The Daily Grill

He Died For Our Stick-Figured Sins

I love when religious types get their signals crossed when it comes to their sacred cows. In this case, 8-year-old Chester Johnson had been assigned to make a Christmas drawing as part of a class project. Turns out the administration at his school in Taunton, Mass., didn't much care for his stick figure drawing of Jesus Christ on the cross. (See the figure to the right...)

They sent Chester home from school. But that wasn't the worst of their hypocritical stance: They ordered the boy to undergo a psychological evaluation.

Okay, let's see. You're an 8-year-old child who has, given the subject of Chester's drawing, attended a Christmas Mass or two in your few years on Earth. Not to mention almost every Sunday if you're part of a God-fearing Christian family and community. What would be the one enduring symbol of your religion? The one thing that would be burned into your head?

Oh, yeah.

That guy nailed to the boards, right up in front, over the head of the other guy in the robes warning you to be good or the guy stuck to the boards is going to get you.

Little Chester should be given a pass on this absurdity. What's more, it seems like the morons of Taunton are the ones that need to have their heads examined.

UPDATE: Thanks to reader Debbie Wolfe for pointing me to a recent press release issued by Taunton Public Schools in which they point out that a number of inaccuracies about this story have been punched up by the media. Check it out here.

My Kindle Ate My Homework

I've been a huge proponent of personal computers and all other gadgetry in general. Bought Radio Shack's TRS-80 back in 1980-when-it-came-out. The first 128K-no-hard-drive Mac. The original Palm Pilot. No tech too glitchy, no adoption too early.

The commonality about it all? I've been in ultimate control of what content was in it. Big Brother might be watching, but it was strictly hands off. Amazon slapped my sense of ownership and control across the face yesterday when I learned they reached right into the Kindles of an unspecified number of customers and deleted — irony of ironies — copies of George Orwell's “1984”. Also his "Animal Farm".

Acccording to the NYTimes, some owners got to bear witness to the digital zap as they were in the midst of reading the book. Including one student who had been making digital notes on the work for a summer class — since his annotations were part of the digital files they, too, vanished. (I guess he can try telling his teacher, "My Kindle ate my homework.")

Amazon's reasons were sound enough: the company that had originally uploaded the books to be sold were not the legal holders of the copyright so they were not entitled to profit from them. and the customers with the vanishing literature were refunded their purchase price. But the "no excuse" part was Amazon reaching out its digital tentacle into owners' personal Kindle devices and wiping out the files.

It seems an accidental glimpse of what could be construed as censorship on a massive scale. Amazon, in retrospect, realized they screwed up as a spokeman said, “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.” Gotta love the conditional nature of "in these circumstances."

What happens a couple of more generations down the road when printed text is nothing more than a quaint reminder of the way people used to read? When some government decides that certain material is deemed illegal and is able to wipe it out from millions of digital memories, Hitler's book burnings will seem a drop in the bucket.

Guess I better start stocking up on printer paper.

Comcraptic!

I'm hereby lodging a hue and cry against my local Comcast "service" in Half Moon Bay, California. Their lameness here is perpetual -- still no On Demand, for instance -- while their rates are the same outrageousness as elsewhere. The last couple of weeks seems to be a new low.

My high speed Internet access has become a joke. It goes on and off intermittently, with no rhyme or reason, for hours at a time. As for the TV side of things, it suffers outages as well, but not during the same periods as the web stumbles. And not all the channels go out -- weirdly, the premiums like HBO stay up while the basics fail.

On the one hand, the unpredictabilty is quaint, not unlike living as a character in the old "Green Acres". I actually have gotten a lot of reading done! On the other hand, a lot of actual work isn't getting done during normal working hours.

To my point (not that this rant constitutes work), I'm having to write and post this with my iPhone.

AIG To Pay Bonuses - Unbleeping Believable

According the NYTimes and other sources, AIG, the American International Group insurance fraudery, has opted to dole out the biggest chunk of the more than $170 BILLION they got from our bailout money on bonuses. Reportedly, $165 million of it is being handed out as we speak to company executives. Suits who are in the same unit responsible for almost collapsing the company last year. The company mouthpieces are saying that they are "contractually obligated" to pay the bonuses. Holy crap! A job where you get to sign a deal that guarantees to pay you for screwing the pooch? I never planned to take a corporate job but is AIG still hiring?!

Pre-existing Condition

Today the US governmint is shelling out another $30 billion of our hard-earned moola to insurance giant AIG. Seems the earlier $60 billion loan (on top of another $40B buyout of share AND $50B spent absorbing AIG's "toxic assets") hasn't been enough to keep them from stumbling — this morning they're posting $60B in losses in the last quarter. Gee, do you think the company's dead in the water? After all, that's the kind of bloat consistent with a body that's been in the river for a while. You'd think AIG would have been shrewd enough to take out a policy against this kind of tragedy...

Welcome to the Sickfare State

The NYTimes is reporting today that last year's bloated bailout and the imminent overstuffed stimulus package is not enough. Banks, carmakers, insurance companies -- they're all whining for more. If this sounds familiar it's not echoes from the Great Depression. It's a very similar sound to the people who insist they have eight kids but want welfare instead of a job to feed them.

Pushy, Pushy

First former prez Bush ramrodded last year's bailout bill through Congress, to everyone's regret (except the banks and other unaccountable recipients of OUR largess) and now White House Resident Obama is calling the delay in rushing his stimulus package through "inexcusable." Plunking out almost a trillion dollars shouldn't be like asking a pal for a loan. Instead, doesn't that just raise a platoon of red flags and make you want to pick it apart even more to see what pork is hiding therein? It took us years to get into this financial cesspool -- let's take a little extra time to make sure the ladder doesn't collapse when we try to get out.

The Dismantling of America

The Senate tripped and fell on their way to deciding the $14B automaker bailout. They pulled the plug. Yanked the rug out from under. Shut off the lights on their way out the door. Though seemingly unlikely, there's a very real possibility that the Big 3 will end up selling off their brands and assets to automakers overseas (kind of like the way Budweiser is now a Belgian product...) With all of the migration of every kind of industry heading off to lands where labor is cheap and the political favors cheaper, it may just be a matter of time before the United States starts looking like one of those big Mervyn stores in their final days (or Federated, Circuit City, The Good Guys, ad infinitum), where the only things left to sell are the racks and other fixtures.

And sure it will be cool to own one of those lugnut-tightening robots off a defunct Ford assembly line. Or have a used chassis hoist in your garage to hold that 3rd car aloft. The irony being, of course, that none of the cars in your garage will be American-made. Yes, they might say GM. Or Ford. Or Chevrolet. Probably hyphenated with Toyota or Honda or BMW.

It probably serves Detroit -- and us -- right. This is the same industry that created the Sport Utility Vehicle out of NO market demand for such a machine. Until they rolled off the line, Americans didn't know they wanted one. But the automakers were pretty confident that, if they built it, we would come. I suspect their attempts to produce anything but gas-guzzling pollution-spewing behemoths were propelled by the oil industry. And now they're spinning madly in a circle, trying to identify the bite marks in their asses.

But where are we going to go? And, equally important, how are we going to get there? I exclusively drove Fords since 1992. Up until two years ago. That's when my Ford dealer suggested I should check out the Mazda across the street. No matter the two lots were owned by the same dealer -- the point was that there was one less hunk of American metal rolling off the lot that day.

I wonder if this is the way the British felt two century turns ago when the Empire was gasping its last. Probably didn't even know what hit them until they saw an ad on the telly for H. Salt Esq. Fish & Chips. The recipe and its owner having fled London for California before opening up their shop for the first time on American soil.

That flaky fish dish provides the perfect condiment for trying to choke down what's happening to this country -- would someone please pass the vinegar?

Flailing While Bailing

What the hell is Congress doing? They approve a whacked-out $700 billion bailout plan for Wall Street with little or no accountability for an industry that produces nothing but red and black numbers. Then they make the Big 3 automakers sweat and grovel for a handout that, while ridiculously large ($25 to $35 billion) is still a pittance compared to the previous amount. And the automakers actually make something! Just because it's a product that a lot of Americans are not asking for isn't the point...

One interesting point is that Big Bro didn't ask to be cut in as a partner with the car makers like he did the banks. What's up with that? Detroit not good enough for the wannabe central banking set?

And why is it that we have to be put in a position of bailing out the auto industry, anyway? Remember the last two years? When gas prices were atrociously high and the oil companies were pulling in billions of dollars in sheer profit, quarter after quarter? It makes more sense that they should be ponying up a big ol' cash life preserver for the companies largely responsible for their windfall.

In the case of both of these bailout situations, the true solution should simply be that large chunks of money should just be forked over to the American people. Not because we're brilliant en masse or that we deserve it but because we would know what to do with all of that deliciously filthy lucre -- we'd spend it. Every bit of it. End of crisis. America saved!

At least until next month.

Bill Of Goods Comes Due

So now it seems the vaunted $700 billion bailout that the Fed's Ben "Trust Me" Bernacke and Treasury Secretary Henry "Trust Me?" Paulson pushed so hard for turns out to be like a three-card monte game after all. Paulson flipped his flop last week and said the bailout money WON'T be used to buy crappy mortgages from banks. Instead, it now seems like the real scheme is to funnel a huge chunk of the fundage into banks in exchange for partial ownership stakes. If you'll remember, this alternative was a "possibility" when the plan was first touted. Now it's the main stem of the deal. Just as I'd said a little over a month ago, it looks like Uncle Sam is gunning to pull together a central bank, to be made up of the bits and pieces of the banking interests it intends to comandeer. America's forefathers didn't want a central bank (most of 'em, anyway) but the country's baby mamas apparently do. Good going, lawmakers! Way to keep your eye on the red queen...