Entries from May 2006 ↓

Last week I sat through the worst meeting in the world, and survived. It was a perfect cocktail of all the classic ingredients of unbearable meetings: powerpoint slides packed densely with unreadable text; a droning, inflectionless voice on the other end of a conference call reading those slides, verbatim; crushingly dull subject matter; and a room so full of fellow sufferers that the gravitational pull of peer pressure prevented us from achieving sufficient escape velocity to run screaming from the room.

It lasted an hour and a half, give or take an eternity, and at the end of it everybody rushed out so fast that they set off a little cascade of sonic booms, like popping popcorn. Most people were crying; a few hurled themselves ineffectually at locked and shatterproof windows; a mini-epidemic of epileptic seizures shuddered through the crowd; rational people beat their heads bloody against walls to dislodge the memory of the horror. A corps of grief counselors fanned out through the wailing throngs and administered massive doses of anti-depressants, intravenously.

Most of us survived, but not unscathed. Every so often, when you hear a blood-curdling scream echoing down the halls, or see some poor distraught geek running naked past your office batting at his body sobbing “Get the meeting off me! Get it off me!“, you know that it hasn’t quite gone away. That it’ll never really go away.

But in the spirit of that old maxim, whatever doesn’t kill you will probably get around to killing you eventually, I’ve put together a little list of tips to help the unfortunate prole survive the horror of a company meeting. Follow this guidebook, and you’ll probably get through it, with most of your sanity intact.

1. Visualize a happier time: childhood, a vacation at the beach, your first kiss. Now set that time on fire, and cackle maniacally over its ashes. Do this for the same reason that the retreating Russian army set fire to their cities during WWII: so the enemy can’t get hold of them. Do not let the meeting take control of your precious memories. They will become process zombie recollections, and turn on you, spouting business maxims. Your old girlfriend will pull back from that first kiss, and smile, and say: “Oh Honey. Are you maximizing your vertically leveraged F2F business imperatives?” And then your brain will eat itself. Do not let this happen.

2. Try deep breathing exercises. Not your normal deep breathing: I’m talking about hyperventilation, enough to flood your brain with oxygen and knock you out. Or, at the very least, drown out the droning, horrible voice that holds you captive.

3. Start singing the Star Spangled Banner. This will almost certainly either bring the meeting to halt, or get you ejected. The beauty of this technique is that they can’t make you stop, and they can’t punish you for it. If they do, simply call up the Department of Homeland Security and let them know that your company is quashing your patriotism and attempting to suppress your love of country. This will undoubtedly get some senior executives sent off to Guantanamo, but, hey: this is war. It’s either you or them.

4. Chew off your fingers. Start with the pinky, which isn’t really very useful anyway. The physical pain will dull the mental anguish, and allow you to hold onto your sanity. If you chew slowly enough, you should be able to make that finger last for the duration of a standard two-hour meeting. If the meeting goes longer, move onto the pinky of your other hand, and then inward, toward the thumb. This technique should be used carefully, of course. I’ve known some people stuck in all-day CMM compliance meetings who’ve chewed off whole arms, up to the shoulder. A good rule of thumb is to stop at the elbow. But, you know, you do what you have to.

5. Claw out your eyes. This worked for Oedipus, who blinded himself after he found out that he’d killed his father and had sex with his mother. Of course, sitting through this goddam meeting is probably far worse than incest and patricide, but there are OSHA regulations mandating that companies release employees from meetings in the the event of an eye-clawing-out incident, so this will definitely spring you.

These steps may seem extreme, but, trust me, they’re not. Sometimes your only choices are bad, worse, and unspeakably horrible. Choose bad. Or choose worse. Just don’t let unspeakably horrible happen to you.

Just came back from watching United 93. When I first heard that they were making this movie, I immediately jumped to lots of conclusions: that it would be exploitative, sentimental, sensationalistic. That it would be a callow vehicle for scoring cheap political points. That it would be hastily thrown together and shoddily, disrespectfully made. I was wrong, on every count.

The movie treats the story of that flight the way it deserves to be treated: unflinchingly. It gives us the confusion of that day, the horror, the insanity, the tragedy, without a whiff of sensationalism or sentimentality. The characters aren’t puffed up with backstories; we aren’t prodded to shed any tears; aren’t guided toward any conclusions. And when the movie ended, in the way that it had to end, I sat dumbstruck, staring, feeling the tragedy of that day more viscerally than I had on the day itself.

I can’t recommend this movie highly enough.

An article in today’s New York Times, puts the blame for the NSA’s post-9/11 surveillance practices squarely on Dick Cheney’s shoulders:

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

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On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970’s and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.

I have no doubt that Cheney and his deputies were instrumental in getting this program going. Still, I’m suspicious: we’ve seen lots of articles like this recently, deflecting the blame for various governmental outrages toward the office of the Vice President. If we are to believe the anonymous sources that pepper these stories, Cheney is responsible for all the dark clouds of evil that have billowed out of this administration for the past six years. He’s like a black hole of malfeasance, a gravity well that swallows all misdeeds; that bends the weft of misdeed-space around him.

And really, he’s the perfect sop. His approval ratings are approaching negative levels anyway, and it’s clear that Bush has no plans to get rid of him. Why not blame everything on Cheney?

Don’t buy it. There are many, many players in this scandal: in the White House, in Congress, in the corporations that this government has all but merged with. Cheney is the most visible, and possibly the worst. But he’s not the only one. Not by a long shot.

Here’s an interesting exchange between Knight-Ridder reporter Jonathan Landay and Michael Hayden, Bush’s nominee for CIA Director:

JONATHAN LANDAY: My understanding is that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American’s right against unlawful searches and seizures.

MICHAEL HAYDEN: No, actually, the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. That’s what it says.

JONATHAN LANDAY: But the measure is “probable cause,” I believe.

MICHAEL HAYDEN: The amendment says “unreasonable search and seizure.”

JONATHAN LANDAY: But does it not say “probable – “

MICHAEL HAYDEN: No.

JONATHAN LANDAY: The court standard, the legal standard –

MICHAEL HAYDEN: The amendment says, “unreasonable search and seizure.”

Hmm. Here’s the text of the fourth amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

The head of an agency whose boundaries this amendment defines should probably know what it is says. Somehow, I’m not very surprised that he doesn’t. I think the real question here is whether this is ignorance, willful ignorance, or just straight-up lying? All three possibilities are just different shades of bad, but still, it would be interesting to know. A lot of this administration’s policies have been conceived in the dark spaces between willful ignorance and untruth, so I’m guessing that’s where the twisted creature that’s been tracking our phone calls was born.

Richard A. Falkenrath, the former deputy homeland security advisor and current Brookings Institute scholar, has published an editorial in the Post saying that whoever engineered the massive NSA phone-record grab is a genius and a hero. And if that person turn out to be Michael Hayden, erstwhile NSA head honcho and CIA Director nominee, he should be immediately confirmed, because he’s just the kind of guy we want heading our intelligence agencies.

His argument, such as it is, wends its way through a carefully-worded, legalistic labyrinth before fetching up on the shoals of the traditional we’re at war, anything goes shibboleth. One of his attempted sleights of hand centers around the word “anonymized”, which appears five times in the course of a 670-word op-ed. As in:

On Thursday, USA Today reported that three U.S. telecommunications companies have been voluntarily providing the National Security Agency with anonymized domestic telephone records — that is, records stripped of individually identifiable data, such as names and place of residence.

It’s a good thing there’s absolutely no way to trace phone numbers back to their owners, isn’t it? Say, through a Google search, maybe, or some other service that, given a phone number, provides instantaneous name and address data. Otherwise, those anonymized records wouldn’t be anonymous at all, and that would be terrible for the point that Mr Falkenrath is trying to make. Just terrible.

Setting that aside for the moment, there’s also the repeated use of “voluntarily.” This also appears five times. As in:

The USA Today story, however, alleges that three telecommunications companies — AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth — provided it voluntarily. How else could one company (Qwest) decline to provide the information? Since there is no prohibition against federal agencies receiving voluntarily provided business records relating to their responsibilities, it appears that the NSA’s alleged receipt and retention of such information is perfectly legal.

So an NSA agent shows up at your door. He says, Hi! I’d like phone records for every call that’s ever been made on your network, ever. No pressure, of course, I’m not demanding anything, but there is the matter of national security, and the fact that you have several regulatory issues wending their way through our pet congress, and, oh! here’s a bunch of money!

The fact that Qwest told these people to get lost is a testament to their courage, not to the legality of the request. Even if this is somehow legal, in the narrowest and most legalistic sense, it’s morally repugnant, and an obvious violation of the spirit of the law intended to keep the government out of our lives.

We’re going to hear a lot of arguments like this one over the next few weeks, so it’s important to keep our eye on the ball: the NSA now has possession of most of our phone records. They’re sitting in a database somewhere, being data-mined as we speak.

This is as Big Brotherish as it gets. This is real. This is happening.

The treacherous phone companies who’ve been pipelining our personal data into NSA headquarters may be hurting soon:

Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University, said his reading of the relevant statutes put the phone companies at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order.

“This is not a happy day for the general counsels” of the phone companies, he said. “If you have a class action involving 10 million Americans, that’s 10 million times $1,000 — that’s 10 billion.”

I’m not generally a fan of class action lawsuits, as they always seem to bring great wealth to the litigators and tiny pittances to the actual victims, but in this case I’m all for it. Lawsuits could do some actual damage here. There’s already one going in Jersey:

The New Jersey lawyers who filed the federal suit against Verizon in Manhattan yesterday, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, said they would consider filing suits against BellSouth and AT&T in other jurisdictions.

Sue them all. Sue them twice. And then when you’re done suing them, sue them again. Bleed them into turnips. They deserve all that and more.

You know that line of Arthur C Clarke’s, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? I have a corollary: any sufficiently annoying pain in the ass is indistinguishable from javascript.

I swear to god, building anything with javascript is like making a house out of rubber bands and seagull feathers. It’s like writing a novel with nothing but the letters “Z” and “Q” and a semicolon. It’s like painting a sunset with a sledgehammer.

Yeah, I’m aware of CSS 2, and Ajax, and the many-splendored glories of DOM manipulation. But all that Web 2.0 goodness is ultimately built on a foundation of crap. You can erect palaces in swamps, but it’s never pleasant, it’s never pretty, and it takes a lot longer than should.

Feh.

Well, it’s happening. The NSA has apparently been tracking our telephone calls for the past five years:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

If this turns out to be as bad as it sounds, you can count on the administration and their apologists to throw up the usual smokescreens. They can’t use “we’re only tracking calls to foreign terrorists” anymore, but they’ve still got “protect the nation from evildoers” and “if you’re not doing anything wrong, why worry?” to fall back on. And it’ll probably work, to some extent. I don’t think people realize how precious their privacy is, and how dangerous a government like this can be. It can happen here. It is happening here.

This isn’t all Bush and his cronies, though. It seems to me there are three parties to this outrage: the government, the phone companies, and us. I have nothing but contempt for Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth, all of whom quickly handed over our phone records when the NSA came calling. Double contempt because they can’t even plead love of country: the USA Today article hints strongly that they were nicely compensated for their “patriotism”.

Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge our culpability here. Because who else but us is going to stop this thing? We can’t expect anything from the administration, obviously. Congress has made itself weak and ineffectual. And we certainly shouldn’t count on the soulless corporations who control our phones to do the right thing (with the notable, and noble, exception of Qwest, who told the NSA to fuck off). That leaves us.

So what do we do? We hit them where it hurts. Find their crotches, don our steel-toed boots, and start kicking. For the government, crotch = ballot box, and thank goodness we still have that crotch available to us. Let’s use it this time, shall we? Mid-term elections are coming up at the end of the year. Time to throw the bums out.

For the phone companies, crotch = pocketbook. I use Verizon for my local and cell calls, AT&T for long-distance. That means that every call I’ve made for the past five years is in an NSA database somewhere, waiting for some twisted Bush-spawned politico to dig it up and use it against me. He’s made several calls to Arabs, your honor! Arabs! Yes, they were his brother and his uncles and his aunts, but nevertheless! The safety of the nation is at stake!

Fuck this. I’m canceling my service with all of these treacherous monopolies. I have to. What other choice is there?

Update: According to the first polls, a majority of Americans (around 66%) are fine with the government tracking their calls. Seems like a quick and dirty survey, and the sample size looks suspiciously small to me, but nevertheless: not great news. Hopefully this changes as the true scale of this thing becomes apparent.

I’m reading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, a compact memoir that’s both beautifully written and dense with wisdom. It’s also possibly the most discouraging guidebook I’ve ever read, less a description of the writing life than a warning, a skull and crossbones: a gentle reminder to abandon all hope.

Here’s a typical passage:

I do not so much write a book and sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Or this:

But you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing … you are filling in the vision. You cannot fill in the vision. You cannot even bring the vision to light. You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work.

Sigh. I’m still not done, so there’s a small chance all of this gloom might resolve into some sort of hymn to the despite-it-all worthiness and exhaltation of the writing life. But I doubt it, and my own small experience tells me that this would be a false coda anyway. The actual process of writing is gruelling, unpleasant work, more an assassination of your vision that its realization.

So why do it? Dillard hasn’t offered any answers, yet, but I think I know what keeps me coming back. When things are going well, when I manage to squeeze out a story or a sentence or even a phrase that I didn’t think I was capable of, when for one brief moment the futility lifts like fog and I glimpse for the first time the landscape I’m trying to create: in that fleeting instant, I’m better than myself; better than I am.

And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Transcendence. It’s why we seek out gods, make art, fall in love: to slot the broken pieces of ourselves into some larger vision that completes us, justifies us. We’re dropped flawed and yearning into a world that bewilders and bewitches us, and spend our brief time here clawing our way toward some vague dream of contentment.

That’s what art is, or can be: a momentary brush with that state of transcedence. It’s powerful, addictive mojo, beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure.

Another Jiggy sighting, this time from Daily Kos, which should know better:

Yes, it looks like the American people, all of them, are getting jiggy with it. Gas prices got everyone’s attention.

The disease spreads. Is this a minor flare-up, or the vanguard of a full-on epidemic? We’ll be watching. And praying.