feline backsliding, and the Two-Feet Theory of Capitalism vs Communism

[robling_t]

The Nar, who speak entirely in metaphor, call Chicago "the limitless, unforgiving sky; the prison which will forever watch over our graves" in the winter. Too bad it's winter.

I was quite surprised to discover, in the course of a casual conversation with Mum about the interesting bottles of the pomegranate juice that's suddenly being advertised on all the billboards, that Mum had never heard the story that blames winter on Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. What were they teaching them in the schools back then, we got Greek mythology every couple of years even in my Catholic high school...


I've been feeling more logy than bloggy lately, and it didn't help to be woken up at 7:38 this morning by loud cursing: Parties Unknown but suspected to be furry had chosen an unguarded interval while Mum went out to move the car from metered to street parking to whizz in her bed. Somehow in this instance I suspect Weasel, since she's been objecting to something on that bed since the last time the sheets got changed. Regardless, I got woken up far too early and ended up falling back asleep around ten, didn't wake up again until two, and had to run out to do the bank-holiday errands without getting a shower, which was Bad because my hair is a sight. (It's been long enough since my last haircut that I don't recall just when that was exactly, and when my hair is even this long it demands washing every twenty minutes or it goes on strike by sticking up in random directions all over my head.) So today could be said to have not gone very well.

Among other trials, Weasel was briefly expressing a sudden interest in the bookcase behind which is the access panel to the bathtub pipes, as if she heard Something Thumpy And Scratchy wandering around back there, and I just smashed a smallish Insect Of Suspicious Character in the bathroom before getting a proper identification on it, which will probably get me worrying and setting out (yet more) poison for fear it's the scout for an invasion force, louche housekeeper that our landlord is (in all fairness, when we came in at 7 I counted lights in only about 15 units out of 50-odd, so her financial troubles run far deeper than our payment habits and this may explain the laxity of her maintainance schedule). I knew it was bad karma to let Mum smoosh that centipede, even if it was the size of a pair of fake halloween eyelashes stuck to a Good'n'Plenty. (Oh, yes, the Unauthorized Lifeforms include centipedes as well; I'm inclined to tolerate those on the grounds that, as predators, they're eating whatever else might be living in our walls. Hoovering up the ants, for example. But Mum can't stand them.) I'm keeping my fingers crossed that since the insect in question was standing in full lighting on the wall above the bathroom sink, where moreover the outside bugs tend to rest between dives at the bulb, it may simply have been an innocent wanderer who came in when it went from 58 to 25 out. (Like the Thumpy And Scratchys do. [sigh]) I suppose I ought to start wearing my glasses in the house.


On to the news roundup:

I thought Art Carney was dead. I may be thinking of Don Ameche -- is Don Ameche dead? It seems as if a whole generation of celebs is suddenly popping off; we lost Irv Kupcinet on Monday, and I can't help but wonder who may be next.



Now the illegal immigrants who got busted in the Wal-Mart scandal are suing Wal-Mart with the claim that they were being discriminated against in their wages and compensation because they were illegals, or specifically Mexicans, or something, it's not entirely clear which from the various news squibs. The absurdity of the specific claim aside, I think this is actually an important point to make: the 'immigration problem' in this country isn't so much the would-be immigrants themselves, it's the businesses who are content to hire illegals because they know they can underpay and variously abuse undocumented workers without fear of being reported, by the workers at least. And this drives wages and conditions down for everyone, because who can compete honestly with a company that slashes its costs by slashing labor costs below a livable standard simply because they know illegals don't dare blab for fear of being deported and anyway ten more are waiting to take the job? I think if we truly wanted to stem the tide of surplus immigration we'd do much better to crack down on the Demand side of the equation: put it about that you have to be legal to work here, no two ways about it, and perhaps at least some of those would-be economic immigrants (as opposed to out-and-out refugees such as what Britain even with its restrictive labor policies still has to worry about) would discover the patience to Go Through Channels.

But of course we probably don't really want to stem the tide, since interfering with the free operations of the labor market would be Communism. Idunno, maybe I am some sort of lefty pinko or something, but it seems to me, if everybody's got the same number of feet, then doesn't it stand to reason that it would be in Capitalism's own best interests to accept some restraining measures to try to arrange it so that the maximum number of consumers, IE wage-earners, have at least the minimal level of resources necessary to buy the shoes being produced? Otherwise after a while the people with the money have all the shoes they could possibly consume in a zillion years, and continued shoe consumption drops off sharply. Hell, Henry Ford, not otherwise noted for being a stalwart Red, realized a hundred years ago that it was to his long-term benefit to take the short-term hit of paying his workers enough to buy his product...

[blink blink] Well, I guess I'd been saving that one up for a while, so I guess if here is where it finally got put into pixels so be it, one less 'I'll write that up when I get around to it' hanging over my head... I suppose I could also start in on H-1B visas which can be abused to much the same result: the noncitizen worker, although working in this country under a legal arrangement, can be and from what I've heard too often is pressured to produce more for less than what a comparable citizen would insist upon, and ends up having to go along for fear of the company terminating their end of the agreement out of spite, which would generally end up in deportation procedures for the hapless H-1B. And nobody ends up happy except the company which just goes out and gets another one. (I'm not anti-immigration, lest one take all this to imply that; I just think we're going at the issue from the wrong end of the telescope, so to speak, if we rail on about 'furr'n'rs takin' our jobs' without considering why this is the net result of current immigration facts-on-the-ground.)


And digressing onto the subject of 'facts-on-the-ground', I find it rather suspect that the Administration chooses to blame either remnants of Saddam loyalists or an influx of foreign Bad Guys or both for the continuing and escalating hostility towards the occupying forces in Iraq, without seeming to consider the third possibility that what we're looking at here is a movement mobilizing around the guy who wants to be the next Saddam Hussein. Considering the historical examples of the French Resistance or the Viet Cong, I think it's far more likely that the opposition is an internal outgrowth of the average Iraqi in the street being various colors of pissed about having their lives, however dismal they may have been, intruded upon by all the crap and inconvenience attendant upon being militarily occupied, especially being occupied by humongous and teched-up corn-fed lugs like us. (Yes, yes, I know, support our troops and all that -- I'm just trying to look at us as others might be seeing us under the circumstances, and I can't help thinking that to most of the developing world US soldiers must look like fucking aliens.) Where we went wrong in Vietnam, from what I can make out, was in overestimating the guy in the street's opinion of us -- he or she may have hated and resented the French and the Communists and everybody else, but we ended up causing them to hate us more, and it's simply human nature to get stubborn when well-meaning people are trying to tell you how to run your affairs. And everything I've heard out of Iraq so far looks a lot more like a resistance movement mining the roads and killing collaborators than terrorist actions or coherent loyalist remnants.


Anyway. On to a happier item: Donations towards the medical issues of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's ailing hard drive were apparently sufficient to address her financial needs, and she's just as surprised as I was at the response to her troubles. Score another one for the Mac community.


And to ramble even farther afield, since it's been a while and I seem to be in the mood at the moment, I went to check out the latest Apple Store out at Old Orchard (nice, if small), and since I needed to find a greeting-card for something, I decided that so long as we'd gone to the trouble of parking it would be worth trying at Barnes & Noble. As we were standing in the entryway, blinking and trying to remember where the cards were, a lady asked if we were there for the book signing: evidently, we'd stumbled upon the book tour of Paul Burrell, Princess Diana's butler who's alleging that she had suspicions that Something Awful might be in store for her.

Alas, our schedule didn't permit us to attend the event: I note it here chiefly because the entire issue of Burrell's Letters tends to vindicate my initial gut reaction upon hearing of the crash -- which was that it was a hit. I try my best not to buy into Conspiracy Theories, but I've always thought that there seemed to be a lot of factors arguing 'for' having Diana done away with, and relatively unconvincing counterarguments; having a writerly turn of mind can trip one up, of course, but then, things do happen than even a writer couldn't dream up (9/11, for example: leaving aside the question of whether I would have thought of/done such a thing, I don't even now believe that I could have thought of it; considered purely as a technical accomplishment, which is about the only way I can wrap my mind around it even a little, to have come up with, a) hijacking a plane which is b) full of jet fuel, to c) smash it into the building that d) has the radio, e) TV, and f) cellphone antennas for most of the area, and get it to g) fall down, h) into the subway system thereby cutting off a lot of transit and threatening to i) flood the entire subway system as well... and j)killing most of the city's emergency responders in the process -- well, even leaving aside a staggering death-toll that could have been ten times worse, it's more than enough havoc to have people walking out of a movie in disbelief if you tried to make it up. Oh, and I even forgot k), the resultant economic disruption because it physically interfered with operations of the country's primary Financial District.).

But it's late, or early as the case may be, so I'll pick this up some other time... Next Rant: CTA hikes fares to $1.75; maybe just once they could try lowering it instead and see if they can make it up in volume...?