Just another beautiful day in Southeastern Massachusetts:
Blizzard conditions with heavy snow and very gusty winds. There could even be a rumble of thunder. Low 18F. Winds NE at 35 to 50 mph. A foot or more of snow expected. Winds could occasionally gust over 50 mph.
I just returned from the grocery store, where there were 40 people in line at the deli, the meat counter was 60% empty, and the lines were 8 people deep.
It’s just snow folks – you’ll scoop it out and goto work the next day… geesh!
Already quoted by many in the last few hours, James Lileks cranked one off in yesterday’s Bleat regarding Dr. Rice’s confirmation hearings before the United States Senate:
I listened to some of the Dr. Rice hearings today. Listening to Sen. Boxer is like having someone pump six gallons of lukewarm tea up a catheter tube. Slowly. It’s like being beaten to death by a moth. The rest of the questions were a bit more adept, inasmuch as they postured and preened with greater skill – but I kept wondering, who’s their audience? Who are they talking to? Who is this supposed to impress? I suppose if you believe that Abu Ghraib is the defining crime of the 21st century, you’re impressed that they’re still gnawing the bone; if you still believe that the solution to Iraqnam is the addition of Russian forces (!) (as Kerry suggested) (!) then this was heartening: truth to power, man. But to someone who is not on the moveon.org mailing list, it’s more of the same. More about WMD, for example. I too deplore the Bush administration’s decision in 2002 to go back to 1998 and plant all those false stories about Iraqi WMD and Saddam’s Al Qaeda connections in the mainstream media, for example, but I’m more interested in what comes next. (And I still, stubbornly, support the decision to go in.) What I heard from Rice’s interrogators was the same thing I heard back in the 80s – often from my own mouth, in fact. The voice of Wise Calm International Reason, all-knowing in retrospect, all-trusting in the power of a summit or a thick piece of paper signed at an impressive ceremony and toasted with Moet. But here’s the thing: the tone of voice, the tendentious lectures, the sonorous outrage, and the overall oppositional posture would have been the same if 9/11 and Iraq had never happened, and they were discussing, say, don’t ask / don’t tell or relations with Haiti.
I really wish someone would run against Barbara Boxer.. and win!
As I thought might happen some time ago, the War on Terrorism has returned to Boston, captured here in this article from the Boston Globe:
The FBI launched a massive manhunt across the region yesterday for six people, four Chinese scientists and two Iraqis, said to be planning to detonate a “dirty bomb” in Boston, local public safety officials briefed on the threat said.
An anonymous tipster told authorities that the six sneaked into the United States from Mexico and were headed to New York and then to Boston, where they intended to launch an attack that could involve a lethal radioactive material, several officials briefed on the threat said.
The threat was reported to a California police department by someone in Mexico who said he had smuggled the suspects across the border, the officials said. The FBI had not corroborated the information as of last night, and officials expressed skepticism about the credibility of the tip, saying the names of the suspects had been run through all available databases of criminals and nothing had come up.
“What we’re trying to do is reassure the public that there’s no reason to panic, because the information has come from an unknown source, and none of the information has been corroborated,” US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan said in an interview yesterday. “At the same time, we have to do our diligence.”
Sullivan said officials had decided to release the names and photos of the four Chinese nationals — Zengrong Lin, Wen Quin Zheng, Xiujin Chen, and Guozhi Lin — because they believe the public could help investigators find the two men and two women.
“There’s an interest on the part of law enforcement to at least locate and speak with these individuals,” Sullivan said.
The information about the four was all that the tipster provided, public safety officials said. The tipster gave no identifying information about the Iraqis, they said.
Federal, state, and city officials were taking the threat seriously yesterday. The threat was discussed in President Bush’s morning security briefing. Representatives from several state agencies, including the Department of Public Health and the National Guard, were gathered at an emergency bunker in Framingham, as Boston police were readying themselves to respond to an attack.
I should take a moment to point out that on Friday, January 14th, I celebrated my third anniversary of blogging.
Not a bad run so far:
Thanks for coming here day after day and reading my babbles!
It was ten years ago next week that I was first promoted into a position where I was a leader of others.
Sure, I had been in positions of responsibility before. As a young man, my peers selected me as Patrol Leader in my Boy Scout Troop. Later, I was selected as the Senior Patrol Leader. It was a difficult and humbling experience to be responsible for other people. It was certainly not easy.
I earned my spending money as a teenager by umpiring softball games each night at the city park – and then, after turning eighteen, by refereeing basketball and volleyball games as well. Hell hath no fury like that directed at a referee in an Indiana High School Basketball game. But I digress.
Ten years ago next week I was promoted to lead a small team of men and women in Columbus, Indiana. And that was the beginning of quite an adventure. A year and a half later, I found myself without a team in Baltimore, Maryland as an investigator. And then, not even a year later, thrown to the wolves in New Jersey leading a much larger team that spanned several store locations. Then a year in Cleveland.
And then in 1999, we packed up and moved to Boston. And we’ve been here ever since.
When I arrived in Boston in January 1999, I was one of only a handful of employees of my company north of New York City. We were the vanguard that established the base, hired the people, trained the teams, and then started up a huge operation. Now there are thousands of us – and we’re still growing.
There have been tough spots along the way – stupid mistakes that I made, silly things I did, and dumb acts I committed that got me in hot water. But it was all for a good cause – and we’ve had a blast doing it. But now it’s time to move on.
Eight years in the same position and six years in one place is a long time – I stayed here for personal reasons, but also because it was fun. As a history buff, it’s tough to pull away from the place where our forefathers first marched against the British.. to walk the trail where Paul Revere road.. to stand at the bridge where the minutemen first confronted the British under arms.. to walk the deck of the USS Constitution.. to stare with respect at the grave of Sam Adams, and John Hancock, and many others….
On Thursday, I was promoted to a new position at our headquarters in Minneapolis. In less than two weeks, I head up into the great white north to take on an entirely new challenge: staffer. I’m going to be a project manager of sorts working on a couple initiatives. I’ll be commuting back and forth for a few months and then relocating permanently.
For ten years, I’ve led teams. Now I’m just going to be a part of one. That’s going to be a major change. No more office, now I’ll be in a cubicle. Gone is the casual dress code, back into suit and tie… things are certainly going to be different….
I expect the work to be difficult, highly challenging, creative, and have a major impact on what we’re doing. And that excites me. There are few feelings quite like taking a vision, breaking it down, and building that into something that we can execute – and that’s going to be alot of what I do in my new role. And I’m really looking forward to it.
But I will always miss my team. There’s never been a challenge in my life quite like leading a group of talented individuals. But I am so much the better for having worked with them. I’ll always be proud to have been a part of their team.
Want to see what a soldier things about Michael Moore? Take a gander at Michael’s Post over at A Day In Iraq:
Mr. Moore, I humbly implore you to take that award and shove it up your ass. As for making more Fahrenheit 9/11’s, more power to you, it’s a free country thanks to the people that you continue to exploit. I warn you however, as I have before, if I or any of my brothers appear in one of your films, you will regret it. To combat your propaganda I have purchased a copy of FahrenHYPE 9/11 to take with me when I leave in a few days. I know among someone’s DVD collection there is a copy of your film. When I hear of your movie getting passed around among the guys, I will get them to watch Fahrenhype 9/11. It’s sad that I have to include a DVD in my arsenal of weapons to combat the enemy.
When we began putting together our DVD collection after joining the DVD revolution late, there were two documentaries that I wanted in that collection. Ken Burn’s incredible The Civil War.. and Eyes on the Prize, the documentary about the civil rights movement.
I remember watching Eyes on the Prize in school in the late 1980s or early 1990s – for a few days during a history class. I don’t think there’s ever been a more poignant documentary about life in these United States – and one that every person should watch to understand the Civil Rights Movement. Course, I also think that history classes should travel to Fort McHenry in Baltimore to hear the story of Francis Scott Key, to the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts to see where all of this began, and to Little Round Top near Gettysburg where Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine held the line and saved the Union army.. but I’m known to have rather extreme views.
That said, apparently I won’t be buying a DVD set of Eyes on the Prize, because of some overstrung copyright laws, as reported in today’s Boston Globe:
“EYES ON THE PRIZE,” the epic 1986 documentary series on the civil rights movement, contains a scene showing Martin Luther King Jr. on his 39th birthday — his last — in 1968. King, who was trying to take on poverty and the Vietnam War simultaneously, was under tremendous stress at the time, and his staff sang ”Happy Birthday” in an attempt to cheer him up.
But the producers of ”Eyes” almost had to leave the scene out of the finished documentary. ”Happy Birthday,” as it turns out, was copyrighted in 1935 and, following the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, will remain so until at least 2030. Filmmakers have been known to pay $15,000 to $20,000 for just one verse, according to a recent report on documentary clearances issued by the Center for Social Media.
The song ultimately stayed in the film, but don’t plan on celebrating King’s birthday tomorrow by going to your local video store to buy a copy of ”Eyes on the Prize.” Thanks to rights restrictions on archival material used in the documentary, the 14-hour chronicle tracing the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycotts in the 1950s to the rise of black mayors in the 1980s can no longer be released in new editions or shown on television. PBS’s right to air the film expired in 1993. Meanwhile, the VHS edition has gone out of print and a DVD release would require relicensing. (Complete sets of used videos are currently going for as much as $1,000 on Amazon.)
The problem goes beyond one documentary. ”We are crippling the story-telling of our own culture by the rigidity of our copyright interpretation,” says Patricia Aufderheide, who cowrote the Center for Social Media report ”Untold Stories,”
I’m friends with many artists and photographers and even a few cartoonists – I fully respect their views on copyright and share many of them. But issues like this just frustrate the hell out of me.
Let’s do the right things for Eyes on the Prize…