Month: May 2005

As reported in today’s Oregonian, the ever-vigilant anti-terror forces have caught another imminent threat in Portland, who’s been scamming the state unemployment fund:

FBI inquiry leads to fraud case
A Muslim faces charges over jobless aid while he worked in Qatar, a lead developed by the Portland joint task force

A former Intel engineer and board member of the Portland Islamic School faces federal charges that he defrauded Oregon’s unemployment compensation system.

A federal grand jury in Portland indicted Soubhi Fakher Abdulkarim, 40, on 32 counts of wire fraud and one count of stealing public money.

The FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force found in April 2003 that the Syrian-born naturalized U.S. citizen was living and working in Qatar, in the Persian Gulf, when he applied for and received benefits from the Oregon Employment Department.

–snip–

For more than a year the state made electronic payments to Abdulkarim’s Wells Fargo bank account in Oregon totaling $12,960, the indictment states. He reciprocated, prosecutors say, by filing weekly eligibility reports by e-mail.

But the JTTF discovered that Abdulkarim was being paid $9,000 a month as an Internet technology manager for Aspire, Qatar’s new sports academy. The feds notified the state, and the payments to Abdulkarim stopped.

–snip–

I feel safer. I mean, I’m glad the state’s not paying Abdulkarim any more undeserved unemployment compensation (and I’m looking into those Qatar job offers a little more thoroughly) but I also wonder how much money the FBI spent investigating this guy, and what the heck they’re doing, since this is their big Oregon success since the Brandon Mayfield fiasco.

A short piece by Tom Grace in Willamette Week last month caught my eye, a geographic correlation between where the Oregon Lottery takes money in and the income levels in the same area.

According to Grace’s article:

The 97217 ZIP code in North Portland, which has 49 video-poker outlets, topped Oregon’s list for net video-poker sales in 2004 with $19.4 million-or $650 per man, woman and child. That’s over a month’s rent for a one-bedroom apartment in an area where the last U.S. Census classified nearly one in seven residents as living in poverty.

Compare that with the 97221 ZIP code in Portland’s West Hills, where the median income is nearly double that in 97217. Net sales last year from its five video-poker outlets were $1.1 million, or $95 per person.

As if NPR needed anyone to undermine it but itself, NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin wrote (in “When Those Pesky Blogs Undermine NPR News”) about how information is just too darn free. A letter.

Mr. Dvorkin:

You state near the end of a recent column that “The blogs showed NPR, when it posted the Defense Department document, that the Web has changed both the rules and the means of disseminating information.”

The npr.org domain has been around since 1993. Are you seriously saying that an organization that has had an Internet presence for a dozen years, that posts hundreds of shows a week online, and has a fairly sophisticated Web presence itself is just now realizing that the “means of disseminating information” have changed?

[UPDATE] Unbelievably, Dvorkin wrote back within minutes. Believably, the response is virtually meaningless:

Yes. The volume and scope of all internet information is becoming so prominent, that it needs to be acknowledged. NPR website does a good job, but it is a mere drop in the
ocean.

JD

The May 2005 issue of Reed, the alumni magazine of the college I finally graduated from, has an article questioning whether the college’s traditionally liberal campus keeps the conservatives down. It somehow completely misses David Horowitz’s current anti-liberal campus crusade. It prompted a letter.

Regarding the “Uncivil Discourse” article in the May 2005 issue I’m a bit perplexed. When I was a student during the Reagan and G.H.W. Bush presidencies there seemed to be no end of students arguing over virtually everything. Indeed, Anne Bothner-By (’86) is quoted in the article as saying “Reed students are very combative.” Are the conservatives less combative (something that seems hardly likely if you turn on the TV or radio)? Or do they just have a harder time making the kind of fact-based argument that tends to gain support from the type of people who choose to study at Reed?

As I read the article this April weekend, a conclave of Christian conservatives, addressed by the Republican majority leader of the U.S. Senate, was meeting to discuss how a largely Republican-appointed federal judiciary is biased against Christians, and how judges who disagree with them might be removed from office, which might give some pause to those students considering careers in law. The Kansas Board of Education is about to decide whether thinly-disguised creationism should be included in the science curriculum, which would presumably affect whether high school students see the connections between chemistry, physics, and biology as mysteries of nature or acts of God. You tell me whether that will affect their future careers on the edge of science and the lives of anyone planning to teach said students.

The discussion is open. It has been open. I was attacked for pointing out that folks who complained (two years after the incident) about police twisting their arms and letting them go at Safeway after they were removed from the Development Office during the South Africa divestment sit-in got off pretty easy. A few years older than my fellow students and from a blue-collar background, I found Reed student liberalism (and conservatism) broad but not particularly deep. As in the real world, a lot of the people didn’t care about politics at all.

What I found most astounding about Gay Monteverde’s article though, given its premise, is its failure to mention the current campaign led by David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom to pass an “Academic Bill of Rights” in state legislatures nationwide that purports to protect academic freedom but is viewed by faculty groups in states where it’s moving forward (such as Florida) as a restriction on acceptable topics of discussion in the classroom and the ability to correct students whose views don’t mesh with topics like evolution. The campaign is predicated largely on painting the faculties and student bodies of colleges as “too liberal.” As a private college, Reed wouldn’t be affected by anything like that passing in Oregon, but the timing’s certainly a heck of a coincidence.

Wonkette notes that film critic (and Yale honors graduate) Michael Medved takes Hollywood to task for not being patriotic (where have I heard that before?), blaming “Many of the major stars today [who] have an Ivy League background.” He can’t understand why popular wars like the first Gulf War haven’t spawned more loving coverage, just conflicted works like Three Kings (where even the characters who are only in it for the money end up putting their lives on the line to help some Iraqi civilians), The Manchurian Candidate (which wasn’t so much against the war as it was anti-corporatism), and Courage Under Fire (not that anyone watched it).

In what is perhaps his finest moment of black kettle-calling, Medved blasts Oliver Stone (who attended Yale for a year) for his movie Platoon and a speech he gave nearly 20 years ago when he accepted an ACLU award. After quoting Stone’s criticisms of the military-industrial complex and the Cold War, Medved asks: “Is it any wonder that people who deliver statements like that also feel the need to trash the U.S. in film after film after film?” After his year at Yale, of course, Oliver Stone did a tour of duty in Vietnam and received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Medved, whose jaw-droppingly name-dropping biography notes that he was classmates at Yale Law with Bill and Hillary Clinton (although he didn’t finish his law degree), turned 19 in 1967, the same year that Oliver Stone headed off to serve his country. Medved had a Selective Service “occupational deferment” teaching middle school three hours a day.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me put some of my long history as a sci-fi geek up front. I’ve got my original white D&D box (circa 1976) on my office shelf, and I played role-playing games for most of a decade. I worked for nearly four years in a science-fiction/fantasy book & game shop. I conceived and organized a science-fiction convention in 1983. My wife and I first met at a monthly party organized by sci-fi writer John Varley. So what follows here is not a slam of people who enjoy a fantastic story.

Rather, it’s a call for a saner type of fandom, particularly in the case of TIME writer John Cloud, whose fawning cover story on Ann Coulter spawned choking noises from people like myself who don’t think people who advocate terrorism and the targeted killing of journalists should be given airbrushed coverage. Sometimes, it can lead to a bit of criticism, as it does here. And here. And here.

This week, Cloud recounts “How Star Wars Saved My Life” although he doesn’t really explain exactly what it saved his life from. He does mention having “crushes on most of the boys in the neighborhood” — at six; that he has a boyfriend; that he regularly came home when he was twelve with spitballs in his hair. But there’s no explanation as to how Star Wars made any of this more bearable, particularly. All I had during my geeky youth was 2001 and the original Star Trek, but they didn’t exactly save me from getting bullied.

Like a lot of over-eager fans, Cloud approaches his 900-word essay with a true believer’s passion and little perspective. He (or an editor) should have noticed the eighth of the essay — complete with dialog — Cloud devotes to recounting his favorite scene from the original movie that even sounds like you’re talking to the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. And perhaps it’s my athiest heart talking, but I’m fairly certain that by the time I was 12 — even with Cloud’s upbringing — I wouldn’t have been praying “the Lord would send me to live with Han and Chewie.”

This lack of perspective, even in the thirtysomething Cloud’s life, is what I think went wrong with the Coulter interview — apart from even thinking of or approving of it. At one point in my life, I met a lot of sci-fi writers, some of whom were big at the time and others who have become big in the last couple of decades. But even then I knew they were just people, and that’s something a writer for TIME should know about any interviewee, whether they’re someone they like or someone they don’t.

There are always fans whose internal governor of gushiness is switched off, however, and they may not know anything about the person, they’re just thrilled to be talking to them. To have the illusion that they’re being treated as an equal, even when the famous person’s only talking to them to peddle a book, a movie, or a story about Iraqi WMDs. Starstruck reporters can’t be objective about their subjects.

In the comments for David Niewarts’s “Beyond the Minutemen” at Orcinus, poster Josh Jasper quips “how about forming a vigilante gang of accountants, journalists and bloggers, and going off into the American frontier of agribuisness, meatpacking and day labor.” I second the motion! It sounds like a job for Michael Moore; I can see the gang being led by his creation Crackers, the Corporate Crime Chicken.