doubting thom

Yeah! Scaled Composites, Inc. today unveiled its SpaceShipOne Project (space.com), a new, private passenger-carrying sub-orbital craft.
And it’s a pretty cute little craft (well, pair of craft, really).

This is how Eleanor Clift so aptly describes (MSNBC.com-Newsweek) the bullying techniques being brought to bear against the two Republican holdouts on Bush’s outrageous tax-cut proposal–Ohio’s George Voinovich and Maine’s Olympia Snowe.

The conservative Club for Growth is running an ad in Ohio with a photo of Voinovich next to a French flag. The group’s press release calls Voinovich a
“Franco Republican.” The same ad is slated for Maine with Snowe pictured alongside the French flag. A narrator equates the senators’ opposition to the full Bush tax cut with French opposition to the Iraq invasion.

In a separate article for the Associated Press, Jim Abrams records:

“These Franco-Republicans [Voinovich and Snowe] are as dependable as France was in taking down Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,” Club for Growth president Stephen Moore said in a statement.

In her own article, Clift goes on to explain:

More than 60 percent of Americans say large tax cuts now are not needed, yet President Bush is making support for tax cuts a test of party loyalty and patriotism….

The president’s claim that the dividend tax cut would benefit most taxpayers goes largely unchallenged. Seventy percent of taxpayers would receive no benefit at all according to the IRS. By contrast, the three top executives at each of the Fortune 100 companies would gain an average of $400,000 a year. Bush trades on the trust he enjoys with voters, which makes him a formidable campaigner. He gets credit for being plainspoken and a truth teller even when he falsely portrays his dividend tax cut as a jobs program.

What is going on in this country? How in the world can we even try to justify a program of tax cuts when we have a war to pay for, and a country–Iraq–to mend the wounds we’ve inflicted upon it? Has Bush no shame?

The Friday 5
1. Who is your favorite celebrity?
Sigh. These questions are determined to make me confront my social ineptness, or at least my ambivalence about likes and dislikes. I don’t think about celebrity or celebrities very much, frankly. So… I don’t think I have a favorite, though there are some I admire, for various reasons, and some I lust over, for others.
In the first category would be Susan Sarandon, certainly. I got to meet her in my Harvard days, when she came to give a Learning from Performers lecture; she participated in a more informal gathering at North (now Pforzheimer) House, and sat up with a few of us well into the wee hours of the morning, talking so incredibly intelligently about her craft, and about rape and women’s issues, among others. I also admire her and her partner, Tim Robbins, both bullied for taking a principled stand against the war, for their political convictions and their willingness to speak publicly, in the face of condemnation and hatred, about their beliefs. (Robbins’s speech to the National Press Club is a must-read, an impassioned, well-spoken, frightening description of our government and fellow citizens’ mounting attacks on our free speech and liberty. Hear the speech from NPR.)
The second category includes but is definitely not limited to Joseph Fiennes; Ewan McGregor (who knew the cutie could sing too?); Matt Keeslar; Viggo Mortensen; Hart Bochner, Jr.; Dan Futterman; Stephen Lynch; and Alistair Mackenzie.
2. Who is your least favorite?
Dr. Laura
3. Have you ever met or seen any celebrities in real life?
Have met Susan Sarandon (see above); Robin Curtis (Saavik from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock; Paula Poundstone; Art Buchwald; Armistead Maupin (and told him that I’d named my then-cat–Armistead Meowpin–after him); Diane Duane, Mike Stackpole (whose Gemstone persona and mine were married for a time) and a number of other sf/fantasy authors. Lots of PBS celebs from my days working in public television: Fred Rogers, various Sesame Street cast members and puppeteers, Shari Lewis (at a congressional appearance with whom I once had to dress in a Lamb Chop costume… oh the horror), Jim Lehrer and Robin MacNeil, Julia Childs (though I first met her one day in Cambridge when she knocked me over as she backed out of a specialty grocery store), Bill Moyers, the Kratt Brothers (yum) and others.
4. Would you want to be famous? Why or why not?
Not for fame’s sake, and definitely not to the point of being stalked in my home or mobbed on the street; but I do wish I’d accomplished or produced something that might be a little fameworthy.
5. If you had to trade places with a celebrity for a day, who would you choose and why?
J-Lo: men all want her, and she’s sleeping with Ben Affleck. <grin>

This article (nytimes.com), about the emotional and other challenges faced by gay partners when one or both of them are active military, made the front page of NYTimes.com.

At a time when thousands of Americans are planning for the return of their loved ones from the Middle East, there is a subset that remains largely invisible. The government’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which forbids gays in the military to be open about their sexual orientation, has caused an unknown number of couples to have their farewells behind closed doors, to plan similarly discreet homecomings and, in the time between, to resort to sterile or anonymous messages as a way of staying in touch.

With their hearts and lives in upheaval, the gay partners of troops in the gulf voice frustration that they have not received the benefits that married couples get, or the same level of emotional support. Several such people–male and female, who agreed to be interviewed only if their names were withheld, out of concern that their partners in uniform could be traced to them–also complained about a lack of support among other gay civilians, many of them skeptical about the armed forces.

This latter part is particularly distressing. And I know in the past, it’s something I participated in; my skepticism of the U.S. military and its leaders, and my disapproval of its policies toward gay men and lesbians, led me to harbor suspicion of anyone associated with or enlisted in the armed forces. It was only through my very close friendship with a straight married Air Force couple in the early 90s, which also brought me into contact with a wide variety of their military friends, that I recognized my own prejudicial thinking.

No, I didn’t support this invasion of Iraq by the U.S. I was very much against unilateral action by my administration without wider global support, and I’m still saddened and angered about the lives lost–on both sides–and the damage done to Iraqi cities and cultural institutions. But my heart truly goes out to the people who make up the forces, and especially to those who are separated from their loved ones, and most especially to those who cannot even acknowledge the existence of their relationship, for fear of being discharged, verbally or physically assaulted, or even killed.

When I started my current job last August, I also was tasked to be the Institute’s representative to the Department’s Internet Steering Committee. At my very first meeting and for a couple of months thereafter, the group complained about their frustration at the lack of participation and representation from my bureau in the past. I just apologized on behalf of the Institute, and tried to start being more responsive to the Committee’s needs.
So during this time, I’ve been working to provide information, and build bridges and relationships. In my first two months, for example, I created an annotated list of training materials and courses available to web developers from our bureau–a list I was told they’d been requesting from us for months. (To be honest, I’ve had to miss a few meetings when they conflicted with meetings here, but I’ve really been interested in the work of the Committee and have been engaged as much as possible.)
In February, the Committee authorized the creation of a Webmaster Working Group, a much more informal subgroup of web managers, developers and webmasters from across the agency. I wasn’t able to attend the first two meetings, but I sent people from my staff to make sure we were represented. Again, no one else from the Institute did so.
So today I was asked by the coordinator of the working group to come to their next meeting, next Thursday, to give a briefing about the training opportunities available for web developers. I agreed. I came back and ran it by my boss, just to clear it with her. She thought it was a great idea and a good opportunity for me, but suggested that I write it up in an email and send it to her, ccing her boss and her boss’s boss (the executive director for the Institute), just in case there were any political issues we weren’t seeing.
So I did. And the thing has gotten needlessly very politicized (surprise), and the Executive Director has replied that it is “probably ok” for me to attend the briefing (thanks a lot, since I wasn’t asking permission to attend, and since I’ve been the only one attending the Committee’s meetings all this time), but that we had to ask the registrar’s office and the School of Applied Information Technology (who as recently as last week decided not to announce one of their courses in a cable to posts because “they were afraid too many people might sign up”… just what sort of business do they think they’re in?) to give the briefing instead of me. These are the groups who haven’t been participating in the Committee, and who never provided the list of training opportunities the Committee had been asking for, and for whom I effectively ended up taking on that responsibility by researching and compiling that document.
I told the director that I was very confident that I could represent the Institute effectively, that the briefing was only 20 minutes so it needed to be a high-level overview rather than a drilling down into procedures and individual courses, and that I’d already done the preliminary work months ago–but I got shot down anyway. She said that even if the other two offices decline to send someone, I still will have to run my slides and comments by them for review and clearance beforehand. This was just meant to be an informal gathering of web managers, developers and webmasters at all levels to brainstorm and share information, not a presentation before the U.N.
So I’m hurt, angry and frustrated yet again by the political bullshit and a message that I’m either not trusted or not important enough to talk about the mission of the Institute, my own current responsibilities for managing training facilities and tools, and the previous work I’d already done in this arena on behalf of these other offices.
Some days I just don’t like working for the government.
The rest of the time I really hate it.

yes, I know: groan
I had forgotten, when writing my previous entry about geocaching on the way home, about the other cool thing that happened to me while walking home from work today.
One of the houses along the way had a bunch of pots on a little bench, next to the sidewalk, along with a note. I walked over, and saw that the pots were full of mint, and the note explained that the mint was free for the taking, but not to “let it take over.” So I took a pot and brought it home with me; spearmint. I don’t have a yard, only containers on my balcony, so I don’t have to worry about the mint taking over. Will be very nice to have fresh mint now.
Sometimes people can be so cool.

There’s a geocache hidden near my office that I’ve been looking for, without success, off and on since last August. The other day I discovered that it had been revised and moved, and I still had the original coordinates and information in my GPS. So, today on the way home from work, I stopped by the new coordinates again, and finally found it after about 10 minutes of searching. I signed the log, took out a Pez dispenser, and left a cow magnet I’d found in a cache we’d located while I was vacationing in Tucson at the end of March.

In the late 80s and early 90s I belonged to a local GLBT computer BBS called GLIB. One Saturday in 1990, I think, the group had planned a day trip by train to Atlantic City. On Friday night, I logged into the BBS and entered the chat room, and there was a new guy there I hadn’t talked to before–I’ll call him JJ. We started chatting, really hit it off, and talked through the night. There was that sense of this being someone I’d known all my life. The next morning, as I was needing to leave in order to get to the train station on time, I talked him into deciding–on the spur of the moment–to come on the outing too.

Continue reading →

Midnight – You are a deep thinker, always searching
for answers and never quite at home. You are
very contemplative, and enjoy being alone with
your thoughts.

When are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

A Queens University (Belfast) study published today in the journal Heart purports that “[m]oderate exercise such as half an hour of brisk walking five times a week is unlikely to prevent an early death from heart disease, say researchers…. Only vigorous exercise such as jogging and hiking seems to make a difference.”
“Moderate [e.g., golf, digging (?) or dancing] and light [walking, bowling or sailing] levels of regular exercise had no impact on death rates from all causes or specifically from heart disease.”
So I finally get myself motivated to start exercising by walking the mile and a half to and from work every day rather than driving (ok, motivated because my car stopped working), and now I find out that I’m just gonna drop dead of a heart attack anyway. Looks like there’s no point in refraining from eating the bacon big boy.