The Zong

And don’t believe anything you read on Drudge, especially when it comes from the British tabloids. They’re a little loony out there, and they love to mess with America’s political innards. Because they’re jealous. Why don’t you go fuck with bloody Parliament, mate?

So the headline “Gore Campaign Team Assembles in Secret” gave way to “Gore Camp Denies Report of Secret Campaign.” God DAMN it!

Speaking of deflating stuff, I got an email from a conservative (gasp!) reader whom I’ve never met personally, but who took the time to compliment the Zong (mostly for the sports stuff) and directed me to a film seeking to rebut “An Inconvenient Truth,” which she claims does an excellent job of just that. Thanks for the e-mail, by the way.

The film, which I’ve read a few murmurs about, certainly wasn’t produced by the liberal elite, whom I think might have come up with a better title. It’s called “An Inconvenient Truth…Or Convenient Fiction?” and I’m generally not one to watch any film with an ellipsis in its title, but I thought about it for a moment and figured what the hell, it’s only 1:32 in the morning.

One thing I really hate is that people will come out and criticize the Goreumentary when they haven’t seen it, so I watched this rebuttal in it’s entirety. It is hosted by a guy named Steven Hayward, and all I can say about him personally is “What a nice guy.” His calm, even gentle demeanor makes it pretty easy to listen to him. While he isn’t particularly clever, witty or easy on the eyes, I can certainly say he comes off as honest. The film itself is pretty dry, and low-budget in the way that makes you think of a training video for office safety. It was screened here in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, and given it’s unapologetic political bent and presentation, I’m not really surprised that it has garnered very little attention in the media here or nationally.

Naturally, as a Giants fan, I love the underdog, and though I’m a big fan of environmentalists in general, I really wanted to learn something from this film. What I came away with after around an hour was that the scientific facts that Al Gore presents in his movie are pretty much all undisputed, but those who disagree with his political ideology are desperate to find something they can continue to dispute. In this case, it’s a rather feeble attempt to assail his predictions as alarmist and exploitative, and it predictably hints at a hidden agenda that Gore and his supporters are trying to force on America. The film is on the website in its entirety, and you’re free to watch it. In a minute.

You should know if you choose to watch it that, Hayward’s earnest presentation notwithstanding, the film was funded and produced by a conservative think tank based here in San Francisco called “The Pacific Research Institute,” an organization many folks around here know all too well. They publish a yearly study on Earth Day called the Index of Environmental Indicators which uses “anecdotal evidence” to complement environmental data which somehow suggests that air quality and carbon emissions are actually improving as the years go by. (One of the assertions Hayward makes in the film is “anecdotal” in that he says the smog in Los Angeles looked a lot worse when he was growing up there than it does now.) PRI is closely associated with The American Enterprise Institute, which in addition to being well-connected with the Bush Administration’s foreign policy (they rent and share space to the Project for the New American Century) has also recently mounted a campaign to discredit the IPCC’s recent report on climate change by offering $10,000 to scientists willing to challenge the report.

I don’t really need to sit and try to dispute anything Hayward says. As he himself states, most of what Gore says about global warming is essentially true, and yet much of the same old conservative bullshit is ever-so-politely present in his arguments. The agenda that I think Al Gore is all about isn’t really a secret, is it? I think his agenda involves getting you to go buy some fluorescent light bulbs and ride your bike to work when it’s nice out. (Scary!) I want my conservative reader to pay close attention here, especially if you haven’t seen the Gore flick for yourself:

• “An Inconvenient Truth” isn’t Al Gore’s documentary on global warming. It’s a documentary about Al Gore’s campaign to fight global warming, and the stuff he says isn’t just his opinion; it’s the opinion of a plurality of actual, real-live scientists. Not political science professors at Georgetown or Senior Fellows at the American Enterprise Institute. (Hayward is both!)
• From now on, every time someone says this, they get fined a million fucking dollars:

“Gore predicts when polar ice and glaciers melt, sea levels will rise 20 feet, yet the latest UN report predicts a worst-case scenario of 23 inches,” says Hayward.

Gore doesn’t predict shit, the scientists do, and this was a scenario that is considered part of “catastrophic climate change,” which, while possible, isn’t even addressed in the stated 23-inch prediction of the U.N. report! I mean, Steve, you seem like you might be a nice guy, don’t start being an asshole right when I was starting to like you.

Anyhow, maybe I wasted a bunch of time watching this stuff, but it’s nice to know that this is the best that Neo-Conservatives can muster in the face of the Climate Change-Fighting Juggernaut that is the Al Gore Army.

The short answer is: “Maybe!”

After all the complaining and bitching and throwing my hands up in the air at the start of the season, the San Francisco Baseball Giants are maybe the hottest team in the majors. The starting pitching has been outstanding, and Barry Bonds looks like he might still be juicing. Wherever the magic is, they’ve won 6 straight and are in Secret Touching-Distance of the first place Dodgers, who going into tonight had the best record in the bigs.

As if it wasn’t good enough, they’ve been doing it basically without the top of their lineup. Dave Roberts and the Viz have been pretty stinky up until now, and one wonders how good los Gigantes will look if they actually start to get on base. On top of all this, Armando Benitez hasn’t blown a save yet! What the fuck is going on here?

I really, really want to believe that Barry, Barry and Sons are as good as this, but it’s way too early for anyone to say that I was wrong about them yet; they could drop their next six and then I’ll be back to my bitching. Nevertheless, the more they make me look like a jerk, the better I feel.

Here’s one for the Headline Hall of Fame:

Bush muses on marriage, chicken-plucking

A grown man said this:

“There are jobs Americans aren’t doing. … If you’ve got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory, or whatever you call them, you know what I’m talking about.”

…said the fucking Leader of the Free World.

There are a couple of immutable truths here on The Zong, and one of those truths is that the NBA is complete garbage, and I have no interest in watching it. I’d probably watch a bunch of games if they only televised the last five minutes of each game, and then only if the score was within 15 points.

The thing is, it wasn’t always this way. I grew up watching the Warriors play, and I was a regular three-sport kid, even though I would have had trouble shooting a basketball into the ocean with my feet getting wet. I remember “Run TMC” at its greatest: the tall, dorky buzz-cutted Chris Mullin, the exciting internal rhyme of Mitch Richmond’s name, and Tim Hardaway back before we knew he was a bigoted asshole. Don Nelson’s (yup, the same Don Nelson) Run n’ Gun was pretty fun to watch back in the day, and I was excited when they made the playoffs in 1994.

That was 13 fucking years ago, and a lot has changed since then. Cell phones were as big as typewriters, Michael Jackson was still cool, etc. Still, that was the last time the Warriors even sniffed the postseason. In a league where half the teams make the playoffs, a drought that bad is too much for a short kid who can’t make a layup to take, and so you can’t blame me for casting off my love for basketball. Who was I gonna cheer for, the Kings?

Here’s the thing: I’m willing to be convinced that basketball isn’t so bad, but it’s a tall order. It’s hard for me not to be a little excited for the team I once loved, and the fact that they’re prohibitive underdogs makes me even more interested. The thing is, I’m gonna watch the games, and so they have to win, or at least make things exciting. There’s probably a little room in my heart for one more sports franchise now that the Giants are trying to kill me, so bring it on, Warriors. Don’t fuck this up.

The Zong welcomes our first new contributor, Joe Alterio, to the fold. If his first post (below) is any indication, the dialogue in here is gonna elevate. Information for all our contributors (all two of us) will henceforth be posted here.

There’s been a lot of gum flapping in these parts as of late, especially in light of the horrid events in West Virginia. The discussion on gun bans has been hot on the Left side on the dial, with some pundits waxing that it’s precisely an event such as this that may allow a comprehensive handgun ban to squeak through the House. The other headline grabber in the news these days is that The Supreme Council on Morality (previously know by it’s less glamorous moniker, the Robert’s Supreme Court) managed to eek by something that those on the pro-life side have been yammering for, lo these many years: a ban on “Partial Birth Abortions”. Setting aside the crytpo-acrobatics that those on the Far Right seem to be so adept at for a moment, I find an unsettling nexus between these two camps.

American culture is a charming culture because of it’s hopeful naivete: while the rest of the world resigns itself to inheriting the same lot as dear, old Granddad, we’re a nation of doers. Whether it’s spearheading a human rights campaign because you’re a movie star, or planning to bomb the hell out of a bunch of poor people for democracy’s sake, more often than not, an American is at the helm these days. I take pride in our level of ambition and proactivty in the world. This can-do spirit, however, does have it’s failings, especially when comes to things like the social engineering that both pro gun-ban people, as well as the pro-life people, seem to be a part of.

Hindsight is a marvelous thing, and it’s a pity that more people don’t really take advantage of it. Forcing a culture to do something, whether it’s preventing abortions, stopping teen sex, or banning handguns, is not a valid policy, because, like any good preschool teacher will tell you, the “only-stick” approach doesn’t work. The only real result of an outright ban on anything is a ferocious, unregulated black market for the product in question, which just creates much more serious health risks for the population at large. Let me just ask this: how’s that War On Drugs working out for us? Feel like we’re making a real dent in drug abuse in this country? ‘Cause I don’t, and it’s not just because I couldn’t find my pants last Saturday morning. Now try to imagine that same type of winless situation we’re in with drugs, but replace narcotics with illegal firearms and back alley abortions, and you get the nasty picture.

I’m not a Libertarian nutjob: I think guns should be registered and tracked, like cars, and I think we should try to reduce the amount of abortions to the absolute bare minimum that need to happen. Most importantly, education, and making sure everyone has the help they need, are our best weapons in the fight against what ails our society. But all this talk of banning this and that, of thinking that people can’t decide for themselves what’s best leaves me queasy. That doesn’t sound like a pluralistic society to me. That sounds like a Nancy Reagan nightmare.

Matt Cain pitched seven shutout innings tonight. He gave up 2 hits, 3 walks and struck out 7 batters at Coors Field, decreasing his ERA to 1.80 on the season.

The Giants bullpen went one inning, giving up 5 hits, two walks and five motherfucking runs. Matt Cain is still looking for his first win of the season. It’s not surprising, but it sure as hell is hard to watch. At least I’ll have the chance to get used to it.

The Virginia Tech shootings yesterday will inevitably lead to another long, national discussion of gun control and the pointing of fingers as good people try to make sense of the tragedy by placing blame, and morbidly opportunistic politicians exploit the anger and grief for their own gain. It’s almost a ritual now; the aftermath of the Columbine tragedy and the murder of five Amish girls last October are just two earlier examples of this heartbreaking process. In the end, none of these kids’ lives seems to matter enough to the powers that be, to the cultural and political leaders that claim to pray for them, and so nothing really changes, and every so often we continue to see the bloody bodies of American children being carried out of their schools. It’s a lot harder for people to ignore than the bodies being shipped home from the Middle East.

So less than 24 hours after the VT shootings occurred, with 32 dead and counting, the debate has begun in earnest yet again, and in place of mourning we have blog postings and news stories advocating political solutions to what is increasingly being proven to be a cultural problem.

Among the blognoise sits a post by Michelle Malkin, who is only a little harder to look at than Ann Coulter and who takes a passive aggressive stance by quoting a conservative blog posting that states:

“Just imagine if students were armed. We no longer need to imagine what will happen when they are not armed.”

Now, I don’t really think gun control laws (in a practical, real sense) would have prevented this tragedy any more than arming a few professors would have, but behind the words above there is a psychosis that pervades our entire nation, and if you look closely you can see why our kids feel the need to shoot each other and themselves all the time. The mentality required to suggest that undergraduate students at a university would be better off carrying firearms around, and that’s why so many of them got killed in the first place is a repellent and ugly manifestation of our country’s obsession with macho bullshit. There’s a big difference between encouraging responsible gun ownership and calling for schoolkids to carry a lethal fucking weapon to class, and these criminally insane dickheads are crossing that line with this argument, big time.

The horrible sickness infecting the minds of the 9/11 hijackers, the Columbine shooters and 23-year old Cho Seung-Hui is one and the same. It passes as patriotism for some and as faith in the divine for others, but it’s all part of the same sociopathic sickness; it’s a lot easier to kill someone than to try and understand why they’re different, and Americans have proved time and time again that we’re really good at shooting first and asking questions later.

I don’t know what the solution to all this violence is, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve more goddamn guns.

For the millions of Americans who will pay taxes tomorrow, the National Priorities Project has a “fun” interactive graph that will break down approximately where the hell your kick-up to Uncle Sam is going. According to the budget proposed by President Bush for the 2008 fiscal year, (going with the dubious assumption that he won’t ask for additional war funds) every single breathing human being will be responsible for bringing in an average of over $9,000, (you infants and terminally ill folks had better get cracking!) and so I went ahead and punched in nine grand to see where the NPP says all that bread will land.

Of the $9000.00 you paid in taxes:

$2448.00 goes to the military
$1683.00 goes to pay the interest on the debt
$1881.00 go es to health care
$540.00 goes to income security
$405.00 goes to education
$306.00 goes to benefits for veterans
$234.00 goes to nutrition spending
$171.00 goes to housing
$135.00 goes to environmental protection
$27.00 goes to job training
$1116.00 goes to all other expenses

I won’t deny that the NPP is kind of an anti-war thing, but if these numbers are even close to accurate, then it’s gonna be hard for me to tell anyone that I don’t support the war in Iraq. I mean, we can all bellyache about the mishandling of the war, scream that we were lied to, even elect a different party to run congress, but the fact is, if you pay taxes, you’re supporting the shit out of this war.

I can see the point of refusing to pay taxes, sort of. Still, I don’t really think it’s an effective protest, since the IRS doesn’t have any say over the spending of the money it collects. Also, they can do stuff like garnish your wages and penalize you without any sort of consequences, so I say pay your goddamn taxes, hippie! The real solution is to get our asses out of Iraq ASAFP so the government can spend that money on Afghanistan, or on getting my turntable fixed.

Last night, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a San Francisco screening for a stirring documentary entitled “Soldiers of Conscience.” As a freeloader amongst true activists, I found myself humbled and moved by the film, and thought I’d offer a small plug here for a few of my friends, and presumably my mother, to read.

The documentary approaches a subject that most of us privileged civilians will remain comfortably distant from for the duration of our lives: the conflict that a soldier faces when he or she is asked to end the life of another human being. It is safe to say that this conflict is as old as civilization itself, and it lies at the very core of public debate surrounding any war, yet very little real discussion about it exists within that debate. The filmmakers have isolated a candid, eloquent and truly provocative discussion amongst soldiers from all sides of the story, and what comes through is a war documentary that transcends the noisy bluster of political rhetoric and gives a clear, uncensored voice to the young men and women who are charged with protecting our nation.

What is most striking about the film is its balance. The graphic and disturbing images of wartime are cast quite distinctly along with the dialogue of soldiers who serve without question and those who, by various methods, have chosen to reject the idea of war completely as Conscientious Objectors. All have seen the horrors of war, and their stories are as close to the “conditions on the ground” as anything you’ll see in the mainstream media. Regardless of their point of view, each soldier is inseparable from their own humanity, and whether through religion, philosophy or military doctrine, all of them face numerous demons that separate them from any political agenda. Those who might decide beforehand that this film is probably anti-war propaganda made to the sounds of liberal hand-wringing should be made aware that the U.S. military is currently considering showing the film at West Point, a testament to the fairness of the film considering the subject matter and the stories of the day.

Even a bleeding-heart, would be draft-dodger like yours truly can hardly deny that war is sometimes a necessary if not blunt instrument of international order. The preservation of what greatness America can still claim owes much to our ability to defend ourselves and others from unbridled aggression, and that weight rests largely upon the shoulders of soldiers with guns and consciences. For me, this fact brings that much more focus upon the misdirection and criminally negligent military doctrine of the current Commander-in-Chief, who continues to wage a losing battle, on the wrong front, at an arm’s length. One wonders if his mind can begin to comprehend the conflict faced by the soldiers in this film and at his disposal, each one of them human.

Thanks to Jen Bradwell and Todd Boekelheide (who composed a magnificent score for the film) for helping me sneak in through the side door during the cocktail hour.