Walking on the Moon

I’m leaving work (and it was light again!), and taking the elevator down 11 stories when the phone in the elevator starts talking to me. There’s a brain-damaged phone in there in case the one guy other than me in LA without a cell phone manages to get himself or herself stuck. It’s a one-button, programmed-to-dial-the-elevator-company, speaker phone. Apparently it will also take calls.
Now, here’s the thing: the company that called the elevator phone (the voice I was hearing was obviously taped) was selling mortages. I spent the 45 seconds I was heading downstairs listening to some company’s mortage pitch. Note that “hang up” is not an obvious choice of actions this phone can take. Nor should it be. If I’m delivering someone’s baby in a stuck elevator, I don’t want to bump the thing and disconnect myself.
So this is either some diabolical company who knows that people are going to stay in the elevator and can’t hang up, so calling the speaker phone at the end of normal business hours gives them free advertising, or it’s some bozo who isn’t being very careful with their wardialer (don’t they have to have elevator phones on a do-not-call list?).

I suppose there’s also the possibility that this is one of the mortage company’s competitors trying to discredit them by placing false heinous ads in their name. I think that unlikely, because I can’t have any worse opinion of mortage companies involved in any kind of direct mailings, but I could be wrong.

I do want all of you to sue these bastards blind if their intrusive advertising gets me so upset that I have a heart attack and can’t call out of my elevator because they’re selling me a mortage on the emergency phone.

Rich and I were blogging back and forth a little about the flu and I realized I hadn’t put up this link, which epitomizes my concerns about this whole hubub. I do think that there are reasons to be concerned about the possible sudden spread of an infectious disease, like the flu – though I think Ebola’s more theatrical – and we should be taking reasonable steps to be prepared for it.  But the whole thing is still very speculative, and we have real problems that are much less speculative.  There are going to be more hurricanes this year, whether you believe in global warming or not, and I think those are a more pressing concern that the flu.

But the issue of the link is also pressing – opportunists will be taking their best shot at using this to further their own agenda.  I’ve heard Bush call for the same kind of martial law.  All this about a disease that has killled <100 people in 5 years.  Shouldn't we be more concerned with the continuing suck-ass distribution of AIDS assistance to Africa?  I mean there's a disease with a track record of killing people in large numbers.  30,000 people are going to die this year of other flu strains in America.  That's a factor of  1200 more (America's 1/4 the world population).  More than that will die of car accidents.  Hell, more have been struck by lightning. Yes, being unprepared for bird flu could lead to a lot of deaths, but the hype is way out of proportion to the assesable threat.  And a bird flu pandemic is not the only bad thing that could happen.

I was listening to KCRW’s To The Point broadcast about Guantanamo Bay in which a senior naval appointee’s views on how torturing people is antithetical to American values, and the fellow arguning the opposite position immediately began throwing up straw men and splitting legal hairs.

You know who does that?  Guilty people.

Torturing people does go against American values.  More than that, if you want to talk about those values being better than the rest of the world’s values – and I’d really like to – you have to hoild yourself to that higher standard.   And that means sometimes you do things not only the hard way, but the hardest way.

The basic truth is this: torturing people is always wrong.  There may be times that it’s the lesser of two evils, but it’s always wrong.  Any discussion of torture needs to start there.  After that we can weasel-word around about “lawful combatants” and exactly what penalties are appropriate.  The point is that if you’ve tortured someone or, worse yet, made someone to do it for you, you’ve done something that’s wrong – something that’s against the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.  And you really need to admit that.

Then come issues of legality and punishment.