Our Man in Moscow

So who is the guy?

Edward Snowden has spent 32 days inside a Moscow airport; a Russian news agency reports that Snowden's request for asylum is in process, and that he may spend up to a year in temporary asylum in the country.

The question has been all along: what’s motivating this guy? What makes him tick? Why did he choose to do what he did, and how well planned was it?

One website has part of the answer—maybe. According to addictinginfo.org, Snowden is a gun-loving, pro-NRA, libertarian dickhead. Think I’m wrong? Catch this alleged exchange from a techie chat room, Ars Technica.

SNOWDEN: save money? cut this social security bullshit

User11: hahahayes

User18: Yeah! Fuck old people!

User11: social security is bullshit

User11: let’s just toss old people out in the street

User18: Old people could move in with [User11].

User11: NOOO

User11: they smell funny

SNOWDEN: Somehow, our society managed to make it hundreds of years without social security just fine

SNOWDEN: you fucking retards

SNOWDEN: Magically the world changed after the new deal, and old people became made of glass

SNOWDEN: yeah, that makes sense

User11: wow

User11: you are just so fucking stupid

SNOWDEN: yeah, [User11]. and you’re quite a gem

User19: and magically, life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years.funny how that works.

SNOWDEN: [User19], you don’t think modern medicine has something to do with that? no? it’s social security? wow. I guess I missed that.

User11: hurr wait a second, life expectancy has shot up in recent times along with the dissolution of the communal family unit in exchange for the nuclear family

User11: gee i guess we might need to create a safety net for the sudden glut of helpless elderly????

SNOWDEN: they wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day

User11: you are so goddamned stupd*pid

User11: PUT OLD PEOPLE TO WORK IN THE FIELDS

SNOWDEN: my grandmother is eighty fucking three this year, and you know what? she still supports herself working as a goddamned hairdresser

Right—and here he is on guns:

User: the restrictions were made to appease the conservatives to get another bill passed. fucking cons.

SNOWDEN: See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment. Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.

From the website, it appears that Snowden had no problem spying on people during the Bush administration: he lambastes The New York Times for revealing the existence of the phone metadata collection in 2006, and thinks the whistleblower should be shot in the balls. But he changes his tune when Obama is elected.

Throughout it all, Snowden has seemed just this side of paranoid and delusional. There is the persistent story that the United States will find a way to off him; to avert that, he has given top secret, highly damaging documents to various people, who will reveal causing enormous damage after Snowden’s murder.

As well, Snowden seems to be winging it completely. He takes hard drives with all his information into China; one expert said that the best practice is to take nothing into China except a clean, empty hard drive. Why? Because anything can be copied—and likely will be—while you’re out for a Coke and a burger.

And speaking of China—OK, Hong Kong—Snowden arrived, stayed in a fancy hotel, and then was running out of money. Hunh? Couldn’t he have stayed somewhere else? And why Hong Kong, since China does have an extradition policy with the US?

Look, if I were Snowden, I might have done this: look for a country that has no extradition to the US, but does have a decent way of life, and a good record on civil liberties. Load up as much cash as I could, buy a ticket, fly to the country, immediately request amnesty, and sit tight while I did so. Once I’m in, I’d start talking.

Oh, and speaking of civil liberties—I went onto Amnesty International’s website, just to check out the Russian Federation’s track record on human rights; the site reminded me that the Federation had just passed, by something like 441 to 0, a draconian bill against gay people. In Russia, you can’t even talk gay issues without getting thrown in the jug.

So this guy—who apparently thinks he is John Galt—ends up in Russia, and is considering places like Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia? I read the Times today, reporting from Havana, and guess what? None of their sources would give their last name. These countries make the United States look like a bastion of liberty.

So now Snowden is in Russia, looking for a job. Guess what? He’s got one. He’ll be “working” for the Russian intelligence agency, who will expect him to deliver. And no—no programming but all the information he has about the NSA. And if he doesn’t?

Don’t think it’ll be a pink slip.

Somehow, this guy has ended up in deep shit. I applaud him for speaking out, but how could a bright guy botch it so badly?

This Just In From Puerto Rico

It’s one of those things about Puerto Rico—while the rest of the world is occupying themselves about other things (Syria, governmental spying, even a royal birth) we are completely obsessed with our own affairs.

I tell you this because the world into which I woke, this morning, was devoted to three issues, which the morning radio repeated endlessly. First, Pablo Casellas is in a coma.

You may remember this guy, who is the son of Salvador Casellas, a federal judge, whom colleagues describe as completely recto or straight. Allegedly, Pablo Casellas returned home on the morning of 14 July 2012 and saw an intruder jumping over a ten-foot wall by the pool. Casellas, who is an expert marksman and has (or had at the time) 33 guns, went back inside, got a gun, and fired several shots. He then discovered his lifeless wife sitting at the poolside; she’d been shot.

What did Poppa do? Well, the judge rushed to the house to be with his son, and to ensure that the investigation is done properly. The press arrived at about the same time and caught the judge scurrying under the yellow “do not cross—police investigation”—tape. Made a great photo—the judicial rear end bumping up against the tape….

But that was only the beginning. There were bloodstains in Pablo Casellas’s car; the grass on the other side of the wall showed no sign of being trampled; the shots in the wall were from a special gun that Casellas reported stolen in a “carjacking” close to the shooting range where Casellas had been practicing. Except that it was closed, that day; it was Fathers’ Day.

Well, it’s taken a year of legal screwing around to get this case to court, and the trial was to have started next Monday, so what does Casellas do?

The family isn’t talking—do they have to? “Sources” are saying that he’s in very, very delicate shape, and that they will start a process akin to dialysis to cleanse his blood. The next 24 to 48 hours are critical….

So where’s Poppa now? Sitting by the bedside, presumably on the taxpayer’s dime. And morning radio is speculating—is it suicide? Did Casellas fils swallow pills? A guy with all those guns has to do the one spectacularly poor way of offing himself?

I know ‘cause I was a nurse. Every time one of our regular patients presented at the ER with an empty bottle of Tylenol in her hands, the ER nurses had instructions: don’t buy in, be utterly matter-of-fact, and tell the patient, “just sit over there, hon—we’ll take you when we can.”

So Casellas is in the anteroom of death, and the island is hanging on its ears. But what else is going on?

Coffee—the price is going up 40%.

Coffee, according to The New Day, is doing about as well as Pablo Casellas, at the moment. Costs of fertilizer, electricity and everything else have gone up. The farmers are being squeezed out of business—which is serious, because we drink 300,000 quintales (no idea what that is, but sounds impressive) of the stuff but only produce 80,000 quintales annually. So we import the majority of our coffee.

You might ask—isn’t there land for coffee in Puerto Rico?

Of course there is—plenty of it, and in fact there is lots of coffee that goes unpicked. So what’s the problem?

Nobody wants to pick it.

Be fair—it’s a pretty rotten job. You’re standing (hopefully—otherwise you’re sliding) on a wet, muddy mountainside with branches slashing your face and insects stinging you and carrying a sack into which you are putting more and more coffee—thus adding more and more weight as you get more and more tired.

Now it begins to rain….

Second scenario—you can go to the Departamento de la Familia and get the Tarjeta de la Familia and that gets you free food, which you can munch on around noon, when you get up.

Well, fortunately the next island over has never dreamed up the idea of the Departamento de la Familia—so guess what? The mountains are filled with Dominicans (from Santo Domingo—not the religious order), according to a student from Jayuya, deep in the center of the island.

OK—Casellas in coma, coffee in crisis…what’s next?

Well, the island has 14 people who are still in shelters—down from the 88 people who were in shelters last week, when a tropical wave dumped 9.15 inches of water on the island. And now the mayor of San Juan wants the governor to declare San Juan a disaster, since the city has 300 cases of damage to examine.

But there’s a problem.

According to The New Day, the entire island is in a permanent state of emergency. Why? Because the planning has been so wretchedly bad that any rain can cause chaos. We have built on flood plains; squatters have built on flood plains; we have given no maintenance to whatever systems we had to drain water.

Nor is it entirely the government’s fault.

“You can’t be serious,” I said to my student, after she had described her flood-plained community’s creative approach to financing redecoration.

Their practice—before the advent of a serious storm—was to throw a few sofas into the Rio Cañas just before the storm. The sofas would block the culvert down by the bridge; the water would rise wonderfully. Soon, it would be swirling deliciously through their house, delightfully whisking away all that stuff the eyes had grown tired of seeing. The press would come, the neighbors would stand woefully in front of their houses, and then FEMA would send the check.

See?

Well, it makes sense down here….

The UPR Blunders Forward

I’m biased, of course, since I spent several decades working as a sort of teacher, but I have to agree with Dr. Manuel Pérez Quiñones, a professor at Virginia Tech, when he says that the worst crime in Puerto Rico has been the savage intrusion of politics on the university system.

This will sound bad—a large part of our murder rate (twice New York City’s with half the population) is drug related. And though the death of any man diminishes me—well, sorry….no. I don’t care if one pusher offs another.

But in the twenty years at which I made a living teaching ESL, it would occasionally occur to me: how can it be that I have this job? Every kid has twelve years in English classes—shouldn’t everybody be bilingual?

Oh, and why was it that I knew the rules for accentuation in Spanish, and they didn’t?

Or there was the time I was buying a $24 product that had a 35% discount. The clerk stood open-mouthed at the register—there was no calculator. $17.80, I told the clerk. Well, we waited several minutes, which I devoted to telling the clerk—once a teacher, always a teacher—the three ways that I had dreamed up to calculate the sum. But it took a manager with a calculator to prove it to him.

I am telling you, then, that we have a serious problem in Puerto Rico. And if we are ever going to get out of this morass, we’ll have to start with kids, teach them, prepare them, and then hope they’ll do a better job than we’ve done.

What Pérez Quiñones bemoans is real. I somehow slid through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but even I knew that the university’s School of Engineering was very strong. University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez has a school that is just as good, if not better.

According to Pérez Quiñones—well, let the man speak for himself:

The UPR as it has always been, was once again invaded by local Puerto Rican politics. In 5 years at Mayagüez, the campus had 4 Chancellors (i.e., campus president). The turn over in positions from Chancellor, to Deans, to Department heads was so regular, that it was a common joke to ask "who is the Dean this week?" The situation continued to deteriorate. Recently on the press there was an article about the sanctions imposed by NSF to the UPR system after an investigation of misuse of federal funds. The UPR system cancelled the Presidential Fellowships that paid the graduate studies in the US to future UPR faculty. And the faculty at their several campuses continued to either fight for their academic lives or simply hang up the boxing gloves and move on to a better (bitter?) future.

Alert readers of this blog are wondering—what’s the deal with the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds?

If it were irregularities, that would be fine—almost. But it’s much more than that. Which is why in April of this year, the FBI charged onto campuses and locations holding university servings and—reportedly—confiscated a bunch of material.

That’s bad—worse is that the NSF stopped paying 50 million dollars for research projects. Or perhaps it’s 90 million dollars—the Internet is shaky today, and I can’t verify.

Nor is it the case that the NSF simply dropped this on them. The investigation has been going on since 2006, and the university was given the chance to make a Corrective Action Plan (CAP). OK—that was approved, but the university couldn’t follow its own plan.

What was the problem?

Caribbean Business Reports has this to say:

To pay professors involved in research—in addition to their basic salary and a reduced academic schedule—professors are assigned a sum of money from the grants, which can't exceed 30% of their wage as compensation for their participation, according to circular A-21.

The source said the way to report time & effort was out of control, and some professors' salaries had increased by more than 100%. "You could see professors whose basic wages were about $80,000 a year, and suddenly they were earning $300,000 annually."

Right—so you can see why the NSF was a little peeved.

There were other problems, too. Some professors were reportedly receiving money as compensation from funds earmarked for other uses, such as indirect costs.

Well, the university had to get some money from somewhere—so where to turn? To our Government Development Bank, locally called Fomento. So the university submitted a loan application to…

…the wrong people. Somehow, the university ended up submitting the application of the General Fund of the University of Puerto Rico. So they had to do it over again.

Into this comic-horrific scene came the 2012 gubernatorial elections, which the party then out of power won. So what did that mean? That the university’s president had to be changed. And guess what? The gentleman who consistently has assured us that the problem with the NSF has been resolved—only to be told by the NSF that it has not—is now the interim director!

Comic-horrific, I wrote in the last paragraph. Sorry—I’ll take that back.

We’re a strange mix, down here. Half of us don’t work. The other half works harder and often better than anyone else. And our professionals—in general—are more highly trained and educated than any I’ve seen.

They deserve so much more.

Two Wings and a Lady

Cuba y Puerto Rico son

De un pájaro las dos alas

It’s a famous quote from a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, and can be translated roughly as “Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird.”

Well if true, it may be that the wings of the bird are flying in completely different directions.

From the video below, it seems that the Cuban wing is set to soar. Raúl Castro has had to face the inevitable: the economy, supported all those years by the Iron Curtain buying Cuba’s sugar at inflated prices, was broke. The fields—five million acres of them—were overrun with a weed called marabú (marabou.) Nor is it just a weed—it’s highly invasive and thorny. If you attack it with a machete—pretty much the only thing at hand in lightly mechanized Cuba—you’ll end up bloody at the end of the day.

The buildings are falling down in Havana, and the state workers, who are supposed to repair the houses, are backlogged and slow to respond. How slow? One woman interviewed has waited 16 years with her ceiling propped up with four-by-fours. She worries that the roof will collapse every time it rains.

Seventy percent of the food has to be imported; supplies in the state-run shops are scant. Doctors make twenty-five dollars a month; one doctor interviewed makes a better living selling copper tubing on the side.

And so, you say, how can the wing be flapping skyward?

Well, Cuba’s economy grew 3% last year, and is expected to grow about the same this year as well. Sure, it’s not quite the 3.6% that Castro wanted, but it’s not far off.

And by allowing 181 jobs to be done by licensed private individuals, the government has at last introduced some incentive to work. In the past, there was a saying, “the government pretends to pay us; we pretend to work.” Now, there’s the beginning of an independent, free market economy.

And let’s face it, where was Miami before the Cubans arrived?

My friend Harry has a story. In those days when Harry was selling shoes, he entered a small shop, got tossed out, and went to a café. Still burning with the humiliation, he overheard a conversation among the boys—a group of middle-aged guys who were complaining: the damned Cubans had come and taken all the jobs away in Puerto Rico. Harry turned to address them.

“If the Cubans are working and you are not, it’s because they are NOT sitting in cafés drinking beer at 10 o’clock in the morning. They came with nothing and got a bike and sold what they could sell and now they have multinational corporations and live in gated communities. Oh, and I’m not Cuban but Puerto Rican….”

Which will explain why the Puerto Rican wing seems to be plummeting.

La producción propia es la tarea urgente contra la dependencia de fondos federales en Puerto Rico

That’s one of the headlines in today’s El Nuevo Día. Economists are urging us—as they have for all the twenty odd years I’ve lived here, to create jobs to avoid dependency on federal funds.

And on the double, since 24,200 fewer people are working here on the island than last year. Granted, that may not be a problem, since we are also shrinking in population, but government (the largest employer on the island) is reporting 20,600 fewer jobs this year than last.

Here’s Caribbean Business Report on the subject:

Puerto Rico’s population was pegged at 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census, down from the 3,808,610 registered in the 2000 Census. It marked the first time the island population had declined between census counts. The 2010 Census also showed there were 4.7 million Puerto Ricans living in the states, marking the first time more Puerto Ricans lived stateside than on the island. Only one state, Michigan, registered a drop in population in the 2010 Census, dipping 0.6 percent.

It’s happened before—in the Great Depression, droves of Puerto Ricans left, primarily workers who would man the factories of the (then) industrialized North East. Who’s leaving now?

Young professionals.

Which is why the article in Caribbean Business Report ends thus:

The population drop of nearly 83,000 over the last 10 years and the continuing exodus raises the prospect of less federal funding for Puerto Rico, increased pressure on the financially ailing public-pension system and a dramatically aging population with fewer financial resources.

Yes and no.

I’m sitting in a terrific local business, Poet’s Passage, run by a great lady, and named in fact, Lady. She explained this curious fact by noting that her father’s family came from Australia via Scotland, where they were all lords and ladies. (Tactfully, I never inquired as to the exact circumstances of the move to Australia).

And Lady has been here since 11AM—busy getting her sister store adjoining the café ready for an activity tonight. Which means that she will be here until the wee hours of the morning.

“There’s money in poetry,” she told me once, “and I sat down with the board of directors of WesternBank and convinced them—I’d made a great business plan. And in six years of business, I’ve never missed a payment.”

She’s less person than dynamo, raising the emotional temperature by several degrees every time she comes into the café. She kisses everyone; she calls out, “Hi, Marc!” from fifty feet away. She’s home-schooling her child or she’s painting one of her poems onto a piece of canvas or she’s busy telling a customer about poetry night, every Tuesday night at 7 PM. She admits it privately—some of the poetry heard there may not last in the canon of Puerto Rican / Latin American literature, but that’s not the point. She’s seen poets grow, as she has; she’s seen self-esteem bloom. It’s a space, a necessary space.

An embracing space. How embracing? The gentleman at the table two doors down is busy working at his computer. He also serves me coffee—and very good it is—when he’s working. How many other workers choose to hang out at their workplace when not on the job? (I except bars….)

Lady dropped out of high school to help in the family business. But it hasn’t stopped her. “Who’s your favorite female poet of the 20^th century,” she once asked me, and we went on to talk about Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore—an army of great poets. I was sweating to hold up my end of the conversation. 

The only resource Puerto Rico has is an amazing human potential. And looking at Lady charge into her café, greet the customers, kiss the staff, give the order to clean the bathrooms, and then take a dirty plate off the table while kissing the customer—I’m convinced.

The two wings can soar upward again.

Wraiths Wrapped in Blankets

Who knows why I had to watch it? I had, after all, lived it.

Actually, I hadn’t. By in my years as a nurse, I had seen a lot of bulimics and anorectics; as well, I had worked on the eating disorder unit at University of Wisconsin Hospital.

And the documentary Thin, by Lauren Greenfield, brought it all back, from the moment I saw the first wraith wrapped in her blanket coming down the hall. Nor does Greenfield hold back—at times it’s unbearable, almost too painful. A fifteen-year old girl is confronted in group therapy, and breaks down shrieking, “I just want to be thin!” Another patient is kicked out of the institution, and has to call her mother, who spits out her rage at the staff. You can hear the desperation behind the fury, and it’s well justified: the patient later killed herself.

And it made me remember: this is nursing in which you never really know what you’re doing. Can you believe the patient when she breaks down and swears she really, really wants to get better? Should you trust your gut, which is telling you, “nah, bullshit?” And what’s better—to tell the truth, and say, “I don’t believe you?” Or do you say nothing at all?

The really dangerous nurses were the ones who thought they knew what they were doing. For them, it was simple—believe the least of what the patient says, set limits, and then follow up with consequences. On psych wards, that often meant seclusion or restraints; sadly, there were times when I thought the staff had egged the patient on.

In the film, Greenfield captures the uncertainty and the anguish of the staff, as they struggle to understand what’s going on on their ward, who the players are, and what to do about the situation.

One of the most telling moments of the film is the patient who sketches a life-size outline of what she thinks she looks like—she produces a chubby figure. The art therapist the puts the patient against the sketch are draws the patient. But that’s not enough to convince the patient—who then writes “fat,” “chubby,” and a host of other epitaphs on different parts of the sketch. At the end, she writes, “help me.”

There’s the frustration of the insurance running out—the patient is nowhere near ready, you know you’ll see her again. At least, you hope you’ll see her again—if not, she’ll be dead.

There are the relatives, who are almost more anguished than the patients. The patients, after all, are very often in denial, but mothers know perfectly well how sick their kids are. One patient reports her boyfriend saying, “I want to be with you for the rest of my life, but the way you’re going, I’m gonna bury you in five years.”

It’s possible—the mortality rate is between 10% and 20%.

To make the documentary, Greenfield spent six months living in the facility.

It’s a remarkable achievement.  

  

...Just so you know

She was impossible not to like, but I expected that. I know her sister, I’ve met her mother and her brother, and she’s lived for years in Canada. So it was clear—she’d be a nice, fun, intelligent woman. And she was.

She was also terrified of setting foot on American soil.

Which was literally about all she had to do—she was flying from Ottawa to Puerto Rico, and had a layover in JFK. But even that freaked her. Would she be safe? Would she be caught in crossfire? Who knew what could happen?

You guys up there? This is how the rest of the world is seeing us.

Consider the fact that the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, has just spoken to the NAACP, and revealed that he has had to sit down with his son—as his father sat down with him—and explain how to behave with the police. The message—yes, the police are racist; yes they will stop you unfairly; no, you can’t trust them.

This from the Attorney General?

Consider the fact that whites who kill blacks in “Stand-your-ground” states are 342% more likely to be exonerated that whites who kill other whites. Check out the chart below, based on 5,000 killings…..

Or what about the black woman who got 20 years for firing a warning shot at her ex-husband, against whom she had a restraining order?

It may be the horrific cold that has fallen upon me, or it may be true, but everything seemed seriously skewed. First of all, who dreamed up Stand-your-ground? OK—I’ve looked it up, and apparently it goes back to the very end of the 19^th century. Florida, however, only enacted the stand-your-ground law in 2005. And according to CBS Miami, deaths due to self-defense are up nearly triple since the law was enacted. 

OK—and this is how Wikipedia describes the moments before the shooting:

At approximately 7:09 PM,[Note 4] Zimmerman called the Sanford police non-emergency number to report what he considered a suspicious person in the Twin Lakes community.[69] Zimmerman stated, "We've had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there's a real suspicious guy."[32] He described an unknown male "just walking around looking about" in the rain and said, "This guy looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something."[70] Zimmerman reported that the person had his hand in his waistband and was walking around looking at homes.[71] On the recording, Zimmerman is heard saying, "these assholes, they always get away."[72][73]

About two minutes into the call, Zimmerman said, "he's running."[12] The dispatcher asked, "He's running? Which way is he running?"[74] The sound of a car door chime is heard, indicating Zimmerman opened his car door.[75] Zimmerman followed Martin, eventually losing sight of him.[12] The dispatcher asked Zimmerman if he was following him. When Zimmerman answered, "yeah," the dispatcher said, "We don't need you to do that." Zimmerman responded, "Okay."[76] Zimmerman asked that police call him upon their arrival so he could provide his location.[12] Zimmerman ended the call at 7:15 p.m.[12]

After Zimmerman ended his call with police, a violent encounter took place between Martin and Zimmerman, which ended when Zimmerman fatally shot Martin 70 yards (64 m) from the rear door of the townhouse where Martin was staying.

OK, so Martin was running away from Zimmerman. Zimmerman is chasing Martin—how in hell can this be self-defense? In Florida, can you really chase someone down, get into a fight, fear for your life, and kill? If so, nobody is safe.

Which is what the black guy on the documentary said—is it now open season on young black men? What was Martin supposed to do? If he had stopped in his tracks and held his hands up, would that have prevented Zimmerman from attacking him? If he had walked toward Zimmerman, would that have been perceived as “threatening?” Having been branded as an “asshole who always gets away,” there was virtually nothing Martin could do.

Well, into this gloomy picture enters Georg Philipp Telemann, the baroque composer who, at the time, was much more respected than a guy called Johann Sebastian Bach. And who knew that there was such a thing as a chalumeau? Originally a folk instrument, it was popular during the baroque period, but then was replaced by the clarinet. And guess what? I like it much more.

Enjoy, guys. I’m putting this cold to bed.

Grrrr

Grrrrr….

This is a letter to the world that will never be read, since at the moment I am without Internet access. And why is it that it puts me into a total funk?

Consider, I have lost my mind, my mother, my job. I should know something about perspective, about what’s important and what matters.

I also feel that I’m spinning my wheels, not doing anything important, not doing what I need to do. I’m stuck, and I don’t believe in stuck. But even though I am writing every day, I’m in writer’s block—which at the moment I can’t define for you, being Internetless. Or unInterneted. Or sans Internet.

And I’m hungry—why won’t they feed me? Previously the old system worked—I gave them money and they gave me food. Today, I gave them money and now? No food.

Well, it’s clear that the world went off somewhere and decided not to take me along. But shouldn’t it have left a note on the refrigerator door? Something like, “Sorry, but you’re fucked today. Don’t try and do anything. You’ll be tired and not able to sleep. You’ll be hungry and they won’t give you food. Expect to fall and break your leg for no reason. Fire may break out. There will be insurrection in the streets. Prepare to be struck by a meteorite…. Get the picture, sucker?”

And this guy at the café which is not a café since that would imply food and that, it appears, is reserved for other people, all of whom are sitting in front of plates and slowly munching away…. Now then, why is it that my least favorite person in the café has decided to fuck around with the staff, distracting them when they should be exerting themselves at full speed with the obviously imperative, critically important task of feeding me? No but there he is, and worse, he has an Argentinian accent, which totally drives me insane. It’s Spanish with a heavy Italian inflection. And now, guess what? He has chosen to stand between a seriously beautiful guy—a man who doesn’t know, though I could tell him, that his identical twin is named Adonis—and me.

And why do I have to go to Boquerón? It was supposed to be a hotel, Copamarina, which was nice, but now it’s a timeshare in Boquerón and people will be sleeping in the living rooms, which is crazy. And where will I go when I wake up, as I always do, at three in the morning and there are sleeping and probably snoring bodies in the living room?

Outside, said Mr. Fernández, or the hotel lobby. So the whole world will be sleeping and I’ll be up and bug eyed and pacing around the lobby, accompanied with the sound of profoundly unjustly earned snores.

Well, well—I shouldn’t complain. Because my mother-in-law has decreed that she wants vegetarian lasagna, and guess what? That falls on Mr. Fernández, who has almost never made lasagna in his life and who cannot even eat lasagna, since it has pasta, and that has become the fatalist-no-computer-I-meant-fatalest (and you know where that red squiggle can go, don’t you?) of poisons. So Mr. Fernández has washed the pan that was collecting the water draining from the third floor, and he is now probably elbow-deep in that infernal pasta, which will kill us all.

Well, I for one refuse to eat it, on general principle, and to spite my mother-in-law, whom in fact I like except on days when there is no Internet and no food. No, I intend to sit at the table but with my back turned to it, in silent but very much obvious protest. Nor am I going to talk to anyone at all—not a word will be wrenched from my lips—for the entire week we’re there, since it should be Copamarina but it’s not so guess what! No words from Marc!

Hey, maybe I’ll make a sign! “I AM NOT TALKING BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE I SHOULDN’T BE AND I PROTEST AND UNTIL THE PLACE IS RIGHT AND THE FOOD COMES WHEN IT SHOULD AND THE INTERNET AGREES TO BE AVAILABLE INSTEAD OF OFF SOMEWHERE ELSE, DAMMIT, I AM NOT TALKING AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!”

That’s what I’ll do. I’m tired of being adult and reasonable and nice and not making a fuss and going with the flow. I’m gonna get good and mad, and tell the whole world about it. In fact, you know that lasagna? I’m gonna spit on it, on the whole pan of it, so that no one can eat it. That’s what I’m gonna do, and just wait and see! Then we’ll have to go to Copamarina which is where we should be and not in Boquerón where I can’t go anywhere when I can’t sleep! Hah!

Now let’s see—what else can I do?

And now it’s several hours later and Jaime has come in and made me drink three beers, so now I can’t think!

Grrr….

Dammit!

I knew at the time that it would come to this. All right—I couldn’t imagine quite how bad the “this” was going to be, but I knew it would be bad.

In 1989, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the railroads had the right to ask their workers to go into a room and piss in a cup. There had been accidents before, drugs were found to be the culprit, and so the railroads decided to check for drugs via urine testing.

Did it ever make sense?

Of course not. If you smoked a joint on Saturday night, you were spilling metabolites in your urine on Monday—but you weren’t under the effects of the drug. Conversely, if you snorted cocaine on the way to work, you were soaring like a kite, but not spilling metabolites.

Then there was the problem of all the over the counter drugs like Sudafed which gave false positives—sure, more sophisticated tests were available, but unsurprisingly, they were also more expensive.

It was a period of drug hysteria—remember dear Nancy Reagan peering out of the darkness that was presumably drug addiction and whispering hamishly (in the manner of a ham, computer—lump it!), “just say no!?” Remember Bill, who smoked but didn’t inhale?

Of all people, Antonin Scalia got it. Here’s what he said:

The impairment of individual liberties cannot be the means of making a point…symbolism, even symbolism for so worthy a cause as the abolition of unlawful drugs, cannot validate an otherwise unreasonable search.

Right—knew we had to agree on something….

So I was prepared, when Wal-Mart wanted me to come work as an English teacher, for the ordeal of taking the bus out to a clinic, pissing in the bottle with the bathroom door six inches ajar, not washing my hands until after I had given the bottle to the apologetic technician. She took it, stuck a thermometer in it, and then let me use the sink.

Full disclosure: I last used marijuana in—was it the eighties? Nineties? You get the point….

So I knew about that. What didn’t I know?

47% of employers routinely do a credit check on job applicants.

Well, you can imagine the snort I made—even Franny, my beloved mother resting quietly in the afterlife, couldn’t have done better.

Consider the case of Alfred J. Carpenter, a shoe salesman in New York City who got laid off. Not a problem, he thought—his resume was good, he had worked for some high-end names like Ferragamo and J. M. Weston. And since he was healthy, he didn’t need to get health insurance, he reasoned.

Wrong—he tore two ligaments in his knee playing roller hockey. And so the bills piled up, and he was struggling to pay them. A friend thought he could work at Bergdorf Goodman; he applied and all was well. But then that went sour, too; soon he was in bankruptcy. But he kept applying for positions, and even took to disclosing his poor credit with prospective employers. No luck, and no dice. Down to his last 200 dollars, he’s now on welfare and food stamps.

The irony of it is that the company has to ask your permission to check your credit. But if you say no? Is there anyone out there who seriously thinks that if you way no, that won’t be held against you? If so, please contact me at once, since I have several really nice pieces of real estate—including bridges—to sell at the moment.

I can hear you—what possible reason would an employer have to check your credit? Well, The New York Times says this:

“Employers are looking for a sense of responsibility,” said Richard Mellor, a vice president at the National Retail Federation. “They want to see that an individual pays their bills on time and takes responsibility for what they buy.”

There are several problems. First is the obvious one—anyone in this economy looking for a job is probably not going to have the best credit. Here’s The New York Times again:

“Someone loses their job,” Ms. Wu said, “so they can’t pay their bills — and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.” It can also be a kind of backdoor job discrimination, Ms. Wu contends, given the numerous studies that demonstrate that those black, Latino or simply poor are more likely to have lower credit scores than those who are white and have means.

Obviously, Ms. Wu gets it. And she goes on to say:

To Ms. Wu and others, a credit report says more about a person’s economic circumstances than his or her moral character. “Some people can go to daddy and say, ‘I can’t pay my bills, will you bail me out?’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And others can’t.”

The other problem? Often, the credit agencies’ reports are incorrect, and everybody who has ever had to deal with these agencies knows—it’s a nightmare. Somehow, the mistake that you corrected in January appears regularly in February.

The solution? Well, nine states have laws regulating or prohibiting the use of credit checks by employers recruiting personnel. But it should be at the federal level—not the state level.

So it was the snowball effect, just as Scalia—probably—feared. First it was just pissing into a cup, then it was giving up your credit privacy, and now? It’s having the government get your telephone / Internet history, if not listening in on your calls or reading your email.

It was Vonnegut, I think, who observed that the Star Spangled Banner is the only national anthem that ends with a question. Remember? We sing it at every baseball game….

And does that flag still wave, over the free and the brave?

Who's Crazy?

Well—so where is everybody? A guy comes out and says that he tapped Obama’s phone, as well as Senator Feinstein, Supreme Court justice Alito, General David Petraeus, and a host of others. He goes on to suggest that Obama may be being blackmailed, and that there is a sinister force at work. He calls it a “rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover capabilities at a monstrous scale on steroids."

And the guy—Russell Tice—has a track record: he worked for twenty years in the Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Department of Intelligence Agency, and ended up in the National Security Agency. He turned to The New York Times in 2005, and was one of the principal sources for the wiretapping revelations published that year.

So he has the connections, and he has big news—shouldn’t be a problem to pick up the phone and get the news splashed over the country’s papers, computer screens, and cell phones. Instead, with the exception of the Huffington Post, the mainstream media have ignored Tice’s most recent allegations.

Instead, Tice had to go to another whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds, and make his revelations on her Boiling Frogs podcast. And Sibel, who worked as a translator for the FBI until 2002, makes a damning charge: the mainstream media are controlled by the corporations and the government. She tells the story of MSNBC who sent a town car to pick up Tice for an interview, and then cancelled the interview on the way to the studio. Huffington Post picked up the news, and then MSNBC called again, stating that they hadn’t canceled, rather they had only meant to reschedule. The town car arrives again, and all is well until minutes before the interview. Then, Tice is told that MSNBC’s New York lawyers have advised them—don’t talk about the recent allegations, just talk in general terms. He protests: he’s in the studio to do just that, but goes through with the interview, anyway.

Edmonds makes further charges in an interview on the James Corbett Report. She alleges that the whistleblowing process that is supposed to protect people who step forward is completely ineffective. And she should know: she was fired in 2002 and the FBI’s own internal process stated that it was likely true that “some” of her claims of retaliation were true.

She also maintains that the FBI keeps both digital and paper files in huge quantities. And if, in the process of investigating a person who FISA has issued an order on, the FBI gets information on another, non-FISA ordered person—the policy is to destroy that evidence. Does it? No way—it keeps everything, because guess what? It may come in handy.

Edmonds makes the point that Congress has never taken on the FBI in any meaningful way—removing a director, taking it to the justice department, etc.

Edmonds goes places I wouldn’t go. She’s convinced that the Boston bombings were a government sponsored set up; she has appeared on The Alex Jones Show. It’s hard to know—who’s telling the truth?

But check out the two clips below—and you decide.