No, I’m talking about Robert McNamara, one of my particular historical nemeses, considering the number of important things that he messed up, destroyed or ruined. Not to mention the uncountable dead.

I am singularly uninterested in the Jackson story.  I’ve seen enough oddball celebrity circuses, and the really interesting and truly weird stuff will not come out for a while for most people.   I expect more news circuses repeated endlessly on the news, and I will ignore them all.

Finally, someone sems to be doing something about rescuing Antioch College, which the alums will have to tell me if it meets their requirements.   I just love Yellow Springs, and want it to remain whole.

Sanford: there’s just no end to the dumb on this; obviously, the man forgot what the color of the sky was in the rest of our world.  Somewhere in South Carolina, a divorce lawyer is going to be very well off in the near future.

Exit question: Show of hands, ladies. How many of you would be willing to take back a guy who told you, “I’ve met this other woman and she’s totally my soulmate, but I’m going to try real hard to fall back in love with you”?

Chicago: In the past Mayor Daley has always survived his tough spots by letting his critics lose their nerve, get distracted, or simply self-destruct. The difference this time is that there are a whole lot more of them, and each day thousands are reminded of why they’re pissed off when they pull into a public parking space. No doubt.

…and I also find the idea of political murder and terror repugnant.    I understand that you find Dick Cheney a sadistic MF, or a Army recruiter someone who is hurting your co-religionists by supporting the war, or you find Dr. Tiller a baby-killer.

Fine.  Then work constructively to bring people to justice, or to outlaw abortions, or to end the war.  Don’t go out and kill people over their politics or for doing things that are legal where they are done.   Political murder and assassination is wrong. Such things lead to — the death of Gandhi himself, because he didn’t hate enough.   It’s terror, no matter how you slice it.

From my old home town of Dayton, Ohio:

Philip Jose Farmer dies in Peoria at the age of 91. And yes, the first for-sure memory of adult SF I have is Riders of the Purple Wage in Dangerous Visions, from my mom’s copy in or around 1967.  And no, I still haven’t read Finnegan’s Wake or pretty much any other James Joyce.

My experience, after 30 years of my mom being in food safety for the USDA and 25 years with the EPA, is that a lot of outfits that violate the rules and end up ‘pizening’ the public one way or another don’t suddenly do so overnight or by oversight.  They do it because they’re cheap and they don’t give a damn about the long view on things if they can make a quick buck.  They do it again and again, because it’s a part of their sloppiness about any standards.  They do it because they can get away with it and nobody’s stopped them yet.

The plant in Georgia that produced peanut butter tainted by salmonella has a history of sanitation lapses and was cited repeatedly in 2006 and 2007 for having dirty surfaces and grease residue and dirt buildup throughout the plant, according to health inspection reports. Inspection reports from 2008 found the plant repeatedly in violation of cleanliness standards.

Inspections of the plant in Blakely, Ga., by the State Agriculture Department found areas of rust that could flake into food, gaps in warehouse doors large enough for rodents to get through, unmarked spray bottles and containers and numerous violations of other practices designed to prevent food contamination. The plant, owned by the Peanut Corporation of America of Lynchburg, Va., has been shut down.

A typical entry from an inspection report, dated Aug. 23, 2007, said: “The food-contact surfaces of re-work kettle in the butter room department were not properly cleaned and sanitized.” Additional entries noted: “The food-contact surfaces of the bulk oil roast transfer belt” in a particular room “were not properly cleaned and sanitized. The food-contact surfaces of pan without wheels in the blanching department were not properly cleaned and sanitized.”

Trust me. I’ve seen rusty vats that food for sale in supermarkets were cooked in. I’ve seen serious filth in food plants, and my mom going after them, usually with a will. She retired as a over-inspector of a quarter of the state of Ohio for the USDA because the meat and poultry standards had been bent to the point of ‘don’t bother those hard-working people in the industry’, and she didn’t want to be a part of all of that.

Evan Dorkin’s take on the death of Patrick McGoohan.  Very funny cartoon.

Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by.   Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set up solid and profitable ranches and farms all over the colony.  (It was one of the areas of Africa that Europeans could deal with the local bug population, let alone the climate, Kenya and South Africa being others, to a point where they’d be interested in settling down there in numbers. )

Eventually, Britain wanted to join the two (Northern and Southern) Rhodesias with Nyasaland into One Big Colony in the 1950s to create a new colonial nation-state under a white-minority rule, but the African nationalist groups that were on the rise didn’t want that at all.  (In most of Africa, the Europeans were the creators of national/colonial boundaries, and those had zero to do with ethnic and cultural groups that were present before The White Guys came.)   Eventually, the ‘federation’ broke up, and the three states were all slated for black-majority rule statues in the early 1960s.

Southern Rhodesia, however, wasn’t interested.   The number of white settlers there were MUCH higher than the other states, and more were rolling in all the time.  In 1927, the white/black numbers were roughly 40k/920k; in 1947 80k/1640k, and then the white numbers really jumped, to around 330k at the highest, but never exceeded 6% of the total population.

The Whites ran the show, and had a good life with about 50% of the land of the colony in their hands, and the colony prospered - most especially the white colonists.  Finally, they declared themselves Independent of Britain in 1965, and intended to run their semi-apartheid state by themselves forever.

Yes, there’s a lot of similarities with South Africa.  There’s a reason.  The blacks in the majority never were allowed to have any political power, and about at the same time, the black nationalists went to the bush as guerrillas to armed battle with the government.  In Rhodesia, the battle was aimed at the settlers on the farms and the raids and international shunning finally led to the white-led government handing over power to a new black-majority government in 1980.

The problem since then can be cut down to have / have not problems with the economy, and political power issues.  Simply put, the people who have held power in Zimbabwe since the early 1980s were the black guerrilla leaders of the past who originally had (at least on the surface) Marxist leanings and saw the whites as the Oppressor Class.  Problem was that the whites also had the capital, the education and the know-how to keep the economy humming, and after Zimbabwe became a black-majority state, the external sanctions came down and the country boomed.

Land ownership in particular was a sore spot, and land reform started after 1980 to return white settler lands to black ownership - with an aim to get small landowners set up on their own to make a good go of it.  The problem was that not that many whites wanted to sell out, and that even after the whites were politically forced (including at gunpoint) to start selling out, the land didn’t go to the poor farmers-in-waiting - most went to big shots in the Single Party Revolutionary Fighters government and army.

The result was that the remaining whites fled with whatever they could take with them, and the One Big Party under Robert Mugabe, the surviving guerilla leader, ran the country as a brutal kleptocracy.  And the result was that the business and farming that kept the country going went to pieces - cutting open the golden goose doesn’t get you any golden eggs and all that.   The value of the currency has gone to nothing.  Nobody has money to buy food or keep up sanitation, or get clean water, and a cholera epidemic is running wild in Zimbabwe, and businesses, schools and hospitals have collapsed.

The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that soldiers — Mr. Mugabe’s enduring muscle — rioted last week on the streets of the capital, breaking windows and looting stores, after waiting days in bank lines without being able to withdraw their meager salaries from cash-short tellers. A midlevel officer who participated in the mayhem, but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of prosecution, said troops were enraged that they could no longer afford to buy food or send their children to school.

The response to this is - more brutality, and statements about how either there is no cholera, or it’s really a British chemical bioweapon aimed at bringing the state to its knees, or it’s some other type of invasion plot by foreigners.  And regardless of the beatings and the rhetoric, the people suffer and die.

I’ll sit down and go over the Presidents Thang in a day or so.  Right now, I’m busy fishing the big Digital Organization, to be followed up with more organizing tricks tomorrow.  So I’m Really Busy As Heck with that stuff. 

Meredith had a good deal from Sinterklaas, with lots of pepernoten / kruidnootjes and the usual Big Dark Chocolate Letters.  She got a copy of Prince Caspian, which she watched on Saturday, and everyone else got fair goodies of a similar sort from Sinterklaas.  It’s getting harder and harder to make sure that old Saint Nick is left in place, as heightened intelligence levels have made this trickier with sucessive advanced periods of time passing.  Two and two are making four as an ‘h’m, maaaaybe‘ more and more, and some mistakes of the local elders are adding to the pile of materials in the clue bank.  (As you scan this, add no more to the bank in your own missives, yea and verily, not to mention forsoothly.)

The ‘pepernoten‘ are a sort of gingerbread holiday cookie; I can’t describe this too well beyond it.  The family thing of this was called ‘pepper and ginger cookies’ (though I couldn’t get an answer as to where the ‘pepper’ part came from, and nobody would tell me.  Mom stopped making the things when I was 13 or so, and never started up again.  She talked about that and other Germanish Christmas cookies, and kept saying she’d like to do them, but never quite got around to it.   (She kept saying that she needed special equipment, wooden molds and rollers and such, and quite frankly, I don’t remember those, but I remember that when she was baking such things, she did a wonderful job.)  Ditto with the olliebollen and the ebelskeever stuff.  Long on talk, short on actually making the damn things up again. 

My Mom’s maternal family (Alsatian and Westphalian) was where she got most of this, with a big dose back again from Dad’s family, which was very culturally German in a lot of ways.   The name is anglicized Dutch, of course, but basically, if you go over to Westphalia, there’s a lot of similarities to the Dutch culturally, or so I understand.   Lots of holiday traditions. If there’s one thing I miss the most about my family passing by, it’s the death of those traditions; I struggle to keep them going for Meredith.   Susan’s family have largely lost what traditions they have had over time.

Various Illinois politicos are asking for a pardon for former Governor George Ryan, whose corruption in office led to a lot of people in jail and several deaths.  One paper wrote: “Instead of selling license plates, [Ryan] gets to make them.”

Otherwise, Ryan will stay in jail till 2013.

Good.  Let him rot there.

The BBC is reporting about a family funeral home business (two parlors and a crematorium) on on the US east coast that was outdoing Burke and Hare in selling the dead bodies that came into the place:

Mastromarino’s company, Biomedical Tissue Services, took body parts from funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Among the corpses plundered was that of BBC presenter Alistair Cooke.

In Philadelphia, he paid the Garzone brothers and their partner, James McCafferty, more than $245,000 for at least 244 bodies between February 2004 and October 2005.

After buying the corpses, Mastromarino would send a “cutting crew”, led by former nurse Lee Cruceta, to Philadelphia to dissect the bodies.

The body parts were sold around the country for surgical procedures including knee and hip replacements, as well as dental implants.

Gack.

I’ve posted here about a kid who was killed by a drunk driver outside of Dayton; the guy was convicted of aggravated vehicular homicide.  He was just sentenced to five years in prison.

I had been watching his ‘latest info’ page, and noticed yesterday that it said that he’d gone into a decline.   Today, it won’t load.

The word out this morning is that he’s died.

*deep sigh*

“It’s not about how to achieve your dreams; it’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the dreams will come to you.”

In a recent posting, I discussed a drunk driver who hit and killed a kid getting off the school bus - in the kid’s front yard.  A Dayton, Ohio jury found the dude guilty of aggravated vehicular homicide, and another such case is now up in their courts, about a hit and run where the driver was high on heroin, hit the pedestrian rather spectacularly, and hid the car.  The pedestrian died after six weeks of agony in the hospital.

There’s a trial going on in Dayton, Ohio (my hometown) about a drunk driver who was arguing with his girlfriend while going down a narrow country road at over 100 miles an hour. He came up on a school bus that was parked with its lights on after letting off a 17-year-old kid at his house. The entire bus full of kids saw the car go out of control and go airborne at 103 miles an hour, nailing the kid in his own driveway and sending him flying 65 feet through the air and up 13 feet into a tree. The driver’s got a long criminal record for drunk driving, assault and theft. Needless to say, the kid died and the drunk is on trial, with everyone at the scene (including the girlfriend) testifying against him….with a five year sentence and a $10,000 fine possible with a conviction.

…or the Holodomor, as it’s better known. In the early 1930s, Stalin forced the collectivization of Ukraine, and when the wheat harvest then fell below the levels that Moscow had ordered, he ordered the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainians for their failure to ‘fulfill their duty.’ Several million Ukrainians then starved to death.

“I address you on behalf of a nation that lost about ten million people as a direct result of the Holodomor genocide… We insist that the world learn the truth about all crimes against humanity. This is the only way we can ensure that criminals will no longer be emboldened by indifference.”

- Viktor Yushchenko, President of Ukraine.

Taken outside Durham, NC, a few years ago.

Can’t tell you how consoling that sentiment is.

Sex, hedge funds, rock and roll, and drugs:

“Seth used to come in here back when it was crazy,” said Adiel Hemingway, the longtime manager of Cupids. As a flat-screen television blared hard-core gay pornography, he said that Mr. Tobias often came to the club with his wife. Mr. Hemingway took out a picture of Tiger in his office. Tiger is blond and covered with tattoos that look like stripes.

Okaaaaaay……

Led by a brass jazz band, creatures from the life and times of the late cartoonist Phil Frank paraded around Washington Square at noon Monday - 40 uniformed park rangers, seven horses, Giants mascot Lou Seal and hundreds of people dressed as creatures from Frank’s imagination.</p>

There was a herd of feral cats, at least one owl, and 50 people gotten up as Farley, the cartoonist’s alter ego and the hero of his comic strip. Most of the Farleys present Monday wore the slouch hat Frank imagined was the uniform of a reporter, some had black ravens perched on their shoulders, and almost all wore false mustaches.

From 1978 to 1983, I was living with my Mom in Findlay, Ohio, about an hour’s drive south of Toledo and not far from the law school that I attended during that time. She lived there until she died in 2003, and I’ve been there many, many times. Still have friends there. (Waves at a Kat!)

The recent stories about flooding in Ohio caught my eye, and when one of them mentioned that Interstate 75 was closed by water, that grabbed me - where in the world would I-75 be in that sort of flat, poorly drained - oh, crap, must be - yep, Findlay. Here’s a slideshow of photos from all of that. I would imagine that the folks who bought my Mom’s house are now dealing with a flooded basement…

Right now, I’m down in my office in the basement, overseeing the sump pump, which wasn’t working earlier, and water was starting to seep up into the office area. More on that below.