Author: Glenn Hauman

Well, the NYC transit system had avoided a strike, for at least a
while.
I’m of mixed minds of the issue– I’d really like to think that New
Yorkers could be pulling together in these trying times, instead of
going through the bull that’s been going on.
But all things considered, the unions, according to math based on items
in this article, we’re only talking about a difference of 70 million dollars a year above inflation for 34 thousand workers.

Meanwhile, we have people like Bear Stearns
who are trying to hold up New York City for $40 million– this after
having received $102 million dollars in the last ten years.
Y’know, even if we don’t have a federal program for prohibiting
businesses to get federal contracts if they avoid federal taxes by
incorporating outside the US, there’s a HELL of an argument to be made
for doing something similar in New York. Michael Thomas makes just such
a case here (by way of John Ellis).

At the very least, it’ll give the impression that we’re all in it together.

UPDATE: I forgot to include this take on the reaction to the NYC transit strike here. Continue reading Sick Transit’s Glorious Monday

…where the highlight was finding myself instead of moderating a pun
battle, replacing Spider Robinson– and proceeding to hold my own
against Esther Friesner and David Gerrold, while raising money for the
SFWA Emergency Medical Fund.
More on this after I take care of some news.

This poll by the Pew Research Center has gotten amazingly little play, both in the news and the blogosphere.

Pew asked 38,000 people in
44 countries (speaking 63 languages and dialects) what they think of
America. And the numbers aren’t encouraging, or all that surprising:

Nineteen countries with data available for comparison
showed antipathy to the US on the rise, and goodwill draining away.
Favourable ratings in western Europe, pretty consistently, were down
five or six percentage points over the last three years. That turned to
22 points in Turkey and 13 points in Pakistan. Just 6% of the Egyptian
public has a favourable view of the United States.
Is the spread of American ideas good or bad? Here in Britain, 50% say
bad. But this soars to 67% in Germany, 68% in Russia, 71% in France –
and rampant hostility the moment you get near the Middle East. Try
Turkey at 78%, Pakistan at 81% and Egypt at 84%.
Does the US “consider others: not much/not at all?” Fifty-two per cent
in Britain sign up on this line. But that’s 73% in Canada, 73% in South
Korea, 74% in Japan, 76% in France.
Do you reckon American policy towards Saddam is driven by getting its
hands on Baghdad’s oil? Forty-four per cent of Brits agree; 54% of
Germans; 75% of French. Would you let the US use your bases to attack
Iraq? Eighty-three per cent of Turks say no.
But maybe the most chilling question of the lot was reserved for Muslim
respondents only. Did they approve of suicide bombing in defence of
Islam? Seventy-three per cent in Lebanon said yes. Well, they would,
wouldn’t they? But what about the 43% in Jordan, the 44% in Bangladesh,
the 47% in Nigeria, the 33% in Pakistan? And in Indonesia (including
Bali)? Twenty-seven per cent said yes. Those are hundreds upon hundreds
of millions of people with a totally different take on what constitutes
terror. This is alienation on the grandest scale.

Well, it’s a little obvious we’re expereincing technical difficulties.
And we have a deep abiding sense of self. But if everybody’s telling us
we’re drunk with power, maybe it’s time to lie down.

Everybody has their moment that tells them that the holiday season has
truly arrived. For some, it’s Santa going down Broadway on
Thanksgiving. For me, it’s the arrival of the David Mattingly
card.
David is one of the leading cover artists in the science fiction field,
and I used to live down the street from him and his lovely wife,
Cathleen Cogswell. He puts the same amount of work into his cards as he
does into his work… although he does put more or his cats into his
cards…
Anyway, go look at his web site. Tell him I sent you.

First it was Ann Coulter wishing that Timothy McVeigh had done it– and
now David Horowitz is saying, “Perhaps al-Qaeda should have bombed the New York Times“.

Good grief.

A while back, I made reference
to the Bush II penchant for secrecy and restrictions on the free flow
of information as one the big strikes against it, and that it bodes ill
for our country.
Dwight Meredith
has given us a fuller tally of Bush held secrets– Texas Governor
Records, Presidential Records, Public Domain Energy Report, Thimerosal
Litigation Records, The Cheney Energy Task Force, Health Records, The
9/11 Commission, SEC Bush/Harken File, Removal Of Information on
Government Web Sites, FOIA Requests, Los Alamos Investigators Fired,
Homeland Security, California Energy Crisis, FBI Abuses, Being Too
Candid, and Secret Trials– and of course, there’s even more he doesn’t
touch on, like that shadow government of ours or the exterior of the
hotel Dick Cheney is staying in.
And these are things we know we don’t know about. What about things we don’t know about at all?

Next weekend, I’ll be speaking at Philcon. I’m surprised to find that I’m supposed to be speaking on a panel with Robert Picardo, best known as the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager, about media tie-in books.

(Yes, he wrote one– a rather enjoyable romp called The Hologram’s Handbook.)

So if you have any questions I should try to ask, put them in the comments sections.

Tom Toles follows the same line of reasoning I did when I likened GWB to a wife beater… of course, he’s much funnier about it.

Bigfoot—
what a way to make an impression.
\\SEATTLE, Washington (AP) — The man who used 16-inch feet-shaped
carvings to create tracks that ignited the “Bigfoot” legend has died.
He was 84.
Ray L. Wallace’s family admitted his role in the creature myth after
his death November 26 from heart failure.
“The reality is, Bigfoot just died,” his son, Michael, said.\\

Over on the WWWAC list, there’s a bit
of discussion on Amazon ascendant, particularly now that they’ve taken
over CDNow.
You’ll forgive me for dissent, but they are not perfect. In fact,
there’s one section where they suck worms– electronic books. And this
is an area on I have no small amount of expertise, having been involved
in e-books longer than Amazon’s been in business.* I was doing a lot of
Christmas shopping on Amazon, picked up a few DVDs. As an impulse buy,
I decided to pick up an e-book as well, Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible—
it looked good, and I wanted to read it right then and there.
But after I placed the order, I wasn’t allowed to download the book.
Nor was I allowed to for nearly twelve hours.
And when I was allowed access, I wasn’t given the option of actually
downloading the book to my hard drive– it opened up the Acrobat viewer
in my browser, and I had to save it from there.
Horrible. For a company that prides itself on customer experience and
not wasting the customer’s time, this was completely inexplicable. Next
time, I’ll check with FictionWise
first.
* By the way, I had actually considered starting up a book business
like Amazon, but I figured that was an interim step that would be blown
away by e-publishing. Seems to be a heck of a business in interim
steps, eh?