It comforts me immensely to know that there are at least half a dozen parodies of Plain White T's' "Hey There Delilah" on YouTube. So far I've found four making fun of Sarah Palin, one supporting her, and at least one making fun of Barack Obama.

This is one of those cool moments in history when a new technology profoundly affects the musical world (which has been reeling under the impact of one new technology after another ever since Edison invented the phonograph, but this is different.) Actually, I'd trace the current flowering back to introduction of cassette tapes -- the first recording media any idiot, even a musician, could use without a record company's help -- but this is better by an order of magnitude. The development of the printing press strongly influenced Renaissance music, both indirectly by its effect on society and directly by facilitating the publishing and distribution of new music. It wasn't all for good -- a lot of trivial fluff was written and published to be played and enjoyed by amateurs -- but you couldn't fault it for vibrancy.

Fifty years ago purists were moaning about recorded music; they said that by the year 2000 we'd all be mindless consumers of mass-produced pap ground out by the mills of the recording industry. Instead we've got this efflorescence of singer/songwriters distributing their music on the Web. Again, this isn't all for good -- Sturgeon's Law still holds. But technology smothering creativity? Hardly.

About three years ago, California's workers' compensation system was "reformed." Here are two results, from my personal knowledge:

"Abby" fell off a utility pole ten or so years ago and shattered her left wrist. It's now held together with a steel rod. Although she could no longer bend the wrist, she was able to continue working as a telecomm technician. (She got no workers' comp for the original injury -- she was working for herself at the time.)

Last winter, the screws holding one end of the rod to the bones in the back of her hand started to work loose; the end of the rod began to lift up from the back of her hand, stretching the skin in an alarming way. She thought it might be due to a fall she'd taken while working (this time for a regular employer), and filed a claim for worker's compensation.

Enter the workers' compensation insurance company investigators. They had 90 days to investigate and approve or deny her claim. They interviewed Abby, her boss, her co-workers, and everyone else they could think of. They took depositions. They got doctors' opinions.

The case was pretty clear from the get-go: there was no documentation of the fall, though no one doubted it had happened; the fall might have caused the problem, or it might not have, or it might have contributed to it, with time and normal living contributing as well. In a rational society, the conclusion would have been to split the difference: have workers' comp pay half the cost of fixing Abby's wrist, let Abby come up with the rest.

Oh, but we can't do that -- workers' comp has been reformed. Instead, the company's investigators ran up as many billable hours as they could for as long as they could, during which time Abby couldn't work -- she needed to get her wrist fixed, and she couldn't get her wrist fixed unless worker's comp paid for at least part of it. On the very last day, the company denied Abby's claim.

Now we move on to a certain school district where instructional assistants -- uncredentialed employees -- must lift disabled students from their wheelchairs at least once a day. Some of these students weigh over 200 pounds, and some are too spastic or paralyzed to help with the lift. And the IAs are not really trained on proper lifting technique -- not that there is a proper one-person lifting technique for getting a 200-lb quadriplegic out of a wheelchair. So some of them get strained muscles (temporary impairment) or herniated disks (permanent impairment).

Workers' compensation covers that, of course. All you have to do is fill out a ten-page questionnaire and provide records of every single doctor, chiropractor, or physical therapist visit you've had in the last ten years. Every single one. And if you fail to do that, or if you omit one appointment, or say it was for psoriasis when the doctor's record says it was eczema, your claim can be held up or denied.

Workers' compensation fraud is supposed to have been a big problem. Premiums were supposedly driving employers out of California. But while I know no one who has ever filed a fraudulent workers' comp claim -- do you? -- I know at least two people who've been screwed over in the stupidest bureaucratic ways by the workers' comp insurance/investigators complex, while the investigators were making money hand over fist, quite obviously running out the clock and imposing endless complex paperwork demands on people who had been injured at work.

And who pays for the investigators' pointless running around? Employers, of course -- who must be wondering why, in these post-reform days, workers' compensation insurance policies still cost so damn much.

Impeach Cheney first

Today, as noted in Crablaw and other places, Crablaw is hosting a blogswarm on the proposed impeachment of President Bush or of any other impeachable federal officer.

If this President and Vice-President don't deserve impeachment, none ever will. Witness the President's asleep-at-the-wheel performance up to September 11, 2001, when suddenly the "vague" warnings on his intelligence briefings came true. Neither his civil nor his military aviation agencies were prepared; none were able to prevent the hijackings or stop them once they were under way.

Witness the President's performance after September 11: in a whirlwind burst of new-found energy, he invaded Afghanistan, toppling the government that hosted the man he held responsible for the hijackings but somehow failing to apprehend the man himself. The man himself remains at large, probably in Pakistan; somehow our "friendly" relations with the current governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan are not enough to induce either government to go in and get him; apparently it's not important enough to us to go in and get him ourselves, with or without their permission.

After September 11, the entire civilized world was on our side -- for a few months. But the arrogance of the President and his administration soon took care of that.

On the home front, we have the Patriot Act -- an obscene carte blanche for wholesale government invasion of privacy and violation of civil and human rights.

Then there's the Iraq war, largely a creation of the Vice-President. He cherry-picked intelligence to arrive at the conclusion he wanted; he and his neo-conservative cronies participated in a mass delusion of a kind of benign domino effect in the Middle East, where taking out Saddam Hussein and transforming Iraq into a democracy would result in the inexorable spread of secular democracy all over the Middle East. Obviously, this grand scheme hasn't worked; equally obviously, it never could have worked; equally obviously, it is a violation of international law to impose one's nation-building schemes on others with tanks, planes, bombs and guns.

Again on the home front, we have surveillance of US citizens in violation of the law -- a law so generously written that court permission for wiretaps can be obtained after the fact. And the President and Vice-President couldn't be bothered to do even that much.

Overseas again, we have "extraordinary rendition" -- that is, the apprehension and confinement of people, sometimes US citizens, in secret or not-so-secret prisons on foreign soil, without charge, trial, or access to legal counsel. Some of these people were entirely innocent. Some have been subjected to "aggressive interrogation techniques" -- that is, tortured, either by US agents or by foreign stooges. Some are still being held, in violation of international agreements on human rights, in violation of the Constitution.

Here and overseas, we have pervasive cronyism, incompetence, corruption, and a Stalinist approach to science. A do-nothing non-entity was put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; its response to Hurricane Katrina is well known. Billions of dollars have simply disappeared in Iraq. Climatologists and the former Surgeon General have had their reports edited and/or suppressed when they expressed inconvenient truths about global warming, the failure of abstinence-only sex education, and other bits of reality that didn't fit the administration's agenda.

I have lived through the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush. I have never seen an administration more incompetent, more corrupt, more prone to spy on citizens and suppress free speech than this one. I have never before seen the use of torture defended by my President (or Vice-President, or Attorney General).

I have never before been so ashamed to be an American. Every day that Bush and Cheney remain in office adds to our shame.

Lament for Wegglywoo

"Lament" is too strong a word -- Wegg hasn't died. But she suddenly and without warning pulled her blogs ( on the beach at the end of the world and pillowbook) off the web. To find any of her writing now, one has to do a Google search and hope the various archives are still intact; to find any news of Wegg herself one has to sleuth with some determination, which I haven't done, not wanting to give off a stalkerly vibe. I found a note, from someone who seemed to know, to the effect that she'd pulled her blogs down for personal reasons and might return to the blogsphere when certain issues were resolved.

I speculate that someone at her job, where the suits seem to have suddenly discovered Weblogging (tm), found her blogs and blew her cover; to keep her job, she would have had to pull them (pillowbook was definitely x-rated, and the other, while more decorous, was not be what you'd read to a child). But that's only speculation.

Could also be that she's doing some serious navel-gazing in the wake of some recent personal turmoil (I'm not going to describe it beyond that). A writer's persona is never exactly the writer herself, no matter how authentic the writer tries to be; craft always gets in the way; and the relationship between self and persona can be uneasy. The persona, though only a creature of the writer, can have more influence than one might like -- sometimes for good, sometimes not. Sometimes a persona is like a shell -- to grow, you have to break out of it. In any case, if the relationship gets too uncomfortable, the writer can and will dismiss the persona, and off it goes like a dream. Some of its traits will probably emerge in subsequent personas, but essentially a persona owes its existence to the writer's willingness to keep it up.

Whatever the cause, I'm feeling two things: concern for Wegg -- her writing portrays an intelligent and unconventional young woman dealing with more than her share of childhood trauma; and an unexpectedly big hole in my reading life. Wegg's writing was always fresh, always interesting. Her little spelling quirks -- reversals and reduplications in certain words, like "hopspital" and "aksked" -- were not the kind of thing I'd encourage in a writer of any age, but the rest of her style made up for them. Indeed, they seemed integral and necessary after a while. And she portrayed her emotions with a combination of deftness and openness that covered a multitude of sins.

So if you happen to read this, Wegg, know that I hope to read your stuff again.

Your tax dollars at work

Miranda got a letter from the California Franchise Tax Board a couple of months ago. It said she'd failed to appear in court in the city of Tracy on a charge of reckless driving, and until she did show up, they were going to have her employer take money out of her wages and send it to them.

Sounds reasonable. Except for two things: she wasn't the driver in the auto accident that started this whole sorry chain of events; and the accident was seventeen years ago.

Seventeen years. Here in California the statute of limitations for most crimes -- most felonies -- is five years. You can commit burglary, shoplifting, grand theft, fraud, second-degree kidnapping, and assault and battery, and as long as you don't kill anyone or commit a sex crime, and as long as you keep it low-key enough to stay out of the "class A felony" category, the cops can't do a thing to you if they don't do it within five years.

But if you're in an auto accident, and your low-life boyfriend -- who was driving, but didn't see why the CHP had to know that -- takes your driver's license out of your purse and hands it to the CHP officer while they're loading you into the ambulance, you better take care of it right away, even if your boyfriend somehow forgets to tell you about it. Because seventeen years later, they'll be coming for you, or for the twenty bucks a month they can siphon out of your paycheck.

That's right. They put the bite on Miranda for about ten bucks every paycheck. The wheels of justice grind slowly but exceeding small. It cost them probably five bucks to dun her, and five bucks to process each payment, so the net gain for the state was probably zero. But that's nothing when justice is to be served.

So a few weeks ago Miranda took a day off work -- lost a day's wages -- to drive to Tracy and appear in court. The CHP officer, now retired, showed up too, and spoke right up, the good man: "Your honor, I can't remember anything from seventeen years ago!"

"Dismissed," said the judge. And that was that.

Except of course for the two- or three-week wait for the word to trickle through the Franchise Tax Board's bureaucracy. So Miranda's next paycheck got a bite, too. Today we finally got the word in writing that they didn't want any of her money any more.

And when will they send back the money they collected on the presumption that she was guilty (hey, wait a minute -- presumption of guilt?) Oh, soon; real soon; not more than a few months. And will she get interest on it? Oh please, stop, you're killing me.

Framing the debate: everything's a bid for a headline

Three dead by suicide at the USA's oubliette at Guantanamo Bay, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy calls it a "good PR move". Aren't you glad you're not her press secretary? I should think killing yourself to get some press would rate as more than just "good."

This comes on the heels of the Washington Times (aka "The Moonie News") headline "Democrats call Zarqawi killing a stunt". I guess it's OK for Republicans to dismiss suicide as a PR move, but not for Democrats to acknowledge the obvious PR benefits the Bush administration will reap from killing one of its favorite enemies.

Apparently the Bushies can't conceive of taking life, even one's own, for any reason except to create headlines and frame the national debate. If a man imprisoned half a world away from home and family, with no trial or release in sight, takes matters into his own hands in the only way he can, we are not to consider the obvious reason, that he found himself in unbearable conditions and without hope; we are to believe that he killed himself because he hated freedom and wanted to hurt us however he could.

Thank you, President Bush, for protecting us from those who would cold-bloodedly hang themselves in their prison cells!

I'm reminded of the death of Bobby Sands, who starved himself in a futile attempt to shame Margaret Thatcher's government into treating him and others like political prisoners. At least the Iron Lady was principled, in her way: in her eyes, Sands was a criminal and would be treated as one. Bush's thugs can't even come up to that level of civilization: the prisoners at Guantanamo are neither prisoners of war nor accused criminals, they're just people who are being detained because it's necessary to detain them. Because, uh, they're evil and they hate freedom, and that's the reason for every single thing they do.

And so the country of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison continues to imprison people indefinitely without charge or trial -- 500 at Guantanamo, and an unknown number at secret prisons elsewhere. That's how much Bush and his thugs love liberty.

Two things from a rant I came across by mere chance have turned my attitude around. First, this bit:

MYTH: If only I could meet the right woman, my life would have meaning.

TRUTH: If your life doesn't have meaning right now, when you're single, then a relationship isn't going to help. [ . . . ] The only way to have a happy life is to develop one for yourself, then leave an opening for someone else to come and share it with you.

Second:

Nobody gives a shit about your problems. Nobody ever will. I know that sounds harsh, but it's the reality of being a man. Want to tell people about your problems? Get a sex change. Or join a men's group; the flip side is that you have to listen to their problems, but it helps.

It's not really true, that second one -- there are people who give a shit about my problems, maybe even two shits, and maybe even sympathy and/or helpful advice -- but at the end of the day my problems are still mine.

The first one was something I should have known, of course; probably did know, once, but forgot somehow. Putting my relationship with -- let's call her Grace O'Malley -- at the center of myself was a colossal mistake. Putting any relationship with another person at the center of one's self is a colossal mistake; it's not putting the cart before the horse, it's putting the horse in the cart, or the cart on top of the horse -- something will get damaged in the process. At the center must be oneself, self-standing, making connections with others but not depending on others, or even a particular connection with one, for meaning.

Seeing this has freed my mind wonderfully, and (paradoxically) made me a better partner. Seeing Grace as a separate person, one with whom I have a relationship but is not me, not part of me, not indispensable to me, has enabled me to relax and enjoy her, and be nice to her.

This is all so banal I can hardly stand it. I sound like an adolescent. But what the hell, there it is.