Arrr, me hearties! ‘Tis me favorite of all days, Talk Like A Pirate Day! Yarr!

You want to talk like a pirate? Don’t just change your words – change your attitude. John Baur and Mark Summers started this wonderful day about four years ago, and it’s exploded across the world since. One of their pirate wenches, Mad Sally, was in Wife Swap on Sept. 18th, if you can imagine trading your wife in for a swearing, hard-headed pirate wench, you get the idea!

But seriously, Talk Like A Pirate Day isn’t about running around with a peg leg and a parrot. It’s about a certain attitude, a freedom of thought and speech that some find refreshing and others find intimidating or threatening. (And there you have the gamut of reactions to me!) The Pirate Guys call it “pirattitude“. The rules behind it, as far as I can tell, are as follow:

1. Choose yer battles well, mate. If ye shoots a broadside at a galleon, ye’d best have more than a dinghy to back it up.

2. Never be afraid of saying what you mean, and not saying what you don’t. Tell me this: what kind of a world is it we live in, where we have to fear our own words? Though it’s not the government calling for it, is that not the realm of Big Brotherism? Where in all our treaties and all our contracts does it say we have to apologize for offending people? Sure, it’s nice. But only if you mean it. Which brings us back to the beginning.

3. Live your life on your own terms. Know that you are master of your own ship. You never have “no choice” in your life, even if you’re in prison and shackled hand and foot. Even if you’re about to die, you can choose to die well. Most of us aren’t at that point. Step back and look at your life. What choices do you really have? Now, instead of drifting into them as the wind whims, tack sail into the wind and shear forth where you will.

4. Read number 3 again. Really listen to it this time, because you didn’t the first time. Come back to it periodically.

5. Love your mates, and avoid your enemies. It’s the best way to live long and happy.

6. Laugh as often as you can — really laugh, not that weird you-live-longer-if-you-laugh semi-Buddhist thing that caught on a few months ago. Start here.

Yarr, me hearties! Adopt some pirattitude today, and confuse the neighbors when you tell them to heave to for boarding! (also fun at drive-thru windows)

Wrong time, wrong place, wrong air traffic controller. Comair Flight 5191 crashed and burned at the Lexington, Kentucky, airport just over a week ago, leaving forty-nine out of fifty of those on board dead; the copilot, just now waking up, may be a quadriplegic. Now a whole bunch of people, mostly lawyers slavering at the mouth, are trying to find out who’s really responsible.

You and I both know that lawyers are not the ones best able to determine this. There are two people directly involved in the crash who are still alive. They, better than anyone else, know what happened. One, the co-pilot James Polehenke, is just now, as of this writing, coming out of his coma. We’ll hear from him shortly, no doubt.

The other, an anonymous air traffic controller, was not paying attention to the pre-dawn flight as it rolled down the wrong, too-short runway to its doom. This is the man who will never be able to tell the whole story openly and honestly. Why? Because the ATC system will not allow it.

An Atmosphere of Secrecy and Fear

I am fortunate to have an inside angle on this story. A good friend of mine has worked for air traffic control in a smaller tower in the Kentucky area for nearly twenty years. For the eight or nine years I’ve known him, he has bitched about the way controllers are treated.

Here are some of his complaints:

• Air traffic controllers can take hardly any medication, including over the counter cold meds.
• But they are also heavily discouraged, under the threat of losing their jobs, from calling in sick.
• Air traffic controllers are regularly asked to work 16 hours within a single 24-hour period.
• Air traffic controllers are discouraged from whistle-blowing by a Byzantine set of rules which few of them understand.
• Air traffic controllers are regularly given comp time instead of overtime, which they usually lose because they are not allowed to use it before the end of the year.

The double-shift the controller in Lexington worked is a standard practice. My anonymous friend has done it many times. Here’s what happens: you work your normal day shift for a month. Then you get thrown one night shift before your day off, eight hours after your night shift ends. So you work your day shift and have to make yourself sleep for those few hours before the night shift. Every controller must do this. This case is not an anomaly. Instead, it is standard FAA policy, written or no. Before believing anything the FAA says about this case, keep this in mind: the FAA and air traffic controllers have had a dysfunctionally oppositional relationship (i.e., they fight all the time) for decades.

(Scuttlebut has it that the reason the FAA has a problem with sick time abuse is because so many air traffic controllers take extended medical leave, not because they call in sick all the time. My guess is that most of this medical leave would not be necessary if only the worker were given adequate sick time to begin with. Also, due to FAA policies, most ATCs are older — another extended sick leave contributor.)

The towers at secondary airports that so many airplanes depend on are typically staffed with minimal personnel. (For most of the last eight years and probably longer, in fact, there’s been a hiring freeze on controllers — again, this is right from the horse’s mouth.) This means there is NO cushion for your safety. If a tower is short-staffed, there is no one to call on.

Add all this together, and whose safety is at risk? The controllers are up in their towers. The FAA is in its offices in Washington. It’s you, the guy flying in the plane, who will crash and burn because the FAA forces one guy to work when he’s tired. And make no mistake — they do this all the time, despite their denials — or at least create an environment in which this practice is necessary.

Air Traffic Controller Fatigue

In the case of Comair 5191, the crash was caused by multiple problems: pilot unfamiliarity with runways, poor runway layout, and poor conditions for taking off as well as air traffic controller error.

But the single entity taking the most flak for this will be the poor air traffic controller – a veteran controller with seventeen years of experience. I don’t know what’s happened to him. I will bet, however, that he is on administrative leave, and will ultimately be fired for negligence.

Really.

How negligent is his supervisor for requiring him to work that second shift – which, by the way, he is not allowed per FAA rules to turn down.

How negligent is the FAA in forcing weary air traffic controllers to come in and do a mentally-challenging and highly stressful job that lives depend on, with little or no sleep, or while sick?

By the way, new regulations imposed AFTER THIS CRASH (which, remember, was complicated by a tired controller) will make it even harder for controllers to call in because they know they are too tired to work. An employee’s need for rest, they say, is not a good enough reason to call in sick. Neither is a cold.

Digest that for just a moment before you go on.

FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown stated just this week, “We would never have a controller controlling traffic who was too tired to work.” Through magic, I wonder? She says a tired controller is given administrative duties – but that assumes that, forced to come in when he’s not capable, he’s also willing and clear-minded enough to tell his supervisor (the guy who can fire him) he needs those duties. And then, the tired controller during this particular accident was alone – typical of these mid-shifts. Who was going to direct traffic? Laura Brown?

Does this sort of management make anyone safer?

Or does it just help the FAA avoid its job of fixing the system they have broken?

Consider this: American long-distance truck drivers are not allowed to drive with less than ten hours of rest, nor work more than fourteen hours a day. Many companies reduce this maximum to eleven or twelve, citing safety concerns.

You and I and anyone else with an hourly job will get overtime after working forty hours a week. ATCs are supposed to as well. But according to my friend, it’s more likely to be comp time, not actually overtime pay. Or they gerrymander things around so that the overtime flows into the next week – this is common with midshift scheduling.

There is much more wrong with the air traffic controller situation than this. Morale stinks. Stress-related illness is common – but not documented, because if you have a psychological illness you can be fired. Overwork is common. Short-staffing – yes, of the already skeletal staff – is also common. Despite the FAA’s denials and rules banning it, having a single controller in the tower during the mid-shift – from 10:30 pm to 6:30 am – is a common practice. Few towers are fully staffed, either by FAA guidelines or what the controllers say they need.

There are many thousand fewer air traffic controllers today than there should be – and about half of them are due to retire within the next few years. And our Congress is pressuring the FAA to decrease their costs while also hiring more controllers. Now how is that supposed to work? Besides, the new controllers being hired will be greenies — little or no experience — unless we get them from the military. With the current world situation, that is unlikely as well.

What I know about the system makes me afraid to fly America’s friendly skies (o’ course, I do prefer ships, me hearties). But what alternative is there?

Disturbing

What I find most disturbing is that this is an endemic problem – it’s been around for decades – it puts all of us at risk – forty-nine people have now died – and yet it is being all but ignored by the media. Why?

Not to minimize things – but forty-nine people dying at one go is a LOT bigger a story than most of the news stories that get covered. You know, the six kids who died in a fire recently? The one guy who was killed when the crazed San Francisco motorist decided he hated everyone? Even — forgive me, my hero Steve — the death of the Crocodile Hunter. (Though to be fair, much of that coverage is a memorial of a life well lived.) Or Katie Couric’s lame debut. Or the mythic child Surrey appearing in print.

Why are these stories more important than this one, the virtual collapse of a safety net we all depend on? You tell me. I can’t figure it out.

Let’s all just remember that forty-nine people, including a newlywed couple going on their honeymoon, are tragically dead because the FAA short-staffs towers. I think that’s something we can all agree to be upset about.

Another of our bloggers recently wrote an article about her father shooting himself in the foot. I just had to know the whole story about this — and she was kind enough to oblige. Seems that this gentleman foolishly chose to use a loaded gun to learn gunslinger quickdraw methods, with one in the chamber. Not the best plan!

But how many of us go around like this? That’s where the term “half-cocked” came from. It means acting precipitously, without being certain of the facts, and referred to a practice by inexperienced or careless hunters who would half-cock their muskets, making them prone to going off easily.

I did this a few days ago, when I didn’t adequately check every single fact. Fortunately, the hole that resulted was only in my ego. How often do we all do this, and what impact does it have on the world around us? All the time, and sometimes a serious one. This can damage your most valuable online asset — your reputation. Or, in real life, it can make you look like a fool.

I do have a point, and I’m getting to it. I’m irked because not many people learn to question arguments — and it’s getting worse. I don’t know what’s going on in schools today, but I do know people are starting to listen to more emotional arguments instead of the facts. They’re also being inexcusably lazy; we have a vast repository of knowledge at our fingertips, and can look up just about anything with just a quick, well-constructed Google. But we don’t. If someone prints a claimed “fact,” we believe it.

This has recently blown up in our faces. We’ve seen faked photographs make it into Reuters and AP — fake photographs that may have affected worldwide perception of the Lebanon-Israel conflict. But it’s worse than that. You know those “factual” percentages and numbers from nonprofit organizations? A frighteningly large number of them are just made up. Plucked from the air.

For example FAIR — Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a self-proclaimed media watchdog — disseminated a statistic in 1993 that wife beating increases by 40% on Super Bowl Sunday. Not so, say any experts not quoting from FAIR’s own press release. FAiR’s primary source? Not a study — an unsourced caption in a book of photoessays.

Or NOW, the National Organization of Women, put forth a widely-quoted statistic that there are 150,000 deaths from anorexia nervosa per year. That statistic, tracked down, comes from the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association. They say it’s a misquote, and that they estimate that many people, mostly women and girls, suffer from the disease. The real number — less than a hundred deaths from these eating disorders per year. But the larger number has been disseminated in magazines and newspapers, by authors Naomi Wolf and Gloria Steinem (who was probably the origin of the misquote), and even, repeatedly, by Anne Landers.

Even if your facts are straight, your argument may not be. Argumentum ad hominem — attacking the man making an argument instead of the argument — is growing more common today, possibly because students aren’t learning proper logic. All arguments are becoming more emotional, and less logical. This is a very bad thing for intelligent debate.

Question everything. Learn how to pick apart logic. And don’t trust any secondary source for accuracy in statistics. As Mark Twain said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Oops, not quite! Twain attributed this to Benjamin Disraeli, but most researchers think it was coined by Leonard H. Courtney, president of the Royal Statistical Society in 1895. No source, apparently, is safe.

First post, and people already have the wrong impression. As I said in earlier comments, I’m not The Sheriff, and I’m not Mosey. I’m not even a cowboy, though I’ve had close associations with a few.

Like cowboys, though, I’m independent. I work hard. I believe in free thought, and free speech, even for idiots (after all, the words out of an idiot’s mouth sort of mark him as such – makes it easier for all of us.) I confess to being very political, but I’ll try to keep that out; I don’t think it has any place in this blog. I’m not out to change the world here. It’ll change itself, given time.

I am out to change a mind or two, and to get others going in that nod of agreement. You already know how I feel about citizen journalism – it only works if you’re actually a citizen of the subject locality, be it a virtual or real one. If you are an infiltrator (carpetblogger – what a great term!), your words ultimately fall into a million little pieces.

I like truth, not “truthliness.” I like facts, not factions. Logic is good, but fallacy will do if it incites insight.

Overall, it’s not important who or what I am. Do you like what I say? Do you agree with me, or do the things I have to say at least make you question what you think you know? Do you disagree with me and hate me? As long as I make you think, I don’t really care.

View me, if you please, as your resident pirate, pulling up alongside blog after blog to take a few broadsides, or into port to partake of a few amusements. I can promise you a bit of pleasure and a lot of fighting if you join me.

Yeah, I blog. That does not make me media, and it does not make me informed, intelligent, or rational. It does make me a person with a big mouth, and an audience that might just possibly be listening– which means I’m no different from any other blogger.

Don’t get me wrong- I don’t have a huge amount of respect for today’s mainstream media, particularly after hearing some of the cowardly things that are going on in Lebanon (“Just stay in your comfy hotel room, guys, and let the natives handle it. They’re used to getting killed. Sure, they’ll give you the straight story!” Tracers.**)

** if you didn’t get that, go back and watch Chasing Amy.

But some of the things in the blogosphere really gripe me. Like the activist citizen media – or as I like to call them, bloggers with a cause. Specifically, I hate the way they adopt any sufficiently dramatic issue and use it to promote their own agenda.

Case in point: there’s a nice little city I happen to love called New Orleans. It had a little old flood not too long ago that did all kinds of nasty things to the city. Not the party and nightclub section – that part was mostly okay and still serves Hurricanes (mmm, Hurricanes) with your breakfast scrambled eggs and white gravy. But with any city, it’s the people that make up the town, not the buildings.

A bunch of homes were destroyed– a hundred percent loss in some neighborhoods– depriving those people of a place to live. Perhaps as many as two thousand people were killed just in the city and surrounding areas, and more bodies are being discovered even now a year later. Half or more of the city’s population is still evacuated, with many more waiting in FEMA trailers for their homes to be rebuilt. Horrible. Almost unimaginable, really.

Seems to me that the tragedy in New Orleans didn’t really require any exploitation. The bloggers down there, a very active and respectable community, might just have needed a little help getting their message out. They’ve been living with the carnage and wreckage and sewage and all the other “ages” for just under a year. They have pictures galore. They have news to report, positive and negative, on what’s being done. They are informed, and they know the truth in the situation– the real New Orleans truth.

But there’s a segment of the blogging world that just can’t leave this alone. They didn’t help out the New Orleans bloggers in the most simple and rational of manners– by linking to them, or by cross-posting their best blogs on well-trafficked sites. You’ll find some of them at the interestingly-named NewOrleansTruth.com.

Not satisfied with the news coming to them in Los Angeles (primarily), they apparently feel that they have to go down and blog for themselves about it. I guess they aren’t seeing enough New Orleans truth out there. You gotta wonder– what are they reading? Are they looking at the New Orleans blogs? Have they helped these guys out?

No. In all the blogs belonging to these folks, I have yet to find one that really talks about a Nola (that’s shorthand for the New Orleans area, all y’all who don’t know) blogger’s blogsite. (For that matter only two- Chartreuse and 1938Media- seem to be actual real bloggers; the others: recruited for the cause, I’m guessing?) There are now links to some Nola bloggers at NewOrleansTruth.com, but only after it was pointed out loudly and voluminously that this was a Gaping Omission in a site theoretically devoted to the Truth.

Where in any of the NOT blogs can you read a promo for a Nola blogger who has demonstrated exemplary – and real – citizen journalism? Or one asking for help? You’d think that citizen journalists would at least read stuff by other citizen journalists. If they’re so damned concerned about it, they should be talking about it, and should have been talking about it for the last year. They also should have read some of the marvelous coverage given the New Orleans scene by Nola bloggers.

You’d think that if they were gung-ho about going down to see the damage and promote a fix, that they’d also be interested in promoting more awareness of what’s going on for real.

Nope. Nary a word.

How about a link on the NOT sites providing a place to donate to the New Orleans cleanup? Or maybe letter templates to write to congressmen or the media, demanding more action.

Hmm. That’s not there either. Gasp. Shock. Dismay.

In fact, there’s not a damn thing on the NOT-affiliated sites that will help the folks in New Orleans in any kind of responsible, material manner. Nada. Zilch. Zip.

Instead, they are dissing the Nola bloggers. Clearly, their carpetblogging actions state, Nola folks aren’t getting the truth across. These poor little victimized people of New Orleans are idiots. It takes a real blogger, someone from a Civilized City like L.A., to come out and help these poor hayseeds. (Tongue very firmly in cheek indeed!)

Here’s my prediction. First, they will go down and take nothing but negative pictures. There will be no pics of the incredible work Nola residents and hordes of fantastic volunteers have done to clean up the city– sanitizing the fishy carnage of the Audubon Aquarium and reopening it, or repairing the damage to the Superdome, or making the streets of the Ninth Ward drivable again, or reviving the city in time for Mardi Gras this year– a truly Herculean task.

Instead, there will be hordes of pictures of all the places that still need work, and tragic stories about all the people who have been forgotten. Sure, that’s important. In no way am I saying that the tens of thousands who still need help should be ignored. However, if you don’t look at the good that has been done already, you’re not getting the whole picture, are you?

These images will be used for two different purposes: first, to Promote A Political Agenda. We all have political agendas, of course. But this Political Agenda will be specifically to attack Bush and the Republican party, while explicitly not criticizing what the Democrats running Louisiana have done, or rather not done. There will be not a single gripe about Nagin’s atrocious decision not to evacuate; instead, the federal government not doing enough will be the centerpiece of this bitchfest. This despite the profusion of blame to spread around to everyone. That’s because part of their agenda is to attack Republicans, particularly Bush (and you can find that easily by reading their blogs).

Isn’t it cheating to go to someone else’s backyard and bitch about what a rotten job has been done there? Aren’t there problems in OUR OWN BACKYARDS that need bitching about? And if there aren’t, maybe some praise and thanksgiving for our good fortune is in order as we WRITE A CHECK to an appropriate rebuilding charity instead of spending that money to travel down to New Orleans.

That brings me to my other gripe. A donation made in secret, in private, is true charity. Marching a parade down the street to hand your hundred-dollar check over to the Salvation Army or Goodwill or whoever is not. Is the motivation behind this much-talked-about project charity, or is it something else? Instead of holding out his hands for anyone wanting to donate to the cause of his going down to New Orleans, could Chartreuse not collect a few dimes to put in the bank accounts of the charities down there? There’s something very wrong with this picture.

Deep Breath Here So I Can Mount The Soapbox

Citizen journalism should be done in your own backyard, where you know the community. That’s the grassroots strength that powers the blogosphere. Let news agencies dispatch journalists to other places.

Think about it- who knows New Orleans’ problems better than someone who lives in New Orleans? The best blogs on Iraq come from guys who are stationed there or from Iraqis who live there. And you can’t possibly hope to understand the mindset of the Lebanese or the Israelis by visiting there for a week or two; it takes someone who’s grown up around it, or who has lived the story. That’s what blogs are about – hearing about someone else’s life, their experiences bringing a profundity to the news that you can’t get in any other way. They are, in many ways, an offshoot of memoirs. Hijacking someone else’s story to promote your own blog is, frankly, just wrong. (Besides, is your life really so boring that you have to go steal someone else’s?)

Since I’ve predicted certain types of abuse by NewOrleansTruth, they may not happen. We may see positive blogs coming out of NOT, and I’d love to be proven wrong in this manner. I doubt I will. I think every single post will be negative, with little or nothing said about the rebuilding that has happened. And I’ll get viciously attacked by NOT and its supporters for writing this blog***, and some Nola folks will come out and say nice things, and all the other stuff I just predicted will come true.

***bring it on!

What’s wrong with this? As long as the public thinks New Orleans (poor, poor New Orleans) is wallowing in its own tragedy, the vast and generous spirit of the city cannot properly recover. Worse, tourist dollars will stay away, perhaps permanently crippling the economy. And there’s no reason for it. The French Quarter is in excellent shape. Many of New Orleans’ other attractions – the food, the music, the Audubon park complexes, the drinking, the ahem adult sections, and the beautiful, friendly people– are also in good shape. How much of tourism can be predicted by people’s perceptions of conditions, as opposed to the reality? What do you think?

My point is that this sort of blogging– doom and gloom, what’s bad about New Orleans– is worse for the city by far than just leaving it alone. Let’s hope that we get through the anniversary of Katrina with a minimum of doom and start talking about what’s right with New Orleans, like the thousands of students who came down on their spring breaks to help fix the city, and the tough and resilient spirit of the people that won’t let an icon they call home die.

As far as NewOrleansTruth and company- let’s watch, shall we? And sneer. At least a little. It’s good exercise for our faces.

NOT, prove me wrong – please!!!

*Oh, and a sweetener, hat tip to GulfSails for pointing this out in his blog: one of Chartreuse’s backers, Know More Media, is even committed to paying these bloggers for their daily posts. How generous of everyone. Nola bloggers are Not Happy. A little reminder, one more time, of New Orleans charities, courtesy Instapundit.

**A second sweetener: the NOT tour was scheduled to happen Next Weekend as of August 2. It’s nearly the end of August, and it ain’t happened yet. What’s up with that?

***Sigh. This is starting to hurt my teeth. Am I really supposed to believe that there is no profit (financial or otherwise) being made on NOT’s site when there’s such nice, clean promo for Discovery Channel all over it? I wonder if they know about this picture, showcased for us in lieu of a thousand words at Chartreuse’s post on Team New Orleans, a response, as the text below the picture shows, to those who think his mission is a “waste of time.” Like, um, the Nola bloggers – who are also New Orleans victims?

Remember them, the citizens of New Orleans?

I do.