joe posts

I’ve read about the huge prison industry in the United States, but I was surprised to hear that now the judges have gotten in on the action.

Two US judges charged with taking more than $2m (£1.4m) in kickbacks from a privately-run detention centre have pleaded guilty to fraud.

Prosecutors say Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took the money in return for giving young offenders long sentences to serve in the centre. – BBC

Fraud?! That’s just product promotion! This wise investor had a captive audience. Poor kids:

A spokeswoman for the non-profit Juvenile Law Center said 1,000-2,000 juveniles who came before the judge between 2003 and 2006 received excessively harsh sentences.

Many of the children were first-time offenders and had no lawyers to defend them.

Get Tough on Crime! Make Millions!

So I’m reading a news story about American hospitals and their struggles to retain nurses. It’s a struggle almost everywhere, for sure – to call it an extremely stressful job doesn’t really do it justice. And in Ontario, thanks to two decades of neoconservative and neoliberal leaders, things are imploding. Cutbacks in the hospitals in the 1990s meant a decline in quality of care and poor working environments for professionals, and cutbacks to education have raised tuition costs and have made it difficult to attract new people to the field. It costs at least $25,000 to study to be a nurse, and there’s about a 1/4 odds that your $25,000 degree will be useless a year after graduation and you’ll be working in a warehouse, self-medicating for job-related PTSD. ( But I digress!) Add the baby boomer retirement schedule… and you get the picture.

So I’m reading this article and I had to laugh because AMERICAN HOSPITALS can’t keep nurses! AMERICAN HOSPITALS! What they’re trying to do is introduce a residency-style program for new nurses. I have to say it makes sense. Emphasis mine!:

The Versant plan pairs new nurses with more experienced nurses and they share patients. At first, the veterans do the bulk of the work as the rookies watch; by the end of the 18-week training program, those roles are reversed.

The new nurses must complete a 60-item checklist. They must learn how to put in an IV line and urinary catheter; interpret different heart rhythms and know how to treat them; monitor patients on suicide watch and do hourly checkups on very critically ill patients; know how to do a head-to-toe physical assessment on a patient, as well as how to inform families about the condition of their loved one.

For Yaima Milian, who’s currently in the program at Baptist, this is markedly different from the preparation she got at her first hospital in New Jersey. She left after a six-week orientation because she didn’t feel ready to work solo. – AP

18 weeks. Four and a half months. And the nurse mentioned left after a six-week orientation program at a hospital in New Jersey. I can believe it. I would say two month minimum. A nurse might have the skills, but every floor is different and requires a whole lot of learning.

My orientation at the Sudbury Regional Hospital lasted three days. And they weren’t 12 hour days, they were 8 hour days, as I recall. At the end of the three days, I told them I was wholly unprepared, so they generously extended it for another six days or so. I quit after a few months – just couldn’t handle it.

Suddenly I feel less guilty about leaving the profession. No wonder I felt unprepared – it wasn’t even a cushy American hospital (I’m kidding about that America, don’t worry, I know your hospitals aren’t that cushy, unless they don’t allow poor people in). I think a residency-style program would work wonders for retention – unfortunately it’s that kind of creative thinking that our political parties despise. Sounds like it would cost tax-dollars, doesn’t it? That might make it hard to cut taxes and raise MP pay again.

Private healthcare, here we come.

I didn’t get Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! right away – The first few times I thought it sounded completely off. Then I remembered I felt that way about pretty much every Bad Seeds album. It was “Moonland,” “Night of the Lotus Eaters,” and then “We Call Upon The Author” that quickly turned me around – the lyrics in the latter are hilarious and awesome:

——-

We Call Upon The Author

What we once thought we had
We didn’t
And what we have now
Will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain

Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets
We’ve shunned them from the greasy-grind
The poor little things, they look so sad and old
As they mount us from behind
I ask them to desist and to refrain
And then we call upon the author to explain

Rosary clutched in his hand
He died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals
Chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we call upon the author to explain

He said everything is messed up ’round here
Everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy
Against the likes of you and me
In this idiot constituency of the moon
Well he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

Well, I go guru-ing down the street
Young people gather ’round my feet
And they ask me things
But I don’t know where to start
They ignite the powder-trails
Straight to my father’s heart
And once again I call upon the author to explain

Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing
That mediocres my every thought?
I feel like a vacuum cleaner; a complete sucker
It’s fucked up and he is a fucker
But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain

Well rampant discrimination
Mass poverty
Third world debt
Infectious disease
Global inequality
And deepening socio-economic divisions
Well, it does in your brain
And we call upon the author to explain

Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window
“Hey Doug, how you been?”
[...]
Brings me back a book on Holocaust poetry
Complete with pictures
Then tells me to get ready for the rain
And we call upon the author to explain

I say prolix! Prolix!

Something a pair of scissors can fix!

Bukowski was a jerk
Berryman was best
He wrote like wet papier mache
Ah but he went the Hemingway
Weirdly on wings
And with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

Down in my bolthole I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“Well the waves, the waves, were soldiers moving.”
Well, thank you. Thank you! Thank you!
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

————-

He’s a hero. They should put those shoes on display in an Iraqi museum. Unfortunately they were blown up by the bomb squad. Really. I guess they were worried the shoes might be thrown again and not blow up again. There’s nothing more dangerous than a non-exploded non-explosive.

It sounds silly to deify a shoe-thrower (seriously, who throws a shoe?!) but it certainly worked as an attention getter as he called Bush a bitch and reminded him of all the people he’s murdered with his neoliberal crusade to remake the Middle East. I hope this reporter lives a long and healthy life and gets to enjoy all the benefits of being ‘the guy who threw a shoe at Bush.’ But not before the goons torture him and we have the obligatory false confession – pretty much the regular War Against Terror Treatment:

He said he visited his brother Sunday and found him missing a tooth and with cigarette burns on his ears. He also said his brother told him that jailers also doused him with cold water while he was naked. – AP

So rest assured, America, that your pResident will not be harmed by this shoe-thrower ever again. If he survives American-sponsored torture and sexual assault and imprisonment he’ll certainly be traumatized and possibly very very angry at those who’ve ruined his country and his life.

And here’s exactly what he said, and why it matters. Who else has gotten away with ten seconds of truth with this pResident?:

Contrary to most media coverage, the 28-year-old TV reporter Muntadhar al-Zaidi made history not by merely throwing a pair of shoes, the highest expression of insult in Iraqi culture, at the US president, but by what he said while doing so and as he was smothered by US and Iraqi security men. He groaned as they dragged him out of the press conference. They succeeded in silencing him – and according to his brother he was beaten in custody – but he had already said enough to shake the occupation and Nouri al-Maliki’s Green Zone regime to their foundations.

Strip the words away, and his and the Iraqi people’s cry of deep pain, anger and defiance would amount to no more than a shoe-throwing insult. But the words were heard. “This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” he shouted as he threw the first shoe. The crucial line followed the second shoe: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” Once those words were heard, the impact of a pair of shoes became electrifying. A young journalist has put aside the demands of his profession, preferring to act as the loudest cry of his long-suffering people. If one considers the torture and killings in Iraqi and US jails that Muntadhar often mentioned in his reports for al-Baghdadia satellite TV station, he was certainly aware he risked being badly hurt. – The shoes we longed for

Here’s an odd Toronto story: An irate bus driver threatened to have me arrested because I didn’t know that I needed a $3.00 fare to get OFF the bus in York Region. The TTC has to pay that particular section of Toronto extra money to prop up Viva and the other bus service that operates there. Now that I know, I can see that they post a little note on the route maps to let us know that it’s a double fare, and sometimes those screens on the exterior of the bus flash a “double fare” message. But I wasn’t paying attention – when I mapped it out online it looked like I would still be in Toronto.

I was going to a job interview way the heck up Keele street, and the bus driver made an announcement saying it was $3.00 to exit the bus north of Steeles – but of course he makes the announcement as he leaves the stop at Steeles street, and I assumed the NEXT stop would, naturally, be the ‘last chance.’ I wasn’t carrying any cash, just tokens, so I wanted to jump off and just walk there. I tried the back door, but it was locked..

“You have to exit at the front of the bus.”

“Ok…”

“It’s $3.00.”

Rummaging. “… I only have $1.00.”

“Then I’m calling the police to have you arrested. I made an announcement. I HAVE WITNESSES!” (waving towards the other passengers)

He picked up his phone and started dialing.

Oh sure. Call the cops. I know mistake was mine, but it’s trivial, and I almost want to know what exactly the police would do about it. Slap handcuffs on me and take me to the station? Or just force me to ride the bus forever? Part of me really wanted to push it. Hell, if I’m going to get “arrested” over two measly bucks, I at least have to make my feelings known. So I opened my stupid mouth. “Look, you made the announcement north of Steeles, I thought this was the last…”

“WHAT????!”

I stopped myself from going down that dark road. Another strategy:

“Um, I’m really sorry – I must have misunderstood your announcement. Hold on. I only carry tokens.”

“Oh. Tokens are good. You can use tokens, but not passes.”

“Just one?”

“Yes.”

“Can I keep riding? I wanted to get to Langstaff.”

“No, get off the bus. Now. Before I call the police.”

“Thank You. Have A Great Day.” (I actually said it with capital letters)

“You’re the one who needs it, Buddy.”

I swear I did not make that up. Weird scene. I was tempted to vandalize a nearby Viva touch-screen ticket terminal, but someone had already messed it up. Oh well.

Anyways, this morning I woke up extra early because Viva has gone on strike. Something to do with management screwing them over. I can understand that and don’t hold it against the workers, even if they insist on picketing the passengers and not their managers (um?). But I have no use for Viva, and neither do a lot of other people, apparently. I arrived at Downsview full 10 minutes early (I had hit snooze like a dozen times) expecting to find a crush of Yorkians, cursing Viva under their breaths, clambering to get on the TTC’s 107. Nope. It was me and a dozen other people, just like most days. I figured we’d get a lot of people connecting to the bus at Finch and Steeles. But nothing. Apparently almost nobody uses it. The Toronto Star is running an article with the headline “Viva strike causes few delays.” If there’s ever a sign that a service is just slightly redundant… Yeeesh. I guess some people use it as an express route, but there are at least three bus companies running down the same roads. Seems kind of silly.

Meanwhile, part of the subway shuts down for emergency maintenance, and because the whole line is designed as a U instead of an O, and there’s no way to reroute any trains, thousands of people suddenly have a loooong walk.

Funny place to live, Toronto is.

I went to clear out my history in Nautilus (GNOME’s [far superior] answer to Windows Explorer) and I got this warning message. Hehe.

Probably the best part about it is that it’s programmed to come up randomly or every X times a user clears out the history. Normally it’s a boring old computer-type message.

Poor Steven Page. He’s looking at five years in a US prison. We’ll see if Canadian Celebrity Status carries any weight in NY. The National Post had the most tasteful headline:

‘Yeah, it’s cocaine,’ Page told police

Innocent until proven guilty, I say. And if guilty… well, it’s just a bit of cocaine. Is it worse than drinking ten Red Bull and a bottle of Jägermeister? From what I’ve seen at the hotel/nightclub where I work, no. Cokeheads don’t vomit on the bar while ordering another shot. They just rent rooms, paint various surfaces with their drug residue, and do anything but sleep.

At least he looked good in his mugshot.

I’ve been watching M*A*S*H DVDs – seasons 3 and 11. Basically.. I’ve been watching them for like a week straight, pausing only to watch Futurama’s new movie and, you know, work on a bunch of exciting copyediting assignments. But I am re-obsessed with the show. It’s playing right now in a little VLC window so I can blog about it at the same time. My neighbors are probably getting tired of hearing Suicide is Painless over and over again. Let me explain.

Unlike a lot of fans, I prefer the later episodes – I found the pre-Alda-takeover episodes to be just a little bit on the corny side. But the DVDs.. ahh.. the DVDs.. have blissfully given us the option of turning off the laugh track.

(Laugh track.. one word, or two? Blech. I’m all dictionaried out for today. Should there be a comma between word and or? Hmmm.. sigh.. turn off the brain.. it’s a blog..)

Anyhoo.

I didn’t realize how much the laugh track (or laughtrack) wrecked the show until I did a few simple comparisons – watching a scene that made me laugh without the laugh track, and then going back and switching the audio channel to hear how unfunny the fake-sounding giggles made the scene. It just never made sense to me. I could never help but wonder why an audience would follow a bunch of soldiers around and laugh at them? It was just bizarre – disrespectful to the troops, even. Heh.

The raging torrent of anger I felt at the newtork’s incompetence, which, from what I understand, forced this insane gigglefest onto the series in an attempt to make it ‘less dark,’ had clearly overshadowed my ability to appreciate the hilarity of the first few seasons. They’re pretty great. I think it’s just the awful way the laugh track was synced – the giggles tend to creep in just before a witty line, or simply filled in any and all silences during the “funny parts.”

As it turns out, the show can be as funny as any of our fancy modern-day non-laughtracked sitcoms. It’s not corny at all, really. If I can figure out how to post a video comparison, I might do that. After consulting a lawyer. Hah. Or not – It’s becoming sort of a game to guess the amount of copyrighted footage you can post online without getting noticed by The Man. Divide the profit margin of Fox studios by the age of the series (in hours), multiply by the Neilson ratings for the episode in question, factor in the DVD sales and subtract all that from the number of lawyers Fox has on retainer, multiply the answer by 100…. I’m guessing… 9.7 seconds? We’ll see.

So there you have it – Joe recommends you immediately run out and purchase the M*A*S*H DVDs. Or download them, if you’re a dirty filthy pirate who wants to hurt big corporations. And everybody knows, pirates are totally uncool.

“To me it looks like they’ve invented a perfect propaganda machine, one that chews up bodies and churns out justifications for everything the Bush administration desires.” – Me

When I wrote that blog back in February, it was because the little information that I could find about prisoner interrogation in “The War Against Terror” reminded me of the techniques used by repressive regimes like the Soviet Union during the cold war to elicit false confessions from anti-Soviet or anti-communist captives. It just seemed like the purpose of “enhanced interrogation” or torture wasn’t to get information, good or bad. Some seem to think the problem with torture is simply that it doesn’t elicit the truth. But it’s not necessarily a problem if the false confession matches the story the interrogator expects to hear, because that makes for some convenient propaganda. “See? He confessed. He can now be convicted. The war on terror works.” Still, I never really expected that there would be hard evidence of a program to elicit false confessions on purpose.

This morning I hit the good old StumbleUpon button and the first ’stumble’ was a telegraph.co.uk article, entitled “Guantanamo Bay interrogations based on faulty Chinese communist methods.” That’s a misleading title. The methods weren’t necessarily faulty, they were just completely evil, but useful for breaking down a human being. Here’s a short excerpt:

American military trainers gave a class to camp interrogators in 2002 on how to use “sleep deprivation”, “exposure” and other “torture” methods to reduce captives to “animals” and obtain information.

But it has emerged that the techniques presented in the class were copied word-for-word from a 1957 US Air Force study which focused on Chinese techniques – that did not work.

The study by sociologist Alfred Biderman, Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War, commented on methods that led to false confessions and “brainwashing”. – Telegraph

The Telegraph is a pretty right-wing newspaper, so it’s not like this is some wild fringe conspiracy theory. Even the centre-right U.S. Democratic Party has clued in and mentioned this scary tidbit of info. Senator Levin was quoted in the article as saying, “What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

No? I think that perhaps they DO need it. How else can a state justify the curbing of civil liberties, the expansion of military powers, the insidious government propaganda, endless war, the suspension of habeas corpus… etc?

People have to be scared into allowing the authorities to play us like suckers.

One way to do that, apparently, is to take a tip from the Commies and torture some brown folks until they say what the U.S. government wants to hear. I’m a little freaked out by this kind of democracy.

This is why I don’t have much faith in Barack Obama, or really any of the nominees or candidates. Can anyone resist this kind of power? You know, the unlimited kind? Already Obama’s going with the Republicans on telecom immunity (see Glenn Greenwald’s excellent reporting), which legitimizes government spying on law-abiding citizens. He has vague plans to end the Iraq war, which isn’t a good sign. Obama calls himself a “uniter” which I naively used to think meant he’d unite the fractured Democratic Party. But now I think it just means he’ll play ball with whatever lunatic fascist sits across from him. What will he do with a bunch of damaged prisoners who’ve been brainwashed into confessing acts of terrorism? Repair and release them? Or make use of them?

Of course I say that, but if I lived there, I’d vote for him. Forget all that stuff, actually.

Americans, (please) Vote Obama..

heheh.. Barack Obama: Better than Dementia.