Comments on The Morning News

Looking at Seattle a year or two ago, my architect friend said that Rem Koolhaus is a Social Worker at heart, and that Frank Gehry wants to be Walt Disney.

the library in jacksonville is a big homeless hang out as well. free newspapers, warm place, safe bathrooms. there was a big article about how awful this is, but i just don't see it. i'm there quite often, and the homeless men and women seem to lay low and just hang out.

I thought this was pretty well written:

He checked on a regular in matted dreadlocks, who often percolated with wild thoughts and spent hours filling sheets of paper with tiny numbers.

"Is the satellite working?" Hogan asked without a smirk. Usually friendly, the man didn't answer. Hogan grew concerned.

He considered it his job to know if someone was off his meds, off the wagon or off from a bad night. Then the man muttered something about a business logo in the newspaper being his own logo. Hogan knew he was all right.

"I was looking for him to say something outrageous, and he did," he said. Then Hogan turned to him and spoke like a friend.

"I'll catch up with you in a little bit."

kind of a normalizing process... incorporating the idiosyncrasies of varying degrees of insanity into the every day. all in all a pretty interesting article

"A tubby economist who became reform commissar..." Hey CNN, that's not very nice.

that mistaken CIA abduction story is sickening. I wonder if that man will ever see justice.

I don't mind the homeless men in the library, I just mind the ones that set up camp in the toilet stalls, ALL of the toilet stalls, and stay there all day every day. I have never seen a free one in any of my visits there, and I've waited for close to an hour before giving up.

The CIA rendition program will never be seriously addressed as long as the judge is receiving advice on the case from the head of the accused agency. Someday, someday we'll break that program.

Expecting Maliki to "do something" about the violence when he is the captive political representative of the people doing (half of) the violence is ridiculous. The Shia killers are his own men.

The only bad thing about the library is that the bathrooms fukkin reek! Could be the waterless urinals are a cause, but holy mama! I dont know if that is attributed to the homeless or not, but I've crapped in Honey buckets cleaner than that place.

Oh yeah, once you get to the 10th floor, how the hell do you get down? Slow ass elevator or fire escape?

the shia death squads are under the control of sadr, not maliki. maliki is sadr's bitch. it was sadr that pulled "his" men in parliament out in protest of maliki meeting w/ bush in jordan.

the police units are the real problems, and the national army, while less prone to the kinds of violence the police are a part of, doesn't have the ability to operate independently.

from what i've read maliki doesn't have unilateral authority to submit orders to the iraqi army, and any attempt to consolidate that power under maliki is going to get huge resistance from the sadrists.

all this posturing on the part of bush is just a trial balloon for finding a way for us to lay the blame somewhere else and get out.

Law firms aren't meant for anyone other than white men who have wives that can take care of the day-to-day tasks of living (dry cleaning, child rearing, car licensing, cooking, cleaning, etc.). It's no longer a profession, it's a business and it's about billing, billing, billing in 6 minute intervals. You have to work 13 hours in order to bill 10 hours, because pissing, eating, or talking to your mother don't count.

But, minorities have it the worst: blacks, asians, women, gays just aren't going to put up with the bullshit, intimidation, oppression that they have suffered at the hands of privileged white boys their entire lives. It is institutionalized discrimination of the highest order and degree. Furthermore, for most of those people, practicing law in some stodgey law firm is not their highest and best use and there is a vast amount of important work that they can and should do with their law degrees.

Oh yeah, once you get to the 10th floor, how the hell do you get down? Slow ass elevator or fire escape?

If I'm not willing to wait 10 minutes for the elevator, I just walk down the stairs. They make it easy to get up there, but not at all easy to get down. Nice work, crackhead architects.

The architect may well have been a crackhead, but the blame for the missing down escalator lies squarely with City Librarian Deborah Jacobs. She is the one who decided to remove the escalator from the construction, for reasons of cost. It was in the plans.

The architect is definitely to blame for the missing signs, which meant that staff had to print up a gajillion laser-printed signs on opening day, many of which are still in service. Architects hate signs, for some reason; the more their designs require them, the more enraged they get at the idea of having any.