Stickybuffalo.com

I love how our Captains of Industry constantly call for the government to keep its nose out of the marketplace, and then as soon as all their awful decisions catch up with them it suddenly becomes to government’s job to bail them out.

Anyway, if you or anyone you know has any interest in buying a house in Greenfield, Mass. (Charlie? Got any family out here who want to move?) please send them my way. Before things get ugly. Please.

in the wake of virginia tech and NIU, the university of iowa implemented an expensive emergency notification system that’s supposed to phone, text or email you when bad shit happens.

today, in response to a particularly horrific early-morning domestic murder, the system was activated. it worked beautifully, by all accounts, in that most university students, faculty & staff were notified instantaneously that bad shit had happened and/or was happening. however, the information we all received was not only vague and incomplete, but also inaccurate and at least an hour too late to have been of any help in the first place.

here’s what i’ve been able to put together in an hour of surfing local news: a man apparently killed his wife and children in their home and fled in a beige minivan, only to crash the vehicle on the freeway a few miles outside of town, killing himself. someone — presumably either the killer or one of the victims — called 911 at 6:31 a.m., and police arrived to find everyone dead. the vehicle crashed some time between 6:30 and 7.

i was still sound asleep when all of this happened. but i was awake at 8:13, in time to take a confusing phone call from a mushmouthed robot warning in broken english of an “active shooter” in “the area,” and urging me to call 911 if i should spot a white male in his mid-40s driving a beige minivan. the robot said i could press * to hear the message again, but hung up before i could hit the keypad.

and that was it — nothing about where the alleged shooting was going down, no instructions as to whether i should stay inside or go to campus as normal. i fired off calls and IMs to various university people, who were all equally confused. a few minutes later, the robot called back to clarify that no university buildings were threatened, and that people should stop calling the police with questions, but that we should definitely report any “speck-fick” (specific?) information regarding the whereabouts of the suspect.

this would be the same suspect whose charred corpse was already cooling on the roadside at least an hour before the emergency warning went out. the murders happened on the opposite side of town, as far away from campus as it could possibly have been. what’s more, the “active shooter” stuff — apart from being distressingly non-specific — was completely bogus. the local cops, naturally, are being pretty tight-lipped about details, but have told reporters that they are “not sure” where the university got that idea, adding that, “to [their] knowledge, no firearms were involved.”

so, to recap: this morning approximately 40,000 people got scared out of their wits by a robot phone call dispensing information that was neither timely, nor accurate, nor relevant, nor even comprehensible, leaving them with no clue what to do other than flood police and emergency dispatch phone lines. the net result is an unnecessary communications train-wreck, and a remotely plausible excuse for students to ditch class. a less-than-auspicious maiden voyage for the Hawk Alert system.

maybe it’s unfair to criticize the university for this thoroughly muddled response. in truth, had this been a real campus emergency, even scant or faulty information would have been preferable to none at all. and it’s hard to blame the decision-makers for jumping the gun — memories of the 1991 Gang Liu murders are still fresh for many around here, and the rash of shootings at other schools naturally has people on edge. it’s understandable that nobody wants to go down as the guy who failed to act at the first sign of trouble.

still, none of this inspires confidence in emergency preparedness efforts around here. all it really demonstrates is that this country is still borderline-retarded with fear, and our little liberal oasis of enlightened thinking is no exception. but the object lesson here, for those who are looking for one, should be that instantaneous high-tech emergency notification — if mishandled — can create more problems than it mitigates.

holy shit, that took long enough.

Off-hand thought of the day:

The sort of populist, inspirational, hope-centric, paradigm-shifting, outsider/anti-establishment campaign Obama is running this year is stunningly similar to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. That the tables have so drastically turned is among the strongest reasons to support Obama over Hillary Clinton.

Bonus weirdness: a google search for “Barak Obama” generates 1.6 million more hits than a google search for “Barack Obama” (though most of the former’s hits seem to be the same as the latter’s hits).

Well, this week has been hard for Obama. He can kiss the racist vote goodbye.

Rick Wilson, the same asshole who tarnished Max Cleland’s reputation among rednecks by associating him with Osama Bin Laden, is licking his chops over this whole Jeremiah Wright affair. On CNN tonight he called it a “gold mine.”

Let me see: Cleland was a triple amputee who literally gave his limbs (and nearly his life) for his country. After Wilson and other GOP vipers got a hold on him, he was a terrorist lover.

Now we have Obama. He is the first American politician, to my memory, to say something about race other than tepid bromides on a colorblind society. Given the grace and intelligence and, worse, underlying morality of Obama’s message, it’s no wonder Wilson wants to turn him into an America-hating black nationalist.

Wilson has the opposite of the Midas touch. He touches gold and turns it into shit.

Will it work this year? Will we yet again destroy the Democratic candidate and appoint the latest dumbfuck Republican? Will Republican attempts to scare the bejesus out of white America strike a mortal wound in Obama’s candidacy? Or will an ungodly share of the GOP base finally be exposed for what they are?

Cracker-ass bigots.

On this eve of the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, I say that it’s time this fucking country stepped up. I’m tired of feeling ashamed about the vicious stupidity of this nation. We’ve gone from inalienable rights to preemptive strikes.

No fucking mas, goddamnit.

this is the most metal thing i’ve ever heard of.

Notes left by Mr Tovey… revealed that he had scoured the internet for plans before constructing his complex machine, which involved a jigsaw power tool and was connected to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets. It could fire multiple shots once triggered remotely.

At 7am on Tuesday he set the robot up in the driveway of his £450,000 house and activated it.

honestly, i don’t know what we have a first law of robotics for if we’re not going to enforce it.

all this time i’ve been instinctively skeptical — maybe even a little bit susceptible to the clinton meme about pretty words vs. substance — but no more. obama is for real.

today’s speech was just about the most truthful, meaningful, and eloquent commentary on race and american history that i’ve heard from a mainstream politician in my lifetime. it would have been easy to retreat, or spin, or counterattack, or throw jeremiah wright under the bus. but instead he took the opportunity — not the bait — to talk about the perennial elephant-in-the-room in an authentic and profoundly insightful way, without resorting to either sharptonian histrionics or cosbyan homilies, without being drawn into a race fight and yet without “disowning the black community.” i don’t know how he did it, but he turned pure shit into gold.

if this doesn’t undo any damage wrought by the manufactured controversy over wright, nothing will. anybody who listened to the speech and still thinks that obama is just another smooth talker with no authentic vision is never going to get it. and if, after today, voters are actually influenced by the wright bullshit, it’s not obama’s fault — it can only mean we’re not ready and probably never will be. but obama is definitely ready. consider me a believer as of today.

update: video

says G Dub.

http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10872696&top_story=1

Open thread for all things economy

hey, remember us? we’re iowa.

where’ve you been, democratic primary process? you never call anymore, you never write. seems like just a few weeks ago you were all over us. what happened?

well, while you were busy obsessing over obama’s crazy preacher and spitzer’s whoring, we just saved the day, again. y’know how hillary clinton’s campaign was resurrected by her dramatic victories in ohio and texas last week? (okay, so texas wasn’t really a victory. but she won ohio, right?)

yeah. about that.

see, john edwards’ iowa delegates refshuffled today — edwards came in second here, remember? — and, well, barack obama just picked up another seven cornfed hawkeye delegates. and another five in california. how many did clinton pick up in her big-shit ohio victory last week? nine, was it?

so clinton’s vaunted comeback — and i never quite understood how you pull off a “comeback” and still lag miles behind in the delegate count — has been negated, with interest. we’re right back to where we were two weeks ago, which is where we’ll be in july: it’s all but mathematically impossible for hillary clinton to win the delegates she needs to become the nominee.

we’re doing our bit here in the cornbelt. now if we could just do something about florida…

i’ll admit, i didn’t think much of the wire when it premiered in 2002. at first glance it was just another retread of a hopelessly played-out genre — the gritty urban cop show — and worse, a staging of the war-on-drugs melodrama that seemed to affirm and reinforce predictable roles of good-guy cops and bad-guy dealers. pure ideological anathema to me at the time.

while, at a superficial level, that initial assessment wasn’t too far off, it took me until the second or third season to realize there was a lot more going on than that. i’ll leave it to more eloquent critics to explain exactly what — suffice to say, i can’t think of a single TV show that has changed my thinking more on matters of crime, justice, poverty, bureaucracy, corruption, and the whole notion of public service (not to mention cop shows themselves).

but on to today’s entry from the more-meta-than-meta department. if you saw any of the wire’s fifth and final season, which concluded this week, you know that it took a swing at the newspaper business through plotlines dealing with a fictionalized baltimore sun. some of the most interesting — and weirdly self-referential — coverage of the series has been from the real-life sun, where series creator david simon once worked, and which was the origin of a personal grudge that season five was, apparently, largely devoted to thrashing out. the sun’s columnists and reviewers couldn’t get enough wire for the first four seasons, but notice how the love affair cools when simon turns his cameras on their own newsroom.