protesting their children being sent to Iraq earlier in the war…they insisted the kids joined the military to get an education and never expected actual active duty and thought it was unfair they had to gok (sic) to war!

While his first paragraph is full of “that’s the way it i, so who cares, it’s their job” tripe, this paragraph is spot on. Bean counters and meter readers aren’t essential personnel, and to force them to be at their post on the specious argument that there might be some use for them in some emergency capacity that they are utterly untrained and unsuited for is just ridiculous. Yeah, lets send my diabetic co-worker out to pull folks out of floodwaters, why don’t we?

So where does that leave us? Hurricanes are a given. Flooding is a given. So, should the City of Houston prohibit its employees from living in evac zones? (Break here for gales of laughter.) Riiiiiiiight. Let’s all move to the Woodlands. As if we could afford it. Please, let me assure you, the pay scale for City employees is not all it’s cracked up to be. As I pointed out way, way back when I started this blog, a 90% pension of City pay isn’t a hell of a lot. (And I for one will have to work something like 40 years with the city to get it).

What I’m getting at here is that a helluva lot of us live in flood-prone areas because it’s cheaper to do so. So if the City demands that all of it’s employees, or even all of it’s essential employees live in areas not likely to suffer flooding during a hurricane (and hey, when a Cat 5 is bearing down on your city, flooding is not the only problem), it would hamstring itself. They can’t afford to do so — so they’re simply not going to get jobs with the City.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a better way to go about this. The City of Houston should devote serious thought to a policy of not hiring single parents in essential non-first response positions. Police and Fire protection are serious jobs, and in a perfect world, they would all be able to take care of us, the citizens, while having someone at home to take care of their family in a regional emergency. But this world isn’t perfect and the pool of qualified people willing to wear the badge (or carry the axe, or hypodermic) is not so deep that we can afford to hamstring ourselves by extending such a restriction to them. Even if we did, what happens in case of a divorce or death of the other spouse? “Sorry, but you’re off the force because we can’t depend on you.” I don’t think so.

But for dispatchers and other essential personnel, it may very well be, and the City should consider establishing a policy of requiring the employee to attest yearly that there is a person willing and able to take responsibility for their family in such case, even to the point of requiring the other person’s signature. At the very least, that is going to make the employee understand in no uncertain terms that essential means essential.

As for Baytown, do I think its citizens should care? Hell yes! Outraged is more like it. Especially the way it has been handled, with employees not knowing in advance if they were considered essential. Think about it. . . would you sign on with an employer who treated their employees in that manner? And would you be particularly motivated to put out 100% effort (or even 80% and coast on the rest).

Then why would anyone else?

Why Ubu, Redoux

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I doubt many people are going to be curious enough to go back through old posts on the Post-Puke section of the site, but new arrivals probably should see one of them. Recently, I explained the origins of my posting name, Ubu. Since the new trackbacks and listings in Technorati and the Ecosystem give the slight hope that I might add a second reader sometime (thanks, mom!), I ought to put it where they can see it without the horrors of the old site. So here it is once again: Why Ubu?

So… why did I pick such a weird name as “Ubu” to post under, anyway? What the hell kind of name is that? Well, I got my start posting comments over at the Rottweiller and hey, it was a dog’s name. Actually, it was a TV production company’s name. At the end of every episode of Family Ties they’d show the company’s logo and go “Sit, Ubu, Sit!” Their logo was a dog, and he’d bark. And hey I needed a name to post under and it was the o­nly doggie-themed name to come to mind. Well other than Lassie or Old Yeller, and I am definately not a girl, nor rabid, dammit.

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I Have Seen The Future…

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… and boy is it fucked up. The beginning of the end of the open marketplace has begun with Kelo. John Cole found the skinny, thanks to Kevin Drum’s excellent article.

This is the future, people. Forget going into business, anywhere, anywhen. Are you a farmer? Forget it. If you’re anywhere near a town, sell the land, get out now. Some developer’s going to come through one day and go “wow, I bet I could put a LOT of homes on that field.” So he’ll run down to the county courthouse, get in with the right people, grease the right palms, and next thing you know, you’re an ex-farmer. And a right selfish bastard for wanting to keep your land and deny the county all those wonderful property taxes, too. Not near a town? That’s ok. It’ll probably be some consortium of eco-freaks wanting to put wind generators on your land. Or a big utility figuring that out in the middle of nowhere would be a great place to put a power plant, since the neighbors won’t complain.

Left unchecked, you’re not going to be able to open a fucking donut shop without greasing the right palms beforehand. Or hey, maybe try importing some Russian mafia moguls. They understand doing this kind of business with the Party, comrade.

Gearing Up the Blog

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I’ve been working on the blog quite a lot the last week or so, culminating in yesterday’s insane (for me) barrage of posts. Today I registered over at Technorati and TTLB’s Ecosystem. Tonight will see the first scan by Technorati, but it’s going to be days before the Ecosystem sorts me properly. Although I suspect I’m ranked exactly where I belong, based on traffic! In the Ecosystem’s case, Bear wiped the rankings a few days ago, which reset everyone. As a result, rankings have been fluid for a few days. I’m going to be puttering about the site for several more days. A major goal is to change the appearance from the default. Ew. Just ewww. So expect odd behavior from time to time, and odd appearances too, as I experiment with themes, plugins, and other tricks. Who knows, maybe the changes will make all text appear in Sanskrit. I’ve always wanted to learn Sanskrit.