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Algor_Langeaux
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Name: Algor
Country: United States
State: Nebraska
Metro: Lincoln
Birthday: 5/19/1966
Gender: Male
Interests: life... life is a great hobby...
Expertise: Way too many to list... chances are I have done it at least once already though... if in doubt, ask...
Occupation: Engineering
Industry: Media
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Yahoo:  Algor_Langeaux
Member Since:
9/23/2003
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| Nebraska's Second Favorite Sport after football...
...has got to be Ernie Chambers bashing.
Which is not to say that to some extent, he doesn't deserve a good bit of it. He can be an unabashed racist at times and is quite comfortable spouting conspiracy theories as fact, and taking potshots at such sacred cows as the farm industry, Husker football, and Religion - all of which are sure paths to painting a large red target on your ass, here in Nebraska. Further, he doesn't simply hold an opposing position, he jams *his* position down your throat and calls you an idiot for holding an opposing position.
He uses his position as a bully pulpit at times to make statements that have nothing at all to do with the bill on the floor - even when he isn't pulling one of his legendary one man filibusters that grind the unicameral to a screeching halt. It has been stated, and likely for good reason, that the imposition of term limits on state senators in Nebraska was enacted largely to ensure that he - the longest seated senator in Nebraska History (36 years) will not be able to seek another term in 2008 - despite the fact that he runs nearly unopposed in his district and wins almost unanimously. He will be 71 years old at that point, and he still scares the shit out of his opponents in the legislature.
The problem that most folks have in understanding Ernie Chambers and his real and legitimate value and worth to the legislature comes from watching the soundbites of him on television or the excerpts of his discourses in the print media. They focus on his more outrageous comments, and totally neglect his real value to the state of Nebraska, to the legislature, and to the body of law in the state. I will pick three aspects that are, if not his most overlooked positive acheivements on our behalf, then certainly, his strongest suits and most positive contributions:
1. He is a dogmatic linguist: After 36 years in the legislature, I have come to believe that the legislature has forgotten the basics of the english language. Most bills presented to the legislature are absolutely riddled with grammatical inconsistencies and just poor writing. Most senators seem to be former lawyers of the sort that has never actually written out a contract on their own, but has relied on some sort of computer generated boilerplated contract writing software that eliminates the need to actually know and use the english language - and especially legal terminology - themselves. When they formulate a bill to present to the body for potential adoption into the legal code, they write it as though they are writing a blog, and without a critical eye to grammar, syntax and spelling, let alone logic.
One of the criterion that should be required of all state senators should be the ability to distinguish between the word "may" and "shall" in legal code. If you can't don't know the difference between them, you probably need to get out of the business of creating law. It seems like most days of the week however Ernie has to take this senator or that to task over some vapid wording of this bill or that that is before the legislature and attempting to become a law. On Friday for example, they were dealing with LB72 - a bill presented by a pair of state senators, regulating the licensure of security personnel. In that bill, the following text was included, as section 10:A licensee under the Security Personnel Licensing Act and a security officer firearms permit shall expire on October 1 of each odd-numbered year. According to this, if you have one of the proposed Security Personnel Licenses, every other October 1st, you will be required by law... to die. Had Ernie Chambers not been a part of the legislature, this bill would likely have been passed without much comment, and would have become a part of our body of state law. Obviously, this reading was not intended by the authors of the bill, but because they apparently can't be bothered to actually pay attention to their own grammar and logic, *someone else* had to.
Worse examples of this happen pretty much every day in the legislature. Without Ernie Chambers doggedly combing through prospective laws to find such flaws, who will? Yes, it was likely just a stupid typing or editing mistake that could be made by anyone... but the fact is, when you are crafting a LAW, you aren't writing your fucking blog, you are making a legal statement that must be intelligent and defensible, or you make the legal code into so much horseshit, full of swiss cheese holes of logical fallacy and contradiction. I don't see anyone currently in the legislature stepping in to correct these flaws before they become law.
Unfortunately, this is all too often just chalked up to Ernie being pedantic and sophistic which admittedly he can be, but the fact remains that without his presence in the legislature, a good deal of pure horseshit would be passed as law.
2. He provides an example of dedication to his peers: I have become convinced that Ernie Chambers is about the only guy in the legislature to actually *read* the bills they are discussing or debating. He is one of the most utterly transparent government officials ever to hold an office. He does not tell his constituents one thing and then do another. People elect him, knowing *exactly* what they are going to get, and he gives it to them. In the game of politics, this is a bigger taboo than incest.
To some degree, being a "good politician" (from the politicians perspective) has become a matter of doing whatever it takes to become elected, and then doing whatever it takes to get re-elected. Ernie got elected for being Ernie, and gets re-elected because he is Ernie. The only reason he doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve is because he wears t-shirts to work. He dresses like a construction worker... not just because that is a good portion of his constituency that he has been elected to represent... but because that is who he is. In a world of politicians that you can't trust to vote the way they promise, or even to bother showing up to vote at all, Ernie shows that it can be done, even if you are pushing hard at being 70 years old.
He takes a stand and generally basis his defense of his position using logic. Admittedly, he does delve into the realm of the phillipic a bit more than I would prefer and that at times if he wanted to get his ends met he could use a method other than the perpetual attack to do so, but even when he is firing his broadsides at the establishment, he is demonstrating a measure of the frustration that his constituents feel every day to the people that as much as any (other than themselves) are the root cause of their frustration. If you know you are going to lose the battle, at least you can make your voice heard and get it read into the record, so that when the folly is eventually exposed, none can claim that no one warned them of "what would happen if..."
3. He is a champion of the underdog: While much of Ernies energies are devoted to representing what remains a fairly small black minority, his interest in and support for a variety of minority positions is well documented. If you are in a minority that is repressed by powers that be, Ernie is there for you. He represents a voice for those that have no other voice. In a state with a nominally conservative constituency, he is the voice for the liberal minority.
About the only place that he strays from the position of defending what is undefended comes with the support of "the unborn"... which I think he would likely defend as strongly as the right of a mother to make choices about her life and body, if only it were not a position held and championed so firmly by the Catholic church - an organization that he percieves as one of the biggest enforcers and propogators of "the establishment" and opiate of the masses. It is an inconsistency in his otherwise nearly universal champion/demagogue of ANYONE that has no voice of their own. I would note however that given the makeup of the State of Nebraska, the possibility that the "pro-life" position would have no voice in the legislature would be extremely unlikely.
When he is forced out of office, I don't see *anyone* that is willing to take up the banner of the voiceless and downtrodden in his stead, and so passionately and vehemently put it in peoples faces until something changes. Some might wonder exactly *why* Ernie is so angry. Before one falls into the habit of dismissing him for doing "the angry black man thing" - and I have heard arch liberals say this of him - perhaps it is not appropriate to simply dismiss that fact. Yes, as the rednecks say, slavery has been over for over 140 years now... and yes, to a degree they can "just get over it"... but to a degree not only can African Americans *not* just get over it. Yes. There is a group of people that are blaming the limits of their future on their past, but it should be pointed out that it was not terribly long ago that it was socially acceptable to say gather as a mob of 20,000 or so people, take an African American man, hang him from a telephone pole, shoot his body several hundred times, cut it down, drag it behind a car for a while, cover the remains with kerosene, light them on fire, and then continue to desecrate the remains for several hours until the army came and forced an end to it.
Yeah, you say... "yeah... in one of those backward redneck southern states after the civil war" right?
Try Omaha.
Between World War I and World War II...
...to put it in more concrete terms, a 14 year old Henry Fonda watched the lynching from his fathers printing plant, across the street from the courthouse at 17th and Haney. The body was burned four blocks away at 18th and Dodge. People thought enough of it to pose for pictures with the burning body...
 You probably don't click on the image unless you really think: "...them uppity niggers need to just get off their lazy asses,
get a damn job and quit whining about the past..."
Days and weeks after the event, people sold pieces of the rope that hanged him... and people actually bought them. No one was prosecuted for the riot... despite lots of photographic evidence like the picture above, with proud (and easily identifiable) citizens of Omaha standing around the body.
I would note here as an aside that an easy parallel could perhaps be drawn here between the treatment of Will Brown's body and the treatment of the bodies of the Rangers that died in Mogadishu during the events related in the movie Black Hawk Down. The people of Mogadishu were decried by Americans as being barbaric and inhuman... and that Americans could *never* have done such a thing because we are "enlightened" and "intelligent" and "more evolved than that".
Remember that the next time you drive past the intersection of 18th and Dodge.
Why had he been murdered? He was arrested for the rape of a 19 year old girl who may or may not have identified him conclusively. He was chosen as a suspect largely because he was a black man... living with a white woman. The white mob had been incited riot by the local papers, to make the most of white fears at the growing influx of African Americans into Omaha.
...you see, the newspapers were trying to drum up support to return a corrupt political machine to power, after they had been voted out of office by a progressive reform party trying to undo the corruption in government...
Remember that the next time you hear someone crow about "journalistic ethics".
They succeeded in their aims. In the election that followed the progressive mayor, disillusioned, declined to run for re-election. He had been strung up as well, but had survived, because the police relased Will Brown to them, and someone managed to cut him down.
Ernie Chambers grew up in Omaha, less than 20 years after the lynching. While people weren't still lynching African Americans in the streets, very little had actually changed. The African American community never really had the financial resources that would have been required to have given them a political voice through traditional means, but by gathering together in North Omaha, and electing a very vocal advocate for themselves, they managed to find another way.
We are not nearly as removed from the kind of stupid mob mentality that Will Brown encountered as we would like to be... but we are considerably further removed from it by the work of men like Ernie Chambers who are willing to take a stand and be painted as a nutcase, so that they can provide a voice for the voiceless.
While I would not be likely to have Ernie as a friend, I can respect him for taking a stand, even when I don't agree with his methods or the specific stand that he might take. By providing a voice for the minority he stands in the gap between law and lawlessness so that the majority can't blithely run roughshod over (or lynch) those in the minority, without *someone* taking up the alarm.
Who will do that when Ernie is gone?
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| on Modesty, Immodesty, and the Human Body...
The concept of Modesty has become somewhat maligned of late. I am not entirely sure that it should be, if it is done properly and with balance. Where modesty is perverted and becomes extreme, it is no longer truly modesty, but an expression - the visible part of the iceberg - of self loathing.
Like many things, it comes back what is motivating ones actions.
Real and healthy modesty is about being legitimately concerned for those we encounter, so as not to be unnecessarily offensive, unless we have some sort of legitimate justification. What constitutes a legitimate justification is up to the individual, and certainly we should be able to challenge people's beliefs... but it should be about balance, and if we are willing to challenge someone else's beliefs, we should be willing to have our own beliefs challenged - which is not something that most of the population is up for.
Conversely, by being Immodest we are saying that how others feel is unimportant, and that the only person's feelings that need to be respected are our own. By being immodest, we set ourself up as the sole and ultimate arbiters of good taste for the rest of those we encounter. Generally, the more vigorously we tend to pursue immodesty, ironically, the less tolerant we can become of the views of others.
We are always welcome to hold whatever beliefs we choose. The problem comes when we try to demand that others should believe as we do. As much as it would be nice to live life in a clothing optional world, where people were judged less on their fashion sense and more on who they actually are, there are always those out there that will be offended enough by public nudity to justify a degree of self censorship. Just as we can't comfortably fit into their mold, we shouldn't expect them to fit into ours.
That means that from time to time, we need to agree to disagree, instead of demanding that our way is the only way...
...that's what being honestly modest is about - not repression for repressions sake.
Again, there are times and places that we need to shake things up, question authority and the status quo... but we should be ready and willing to take our lumps when something means enough to us to take a stand. If you want the freedom to walk around without pants, chances are you need to be willing to actually fight for it - otherwise the freedom you seek isn't really all that important to you. For most of us, that will likely mean that we will be quite happy to settle for private social nudity, as opposed to public social nudity.
I would guess however that the vast majority of folks that vocally seem to be advocating unlimited public nudity probably wouldn't like it much if it ever happened... most of what they are actually doing comes back to it being a drive they are engaging in precicely because it is "naughty" and if it is no longer forbidden, it would no longer be "naughty".
If women walked around topless on a regular basis, would anyone get a charge out of flashing their chests or wearing revealing outfits? If men walked around without pants on, would there still be folks out there opening their trenchcoats or mooning people? I would guess about then there would be a movement that would associate getting dressed with being "naughty"... lots of little seedy dive bars would pop up overnight where people would gyrate on a stage and slowly get dressed to music, as entrepeneurs raked in huge piles of cash for overpriced and watered down drinks.
Ultimately, being honestly modest comes back to the simple practice of not demanding or asserting that the rest of the world must believe what you believe, or behave as you behave. It is no different than not demanding that you believe what I believe about religion or politics.
Healthy modesty suggests that your body image is not determined by what someone else viewing your body says or feels about it, so whether someone sees it or not really has no bearing on your worth or value, or the inherent beauty of your body... its beautiful and valuable because it is a part of the whole of you, not because someone else wants to ogle it... or not.
I think healthy modesty has gotten a bad rap. Presently, I think that many people associate modesty with shame and repression and an imposition upon ones freedoms. I think its better understood to be about being concerned with the mental and emotional wellbeing of others, placing the matter of body concept back on the individual, and picking your battles wisely. | | |
| Contemplating...
..."Bad Movie Night" on Tuesday night. It is quite possible that it could even be a bad movie night *sleepover* if we play our cards right.
Any thoughts, campers? | | |
| ::UPDATE MODE ENABLED::
I was planning on doing several posts on Saturday. It didn't happen. I woke up with a migrane and it went a bit downhill from there.
I had what I would probably consider my first fairly serious fuckup at work.
Two weeks ago, we started a new procedure regarding one of the farm shows we air here on saturday mornings. It was a total cluster hump. We needed to do captioning of a program *live* - as it is being aired - even though the show itself had been on tape. There is no reason for this really, other than that it is the way it has always been done. The first week it didn't work - we have a captioning service in Kansas that listens to an audio stream of our program on a modem, and sends us the caption text which we embed in the show and both re-record for future airings, and air *live*. The modem for the person kept hanging up, so the live bit never came off at all. We did get the thing captioned for future airings, but it took 4 hours and six tries to manage it.
The problem is that this is a program in the server, that is being re-recorded in the server. The idea was to give the captioned version a relatively similar name so that when it shows up in the available spot list, the captioned version should show up directly under the un-captioned version:
VM386944 <--- uncaptioned version VM386944c <--- captioned version The numbers are assigned by our traffic department, but no unique number is assigned to the captioned version of the program because, again, this is a relatively new development and they haven't really had to create a procedure for that yet. I never the less figured out why it might be a really good idea to give it an entirely unique and new call number on Saturday.
If you enter a number that has already been assigned to a spot in the library, it gives you a warning that the spot already exists, and asks if you want to overwrite the original file. The specific version of the popup window that it calls for in windows, takes control over the cursor and moves it over the "yes" button. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately however the keyboards controlling these machines have a touchpad built in and no mouse... and the touch pad is one of the "smart" ones that spontaneously interprets a touch on the pad to be the same as a "click" on the mouse.
When spot VM386944 is going to be captioned, and you type in VM386944 and neglect to add anything else before the touch pad thinks that your moving your finger across the mouse means that you meant to hit "ok, add this new spot already!" and it asks you if you want to overwrite the spot, and in your haste to move the cursor to "no, don't overwrite this spot" and you really wish there was a button that said "oh, god no, don't you even think about doing that, you stupid motherfucker!" but the mouse interprets that as "HELL YEAH!" you just accidentally fucked your program right off the server... and you now no longer have a show to air, captioned or otherwise.
Oh... and did I mention that I started the day with a fucking migraine?
Luckily I made that particular fuckup at 5am, getting ready for a 7am show. The problem was that because the show was produced by the Agricultural Communications Department of the University, there wasn't a copy in-house that I could re-ingest. I just blew out the only copy we had.
Thanks to some very passioned scrambling, more than a little luck, and mad ninja stalker skillz, the person at Ag Com that would have access to the disk was identified, her home phone number was pulled out of the ether, and before 5:10 I had her on the phone - on her day off, at the head end of a three day weekend for her - and had her running over to her office to get her DVD copy of the show, so that I could re-ingest it so that we could both be ready for air, and for the captioning process.
It all worked out, but in order to cover my ass I had to get someone out of bed at an ungodly hour on a Saturday morning and have them jet around the streets of Lincoln at "0" dark:thirty. I really hate it when someone else has to be inconvenienced in order to cover my ass...
At any rate, between that and my migraine - which was growing - I felt like I spent most of the day being caned (but in a bad way) and couldn't focus my mind enough to do any posting. After the front reversed itself I was much improved, but still a bit on the ragged edge. I gave Rocky a miss and hug out with a snuggly loving friend instead.
No contest really... though I could have hung out with my snuggly friend at Rocky, we needed rather more snuggling than would have been ideal, even at Rocky, so wise decisions all around.
My parents were in attendance last night during my munchkin time, but we managed to have fun anyway. We plowed through the Babylon 5, coming down to the point of having only two episodes left, "Asleep in the Light" and "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" (the latter of course was intended to air at the end of the fourth season, but I always prefer to include it at the end of everything, as the nature of it - essentially a flashback from a million years in the future - places the story in a rather greater persepctive.) which we will likely watch next week. I wish I had been able to plan ahead and get the B5 movie bundle and Crusade at this point, as I really don't have any grand desire to be done with the epic experience with my kids yet...
Ahh well... when I have a little cash...
::UPDATE MODE DISABLED:: | | |
| If you are curious...
I did post a bit in response to some comments on the LJ version of my blog, that people that read other versions may be interested in. I won't bother posting it in full here... but the link does head over to the original statement, as well as the comments that followed.
In case we aren't noting the pattern here, I tend to not get online much on my days off. That would be Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday. Of my days at work I generally don't post much on Thursdays, because there are three of us working and only two computers... and it is the one day of the week somehow that I actually have *plenty* to do during the day and can actually spend my work day working!
*gasp* | | |
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