Month: April 2007

Shorty’s Labyrinth

You can’t save energy! What will the neighbors think?? How homeowner’s associations are bad for the environment. The good news is that states and the feds can pass laws pre-empting neighborhood rules. In fact the feds did just that in 1996 over an issue of clearly overiding national interest, satellite dishes.

Um yeah, maybe we ought to refinance those before they all default and leave us holding the bag. That’s what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and WaMu (funny seeing them here) and the Mortgage Bankers Association are saying. I guess there’s somebody around old enough to remember the 1980s and the fallout from the Savings and Loan problems. It was years before they got all the property sold.

The Little Government Agency That Could. Be on the lookout for news in the coming weeks from the Office of Special Counsel investigations. It sounds like they are making a go at connecting the dots between Rove, Gonzales, the RNC, and just about every other rotten thing on the Potomac.

Waaah! The Lawyers are getting in the way! The government wants to limit attorney access to “unlawful combatants.” If they can actually make a judge see things their way, what exactly is stopping them from limiting Joe Average from seeing his lawyer if he is accused of a serious crime? All they have to do is say his lawyer is disruptive and poses a “security risk” the way I see it. Talk about a situation where I would be delighted to be proven wrong!

Boy, I wish I was average. Because apparently the average American has 25 electronic gadgets (guilty) and spends $1200 per year on more electronic gadgets.

All or Nothing. President Bush is really going to town on this illegal immigration thing. Yesterday’s radio address included bits like “We need a system where our laws are respected. We need a system that meets the legitimate needs of our economy. And we need a system that treats people with dignity and helps newcomers assimilate into our society… We must address all elements of this problem together, or none of them will be solved at all.” Today he told a graduation assembly that “the immigration system is deeply broken: Employers are not held accountable enough; borders are not secure enough; businesses need workers willing to do low-paying jobs; and the 12 million people estimated to be in the U.S. illegally cannot all be deported and so must be dealt with ‘without amnesty and without animosity.'” He then added “We must address all elements of this problem together — or none of them will be solved at all.” He really does have a black-or-white good-or-evil this-or-that way of looking at the world, doesn’t he? Hey, when you have a perfectly good meme going, stick with it. Good luck coming up with a bill that does all that without eroding the American workforce. Last I heard, the way to find workers willing to do low-paying jobs was to pay them more.

It turns out there’s some disagreement about the “timetable” for getting out of Iraq. Oh, I wasn’t talking about in Congress! I was talking about among the Iraqis! Now, interesting quote in this story from Presidential hopeful The Other Clinton,

“The first thing I will do upon taking office is to end the war in Iraq,” Clinton said.

So, for those of you playing at home, Mrs. Clinton thinks we will still have substantial troops in Iraq in January of 2009. And — follow me on this — that means she thinks both current efforts and any future effort before 2009 to end the war are Doomed. Now that’s what I call setting a timetable to surrender.

More American Terrorists. Except we aren’t calling them Terrorists, we are calling them Militia. Jill over at Brilliant At Breakfast sums it up nicely when she says “I guess you have to be dark-skinned, Muslim, and Really Really Scary-Looking to qualify as a terrorist in the eyes of this bunch.”

Food for Thought. The Baltimore Sun tells us that we import a lot more food than we used to and do proportionately less testing of it than we used to. The Indy Star outlines some of the reasons why.

And Finally…

Fist Full of Dollars. Now Katrina victims are being asked to buy (or at least pay rent on) their FEMA trailers. Let’s overlook for a few minutes that these people’s homes were destroyed over a year and a half ago and they are still living in trailers, despite the fact that it underlines how absolutely abysmal progress has been in rebuilding the area. Instead let me point out this section:

The hurricanes destroyed more than 200,000 homes, according to government estimates, including many apartments that have yet to be rebuilt. Louisiana recently announced that it had awarded $202 million in federal funds to help small landlords restore more than 5,200 rental units. With many fewer apartments available, rents along the Gulf Coast have soared, leaving many former residents of New Orleans unable to afford to return home.

Funny thing, when you try to replace 200,000 homes with 5200 apartments, scarcity results.

Why WAMU will no longer be my bank

The events I will describe are true. If WAMU would like to comment on this entry, their representative should contact me. Once I have verified the origin of such comments and the authority of the representative to send such comments to my satisfaction, I will gladly post their reply in an update to this post.

I have been a customer of Washington Mutual Bank for about 5 years now. I have had business and personal accounts; I have had accounts in two states. The nice people at the Harbour Pointe Banking Center have been very helpful, in particular a young man named Kyle.

However, since I have moved back to Nevada, it is a good idea to change my banking accounts to Nevada accounts. We have been through this before, and do not want to hear things like “I’m sorry, there’s a 5 day hold on your paycheck because it’s from out of state” or “I’m sorry, I can’t process a cashier’s check in that amount because you have an out of state account.” Problems like this are why we changed from
Bank of America 5 years ago. Well, that and charging me $0.25 to talk to customer service “too many” times and clear up a problem caused by their error.

So this morning I assembled all the various documents I would need to open a new checking account at the WAMU branch just 5 minutes away. To my delight, they were actually open a few minutes before their stated opening time of 9 AM. Within moments we were talking to a customer service representative, one of those folks we used to call a “bank teller”.

This representative told us that no, there was no need to open a new account. Not only would there be no problem continuing to bank using our old account, there would be no problems with checks and so forth (not even with the pizza guy? I think not!), but opening a new account would in essence be starting “a new banking relationship” and they would have to treat us as a brand new (implying “untrustworthy”) customer. We were furthermore told that the only services she could not do for us right there on the spot was address changes and ordering checks.

Ok, now remember that after a cross country move, two things I desperately need are to change my address with the bank, and get checks that reflect that address.

To do those things, all I need is to make a “quick call to customer service.”

I’ve had the occasion to talk to customer service over the years, and “quick” is never a word I would use to describe the experience.

But nevertheless, I went home and poured a cup of coffee and grabbed the telephone. It was now about 9:15 AM. After navigating an arcane voice-routing system, punching in my account number, giving it a phone password I didn’t even know I had, it insisted on giving me my balances before offering me any opportunity to speak with a human. Hint: just because a particular kind of information is commonly needed doesn’t mean everybody needs it every call before dealing with every problem.

I finally got to talk to a human. As nearly as I can tell, this human was Charlie Brown’s teacher. If calls really are recorded, some supervisor will hear me say multiple times “I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you are saying.” All I could hear was a woman’s voice and lots of background noise. It was as if she’d called in from one of those trendy restaurants that are way too loud so patrons will eat and leave right away. I finally told her that something was clearly wrong and I would call again.

I hung up and called again. Again the punch this number and that and listening to my balance which has not changed in the last 5 minutes and don’t I want my 5 most recent transactions…. At least these calls are toll free. For me anyway; who knows what this costs them every phone call.

Human Two was at least understandable. I explained that I needed two things today, and the first thing was to change my address. She told me that was fine, but it would take 30 days for the address change to go into effect, and in the meantime I would not be able to do things like order checks.

Um, that’s the second thing I needed to do.

She replied: Oh, If I need this done right away I could do it at my branch bank (where they just told me I need to call customer service).

She continues: Or I could do it instantly online, and then call her back to order checks.

So let me get this straight, if I change my address with customer service it takes 30 days, but if I do it instantly online then I have to order checks from customer service?

She replies: No, you can order checks online too.

Ok fine thanks for your [lack of] help I’ll go do that now. Click.

But wait! There’s a punchline!

By now it was past 9:30, not quite 9:45. I calmly walked over to my computer and logged into my online account. After a minute or so, I found the “change address” option buried in the “change personal information” section. I punched in my information and clicked the box marked “NEXT”.

A moment later, my computer screen informed me that this service was not available at this time, and that I should call customer service.

That’s when I screamed in frustration.

I spent the rest of my morning shopping for a new bank. I’m going with one that has competitve products/rates, and posts the phone numbers of individual branches on their website. When I called, the phone was picked up on the second ring by a human. No voicemail tree, no requests for my account number (which I don’t have yet), no press-this-to-get-that. Within 30 seconds I was talking to a New Accounts Specialist who told me all about the features of the various accounts they offered, asking helpful questions to eliminate products that would not suit my needs. She told me about branch locations, and pointed out that as a full service bank they had additional offerings such as investments and mortgages. WAMU could learn a lot from Colonial Bank.

In closing: It’s ok for a General to say Iraq must live with “sensational” attacks, but it wasn’t ok for John Kerry to talk about reducing terrorism to “nuisance” levels, go figure; The FDA knew about food that could kill us and did nothing; eventually I will get around to my own thoughts on the 9th Amendment; welcome back to the ’50s, a radio station is ditching traditional commercial spots in favor of sponsored hours of programming; fossil filter, fossilized rain forest and mystery fossil turns out to be a giant fungus; bad legislation on the horizon, “Let’s sum up. If the Spy Act become law, hardware, software, and network vendors will be granted carte blanche to use spyware themselves to police their customers’ use of their products and services. Incredibly broad exceptions will probably allow even the worst of the adware outfits to operate with legal cover. State attempts to deal with the spyware problem will be pre-empted and enforcement left up almost entirely to the FTC”; here’s a list of 50 places where you will probably never eat; must read item, 10 steps to fascism; clever wording, Muslims show only partial support for Al Queda rather than no support at all; I hate to agree with rightwingnews.com, but he’s right…. er, correct; someone who may have figured out why free trade isn’t a panacea; turnabout, a religious group says that if they want God in their personal reproductive issues, they will ask Him!; if you ever thought that what you got at the end of the fast food line didn’t look like what you wanted, you need fast food ads vs reality; a must bookmark item, how to reach a human in a voicemail maze and finally, How to Prepare for an Alien Invasion.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I hope I’m not late to comment on the terrible events that transpired at Virginia Tech this week. I first learned of the situation in a La Quinta over breakfast, and have been digesting ever since.

Let me begin by saying that I have not lost my faith in the Second Amendment. While it is true that it would have been more difficult for this clearly troubled young man to kill that many people without guns, it is also true that the law already should have prevented him from having guns. Funny how gun control laws work on the faulty premise that people with criminal intent will surely follow the law. It is also true that in the absence of guns, he could easily have killed many, many people with a homemade bomb. Blaming guns for one man’s insanity is itself insanity.

It is also worth pointing out that a few dozen innocent people killed in a day is not unusual in Iraq. Today, for example, “Men in the northern city of Mosul shot and killed 23 people from a minority sect Sunday after pulling them off a bus in an apparent revenge attack, the police said. The attack came on a violent day in Baghdad, with at least 20 people killed in car bombings, most in a double suicide strike against a police station in a religiously mixed neighborhood.” Look how much safer the Americans have made things, eh? Ted Rall points out how good we have it: “Only 32? Living in such safety must be sweet!”

Nor is it reasonable to blame liberals, violent video games, violent popular music, or overprescribed psychiatric drugs. Those 32 people might be alive today if the shooter had actually taken psychiatric drugs! Gavin DeBecker’s insight that sane people do not resort to violence except under certain circumstances does not apply, because this man was not sane.

I would also like to dispute the idea that this sort of thing is new. Maybe we have better news coverage, but school shootings are nothing new. And the same thing causes them now as caused them over 20 years ago.

By sheer coincidence, we have this item on the trial of one of last year’s crop of school shooters. Glossing over the fact that the young man says he “freaked out” when the Principal “tackled” him (surely he was already out of control, or why would anybody feel “tackling” him was an appropriate response), I would like to bring your attention to this:

Hainstock told detectives he was upset with school officials because they didn’t stop other students in this southwestern Wisconsin town from picking on him and calling him names. Going to school with guns occurred to him just that morning, he said, and he just wanted officials to listen to him.

He wanted to be left alone, and he wanted the authority figures to listen to him. Isn’t that what most of us want? Really?

We can tie all these threads together with this rather lengthy item called “Virginia Tech: Is the Scene of the Crime the Cause of the Crime?” The Reader’s Digest condensed version is “Schoolyard massacres are rebellions against oppressive and bullying environments by students who can’t take it anymore.” Truer words were never written, and they apply even to students who are insane. The author goes on to observe that school shooters don’t fit a profile, but strangely enough the schools where such things take place do (from page 5):

  • complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure;
  • antiseptic corridors and overhead fluorescent lights reminiscent of mid-sized city airport;
  • rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and
  • maximally stressed parents who push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.

To put things in another context, we cannot control other human beings, but we can control the environment in which they interact. When the same thing happens in the same sort of place over and over again, we must seriously begin to examine the environment in which the problem exists.

In closing: Go, Speed Racer, Go!; a couple items on terror watchlists; climate change may make the world less politically stable, and storms are already adversely effecting the American economy; another state decides they don’t want to pay to implement Real ID, it’s a shame it comes down to nothing more than a money issue, but it’s better than rolling over; I guess the Sears Tower just isn’t tall enough any more; an interesting if somewhat rant-prone commentary called “For Millions of Americans, Being Insured is a Cruel Hoax; Alternet brings us Conservative Policies Are Ruining Your Health; someone helpfully opines that the SEC is unlikely to indict Steve Jobs, so all you Macheads can continue to enjoy your Kool-Aid; profound quote of the week, “It’s strange to us, so we don’t like it.”; and last but not least, the latest on Gonzales. I am proud to say I was one of the first to call for the Senate to demand Gonzales’s resignation, and I stand by that not because of these firings, but because he has no respect for the Constitution and the Law.

If anyone cares, we have arrived in Las Vegas and are getting unpacked. I will change my “about” page to reflect reality soon. Closing on this house was more of a grand adventure than I would have liked, and I am exploring my legal options.

Musings from the Road

Greetings from Nephi, UT, where I am connected via my cellular phone despite the fact that the Super 8 advertises “wireless high-speed internet.”

The cat says hello too.

First, a few observations: the Element holds an amazing amount of stuff but it is still finite; Washington roads kind of suck; and “conditioning shampoo” is an oxymoron as shampoo is designed to get stuff off of hair and the conditioner is designed to leave something on hair; last night we were in a town with a clearly growing local economy, yet there was still room next door to the K-Mart that was across the street from a Wal-Mart for a “$1 only” shop.

Tomorrow we should arrive in Fabulous Las Vegas.

There are two issues I would like to bring to your attention today. First, on the very same day that a White House spokesperson admited that as many as 5 million emails were “accidentally” lost — some of the very same emails that were not in the White House system to avoid scrutiny (and subpoena) — President Bush asked Congress to greatly expand domestic eavesdropping rules that have been in place since the Carter Administration. Because we can totally trust him, right?

Right?

Meanwhile, on the other coast, Google is buying internet advertiser DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion (that’s $3.1 Thousand Million). CNN says the “great irony” of this deal is that “Google is the 800-pound gorilla in online advertising.” No, the great irony of this deal is that Google’s official corporate motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” and DoubleClick’s invasive web advertising is about as evil as you can get without actually writing a virus. This deal is fundamentally incompatible with Google’s professed worldview.

Unless of course their motto is a command to others rather than a guideline for themselves.

Jurassic Shorties

As I await a packing crew, I have a few minutes to bring you some of the news tidbits that struck me.

Green Card? I’m from East L.A.! (pop culture reference)You would think the President had more important things to do than worry about “Immigration Reform” what with the problems in the Department of Justice and the EPA being told to do their jobs and people not being real happy about what’s going on in Iraq and everybody going behind his back to do this “diplomacy” thing with our “enemies”. Nope! My favorite quote from this article is “With up to 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., lawmakers haven’t agreed on how to uphold the law without disrupting lives, eroding the workforce and risking political upheaval.” Guess what? You can’t do all three. Blanket amnesty will get you one and two, but then you still have the problem of not knowing whether any of these immigrants are Bad Guys. I can’t think of another option that will get you 2 out of 3. And don’t forget that “eroding the workforce” is a codephrase for “getting rid of people willing to work illegally in questionable conditions for possibly very little money.” Oh, the horror, if employers had to follow the law! Elsewhere, the President says he’s caused a drop in illegal immigration by hiring more border guards and building more fences. Maybe he also caused it by making the economy bad enough for the poor that it’s easier to stay in one’s home country.

Making it way too complicated. Democratic leaders in the House want to “fix” the AMT. How about just capping tax deductions at 3 or 4 times poverty level for a family of four and abolishing the AMT? Allow an additional deduction for charitable contributions — we don’t want to interfere with people who want to do good for society — but that’s it!

The name is Short. Miss Woman if you’re nasty! (pop culture reference) Kudos to the IHT for bringing us “Backlash against enforced informality”.

“A Terrorist Watchlist couldn’t possibly be used for political purposes…. could it?” Maybe not. This story is as yet unsubstantiated, but it seems a University Professor, Constitutional scholar, and Veteran has been put on a no-fly list for saying things the Bush Administration disagrees with. When trying to figure out what was going on, he was allegedly asked if he’d been in some peace protests, because that often lands people on the list. Right, because peace activists are really apt to blow stuff up. Yeah.

And my pet peeve doesn’t even make the list. This article uses British rules but still makes some interesting points. However, if you want me to read your resume instead of tossing it in the trash, you’ll need this page too.

Downsizing: It’s not just for low wage workers anymore. Citigroup prepares to lay off 8% of its workforce.

CNBC’s Chief Economist called it “unremittingly bad.” Yeah. US mortgages are at all-time record default rates. The IMF says there is a “small chance” of “major dislocation”.

Castro says something to the effect of “Burn food because there’s not enough oil?? Are you people out of your minds???” Excellent point. In other news, Changes to emissions rules are in the wind.

Eliot finally does something I don’t like. Just what we all want, for the Presidential campaigns to be even longer.

At least somebody is coming out ahead. “More Uninsured Means More Healthcare Corporate Profits. And remember, “corporate profits” do not provide care to anyone. “Corporate profits” represent overcharges to people who need healthcare. This is not money paid to doctors and nurses. Very little of it is money paid to community hospitals. This is money counted after all the researchers creating drugs to treat serious diseases have already been paid. This is money whose sole purpose is to say to Wall Street “Look how much money we have!”

“First you give me money every week. Then I tell you to eat less food, eat more veggies, and take these vitamins.” Maybe I need to write a diet book! The Motley Fool catches up to what I said years ago, some diet plans do more for your wallet than your waistline. Don’t get me wrong, not all diet plans are evil, and there is something to be said for the portion/calorie control of “once you have eaten the contents of this box you are done.” But the primary goal of a corporation is to make money, and these diets are being marketed by corporations.

That’s all for today. It is unknown whether I will have time to post later this week. Thank you for your patience.

Church | | State

A Special Item for the Blog Against Theocracy Weekend

I have been asked to say a few words on Separation of Church and State this weekend. If I may, I’d like to point out a couple of very good items I read earlier this week: “A look at the Christian Right’s legal muscle leading the fight to end the separation of church and state”; from CNN we have the very provocatively titled What Would Jesus Really Do?. This item is so full of wonderful quotes that I wouldn’t blame any preacher who stood up and read the whole thing tomorrow morning as part of the sermon, but this is my favorite passage:

An African-American pastor I know in the Midwest was asked by a group of mostly white clergy to march in an anti-abortion rally. He was fine with that, but then asked the clergy if they would work with him to fight crack houses in predominantly black neighborhoods.

“That’s really your problem,” he was told.

They saw abortion as a moral imperative, but not a community ravaged by crack.

If you don’t mind, I am limiting the discussion on the religious side to Christianity, because many believe this nation is and was founded as a “Christian Nation.” There is no credible movement in this country to have a theocracy based on Jewish or Moslem or Hindu or Buddhist scriptures, but there is a movement to make our government more closely aligned with a rather narrowly defined Christian ideology.

Let’s begin with the Biblical reasons that Christians should support Separation of Church and State. I’ll begin In the Old Testament with Samuel 8:1-22. Something like the following conversation occured with the Prophet/Judge Samuel as intermediary:

Israelites: GOD! All the other nations have kings and we don’t!

God: Um yeah, and you know what else they have that you don’t? Idols and high taxes and drafts of military aged men and corrupt government officials. And you know what they don’t have? A sovereign omnipotent God!

Israelites: But God!!! We want a King like all the other nations!

God: If all the other nations jumped off a bridge would you?? Fine, have your King, but don’t come crying to me if it doesn’t work out the way you’d like!

Samuel of course then sought out a king, and found Saul. Who of course didn’t turn out to be all that. Saul had to choose between doing what God said and what the People Who Wanted A King In The First Place wanted (I Sam:15:24). And then he tried to kill a political adversary (I Sam 19:11). Even a government appointed by God was corrupt. But how do the people challenge a divinely ordained government?

The next King was really only marginally better. He had a civil war to deal with (II Sam 3:1), and his very own sex scandal (II Sam 11:2-12:23) — quite a feat when you already have a harem — and even a traitorous son (II Sam 13-18). And this was the King everybody says was so Godly.

If you don’t like the Old Testament, let’s go to the New Testament. Even Jesus himself thought Church and State should be kept separate, most succinctly put in Matthew 22:21, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. and to God the things that are God’s.” This caused the listeners to “marvel.” Frankly, by this standard even Christians should object to “In God We Trust” being on coins. What Would Jesus Do indeed.

Just in case you don’t think Jesus meant we should extend this thought to mean Christians should follow all the laws of God in addition to all the laws of the State — and that there would be minimal overlap — the Apostle Paul spells it out nicely in Romans 13:1-10, which begins “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.”

Let’s follow up with the reasons every American should support Separation of Church and State. I will set aside my Bible (RSV if anybody cares) and get out the Constitution. As I have pointed out before, it was written by men who knew a thing or two about history.

They knew that many of their forbears had come to this land seeking religious freedom, including freedom from the Government-sponsored Church of England.

They knew there had already been religious persecution in the colonies.

They knew what happened in Salem.

Extremely well read gentlemen like Thomas Jefferson had a basic familiarity with world religions; Mr Jefferson even owned a copy of the Quran.

For these men to have turned around and written “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” means they thought Government and Religion should keep a respectful distance of one another.

People who think our Government needs more Old Time Religion need to turn around, and clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and visit the sick in their own communities (Matt 25:31-46).

In closing: Cheney’s Secret War; 21 biggest tech flops; American Mercenaries; Oh! So that’s where the money’s been going!; follow the money… oh wait somebody already did; Maybe Congress shouldn’t any recesses until 2009; scientists and 18 out of 19 computer models agree the American Southwest is headed for a multi-century water problem; Bush orders Carter not to visit a guy he’s known for decades; once more Krugman preaches common sense; and a word of warning, Las Vegas is not a place to argue with the TSA, even if you are a veteran recently returned from Iraq. One of these days there’s going to be a riot at McCarran unless things change.

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it’s poor defense against a gun.

Yesterday’s news was a shooting on the campus of University of Washington. Here is the national coverage from CNN, and local coverage from both the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times. Both local versions of the story have links to related items that are worth seeing. Items like a copy of the protection order the young lady took out against her ex-boyfriend, a letter from the President of the University, and two warnings from two different columnists that a piece of paper can only do so much.

The nicest thing I can say about this man is that he had the courtesy to save the state the expense of a murder trial by ending his own life.

Here we are, less than 24 hours later, and instead of merely reporting breaking news, CNN is breaking news: a man killed a woman at CNN Center in what police euphemistically refer to as a “domestic situation.” That’s cop-speak for “beating the snot out of your spouse.” In the interest of balance, it is only fair to include coverage from the Seattle P-I, albeit a canned Associated Press story. I will be utterly shocked if there is not commentary in the Seattle Papers tomorrow comparing the incidents.

The gunman in this case was shot by a CNN security guard, and will surely go to trial assuming he is found competant to do so. I will leave aside for today the issue of armed security guards and their authority to shoot people.

Domestic violence is serious, serious stuff. There is no telling if or when it will get out of hand and become deadly. If you are in a relationship that is abusive, I am begging you right now to call 1-800-799-SAFE. If you know someone who you suspect is in an abusive relationship, you can click that link and find out what you can do to help. Everyone else, indulge me for another few paragraphs.

If you are not familiar with the work of Gavin De Becker, this is as good a time as any. You can find his book, The Gift of Fear at Amazon, most local bookstores, and most public libraries. Oh, and he’s got a sequel about terrorism. Some of the things I learned are :

1. Someone who won’t take “No” for an answer is trying to manipulate you. “No”, by the way, is a complete sentence that requires no further explanation.

2. Normal, sane people do not resort to violence until or unless it seems like the only rational course of action. Not all people are sane, however. And even sane people can be driven to violence by outrageous circumstance.

3. The only effective way to cut off contact with someone is to completely, utterly, without exception not respond to any of their attempts to contact you.

4. A restraining order — the traditional tool of The State to tell someone to leave you alone — often serves to enrage the recipient. Remember, if this person were normal, he or she would already know you don’t want anything to do with them.

5. If you find yourself in bad relationship after bad relationship, it is time to stop having relationships until you figure out what you are doing to inadvertently attract nutcases.

6. It is easier not to get involved with someone — on a personal level or a professional level — than it is to get rid of them. Screen potential employees, potential renters, potential business partners first.

This is no substitute for reading the book. Your take-away points may be very different from mine. I think it ought to be required reading for every school administrator and office manager. Frankly I’d like to see more high school and college kids reading it.

In closing: Bush threatens to veto any war funding bill that actually requires him to start finishing up, accusing Democrats of playing a “political dance” (yeah, it’s called doing what the voters sent them to do, look it up sometime); I suppose everyone has heard about McCain going to market with a hundred bodyguards and a few attack helicopters; great short film series at Hometown Baghdad; some scattered reports that we might have another war by the weekend; follow up on David Hicks, “If Hicks was such a menace, critics argue, why did he get just nine months?”; Condi won’t return Waxman’s phonecalls, but will she show up for hearings?; the Motley Fool brings us the end of retirement; turns out meat inspections have been a little lax since the Nixon administration (feel safer now?); and yet again the rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer.