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A few months ago, I was sup­posed to get some help on my job. Specifically, some­one to work on the .NET side of things, which would free me up to do the job I was actu­ally hired to do: PHP devel­op­ment. He wasn’t my first choice, but he was sec­ond, in large part because of his mas­ters degree and (minor) expe­ri­ence with .NET. In real­ity, though, find­ing some­one to do .NET CF devel­op­ment is a total pain, let alone on a startup company’s budget.

On his first day, he never arrived. I called and called, and three days later he informed me that he was in India on an emer­gency, and had asked a friend of his to return my calls if/when I called him. His “friend” never did, so it fell through. About a month after that, the first-choice can­di­date called me up out of the blue and asked if we were still look­ing for developers.

I said sure, and he came onboard for the same salary as choice #2 (the main stick­ing point for him the first time around). He was sup­posed to start on or about the first of November, though the owner and him had those con­ver­sa­tions and it was never quite clear what exactly was said as far as a def­i­nite start date (if any­thing was). So last Monday, I called him up, and he was in Austin. We worked out that he would start yes­ter­day at 8am.

He too, never showed up.

Five more mes­sages and 30 hours have passed since he was sup­posed to start work­ing here. Reading Glen Greenwald today, I come across this lit­tle tid­bit, which he quoted from an Associated Press story from Monday (empha­sis is Greenwald’s):

In court doc­u­ments filed with the 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., the Justice Department said a new anti-terrorism law being used to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay also applies to for­eign­ers cap­tured and held in the United States.

Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indef­i­nitely on sus­pi­cion of ter­ror­ism and may not chal­lenge their impris­on­ment in civil­ian courts, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion said Monday, open­ing a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.

The story also goes on to note that the “test case” of this is a Quatari pro­gram­mer liv­ing in Peoria, IL (yes, that Peoria) — about an hour and a half south of my house. Nice that some geek is now sim­ply a test-case of Presidential TortureAlternative Interrogation Procedures, not a human being with a wife and four kids. If I were an immi­grant, I’d get the fuck out of the coun­try and not look back as well.

Of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that dude is just an ass­hole, and the whole “we can dis­ap­pear you” thing is just a coin­ci­dence. Not that it really makes the “we can dis­ap­pear you” thing much bet­ter, sim­ply less immediate.

BTW, where are the Democrats on this? Or was the plan to just get elected and let Bush’s phony “bipar­ti­san­ship” non­sense pre­vent them from actu­ally doing any­thing lest the media paint them as “Terra-loving San-Franciscamites”?

[Kinda sorry some­thing this snarky is the first post to PGO in months, but this par­tic­u­lar paranoia-kicker is a lit­tle close.]

Update: Turns out dude had a “per­sonal life cri­sis” that meant he had to stay in Austin, and would’ve called except for his dead cell­phone bat­tery. I guess Texas is worse than I sus­pected, since they appar­ently don’t have pay-phones or e-mail there either… *fume*

In an ear­lier post, I had noted that I would write some more on a pho­to­graph I had posted to pro­vide a graphic illus­tra­tion of the kinds of regimes that decided on tri­als when it was in the best inter­est of the state, rather than, for exam­ple, the inter­ests of justice.

When you look at the use of color in that photo, the first thing you should notice is every­one in that pho­to­graph is white. It’s shock­ing to watch so many peo­ple inter­nal­ize and regur­gi­tate the “White = Normal” lie with­out even think­ing, and that atti­tude is obvi­ous in the responses to the start of ren­di­tion and the Military Commissions Act.

Start with the fact that the U.S. gov­ern­ment denies even the pos­si­bil­ity of habeas cor­pus, every day, all over the world. Immediately after 9/11, 1,400 peo­ple were rounded up and impris­oned by the INS with­out charge or the abil­ity to see coun­sel. Thousands more are lan­guish­ing in jail after being sold to American troops in Afghanistan by the our heroin-producing “allies” (one would be hard pressed to call any­one who helps junkies stay that way an “ally” in any but the most cor­rupt, Machiavellian sense). No writ for Iraqis or Afghans sus­pected of sup­port­ing who­ever the bad guys are this week in those two coun­tries, either.

Nor is this some new phe­nom­ena in American life. There was no habeas cor­pus for slaves prior to 1861. Or out­spo­ken north­ern Democrats from 1861 – 1865. Native Americans weren’t allowed to file those writs until 1891. Japanese immi­grants and their kids didn’t get it dur­ing WWII either.

Even prior to the Military Commissions Act„ whether this basic human right applies to non-citizens resid­ing in the U.S. was a ques­tion con­sid­ered up for debate by the same Congress: recall their ear­lier attempts to make local police eth­ni­cally cleanse Latinos from the U.S. — until the tar­gets of that lily lit­tle geno­cide started march­ing by the mil­lions and broach­ing the sub­ject of neigh­bor­hood defense com­mit­tees (rally ’round your fam­ily, pocket full of shells).

Naturally, like all laws, this will be pri­mar­ily used against non-white peo­ple, but that does not mean it won’t be enforced against whites who don’t go along. In America, you can’t do that kind of thing to white peo­ple with­out pass­ing laws and such (well, maybe commie-pinko whites, but they hardly count), which is why this law is a huge deal among the pro­gres­sive groups when it merely insti­tu­tion­al­izes what:

1. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion has been already doing for the last 5 years.
2. White-owned gov­ern­ments in gen­eral have been doing to every­one else for the last 400 years now.

It sim­ply sucks that nobody here seems to care about any­thing unless they are per­son­ally threat­ened or attacked — well enough that the whole right-libertarian free-market/greed-is-good ide­ol­ogy deserves a look in a whole other light.

I’ll post still more on that pho­to­graph later.

It’s actu­ally pretty amaz­ing how crazy TV has got­ten since I stopped watch­ing it. Obviously, I can’t know for cer­tain how crazy it is, since I don’t own one, but I read blog­gers talk about ABC putting on shows about “how soon is the apoc­a­lypse,” and sup­pos­edly some CNN anchor was recy­cling bull­shit from WorldNetDaily (the same folks who brought you the “American Hiroshima” amuse­ment park ride last year) about an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. And when that didn’t hap­pen there was sup­posed to be a nuclear attack on the U.S. in 2006-09-12, and then again in late September — or, for those read­ing this in the archives, a month and a few weeks before I wrote this, respec­tively. I could knock on wood, but I won’t: Fate can kiss my ass.

Politically, I think the U.S. wants to attack Iran shortly after the mid-term elec­tion, but I have an itch­ing sus­pi­cion the mil­i­tary won’t be ready in time. In which case a Democratic vic­tory may pro­vide some fric­tion — though not enough to stop another war.

And, for the record, America is in such a state cul­tur­ally that Mutual Assured Destruction is presently con­sid­ered the mea­sured response among the polit­i­cal class — thanks for vot­ing with your fetuses, freaks.

Meanwhile, another 10 mil­lion peo­ple slid into poverty this year. Those already in poverty were (unsur­pris­ingly) pushed even lower down. The wealthy are throw­ing the mid­dle class off the lad­der by the hun­dreds of thou­sands, and they knock oth­ers off in a mad scram­ble not to hit bot­tom, who in turn knock those below them off the lad­der, and on down the line until the num­ber of fam­i­lies liv­ing in their car swells some more. A few souls from the mid­dle classes don’t even bother to scram­ble and choose to swan-dive instead — much respect, thump thump.

Friday, on the way home from work, I fig­ured the U.S. would try to shoot down the North Korean mis­sile test. The NPR story men­tioned that pos­si­ble out­come, and they wouldn’t do so unless one of their sources men­tioned it. Further, since the sources for this story would come from the for­eign pol­icy estab­lish­ment, AKA the Pentagon, it’s likely this is meant as a fair warn­ing to try and dis­suade the North Koreans from test­ing their missile.

John Isaacs, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, added, “This is a per­fect inter­na­tional Kabuki dance. The North Koreans may test a mis­sile that they will have no idea will work in the real world and the United States has a mis­sile defense which we have no notion whether it will defend against the North Koreans. It is per­fect sym­me­try.” Reuters, US Activates Missile Defense Amid N.Korea Dispute

Funny how most Kabuki dances can­not pos­si­bly end up with Seoul a lake of fire and Pyongyang a sea of glass.

I’m done blog­ging par­tic­u­larly on pol­i­tics. I’m done because (essen­tially) all polit­i­cal blogs are turn­ing into the minor leagues of pun­ditry, let­ting pro­pa­gan­dists hone their craft before being wran­gled, branded, and paid to use those same skills as the future Priesthoods of Power. This is not a con­test between the two par­ties, this is sim­ply the cor­po­rate media sys­tem (and the par­ties they feed off of) rec­og­niz­ing and attempt­ing to swal­low Internet pro­pa­gan­dists as they did already did to the leaflet­teers, news­pa­pers, and radio broad­cast­ers. Television is a spe­cial case because it was top-down con­trolled from day one, due to the enor­mous cost inher­ent in run­ning your own tele­vi­sion studio.

Politics will still loom large on this blog, how­ever, because I see the politc in my own life and the lives of those around me (or if you pre­fer soul­less cliché: “I believe the per­sonal is polit­i­cal”), but it will not be another end­less, repet­i­tive, anti-Bush snark parade mas­querad­ing as me hav­ing some­thing impor­tant to say. Not that I don’t really, really wish Bush would spend the rest of his life in a cage for crimes against human­ity — Clinton could be his cell­mate — but it’s not worth my time to go over the same crap as every­one else.