Meacham Park Strikes Again

As most of you know, the infamous Meacham Park neighborhood within Kirkwood has struck again. In July, it was the “Rockhead” cop-killing, and now, two “bruthaz” are charged with robbing and raping an Imo’s Pizza Delivery driver, a 40-year old white woman.

In a wise move, Imo’s has temporarily redlined the Meacham Park neighborhood; it would be even wiser to make that move permanent.

But not all pizza joints in Kirkwood are so wise.

Here is the text of an e-mail sent to this website on October 8, 2005, by someone who shall go by his inititals, S.M.:

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As you probably know St. Louis Pizza and Wings has agreed to deliver to the troubled Meacham Park area after other companies refused to after a driver was stabbed and sexually assaulted.

While trying to email my objection to St. Louis Pizza and Wings (no email address on webpage) I noticed through a Google search that one of the co-owners names (Demetris Alfred) matches the name of a board member on the racial activist F.I.R.E. webpage.

FIRE board webpage — http://www.f-i-r-e.org/page2.html

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If anyone else can confirm that Mr. Alfred of Pizza fame is the same man as Mr. Alfred of F-I-R-E fame, please let us know.

For those of you that do not know, F-I-R-E is the group Firefighters Institute for Racial Equality. The group is most noted for lobbying for affirmative action in hiring into and promotion within professional fire departments in the St. Louis Area. Since African-Americans are the predominant racial minority in the St. Louis area, this means that most of the group’s members and executives and sympathies are African-American. F-I-R-E execs are fairly frequent guests on the Lizz Brown radio program; ’nuff said.

Odds and Ends

Watching old video tapes can sometimes lead to a good hard laugh, or maybe two.

1. Sometime in 2001, the History Channel aired an economic history of the world in the 20th century. Toward the end of the six-hour documentary, the show interviewed Bill Clinton, who, at the time of the documentary, was a few months separated from the White House. The topic of the moment was the 1994 Mexican bailout, which, as we know, was really a bailout of American-based multinational banks by American taxpayers, to rescue the banks from the financial pain of the Mexican government defaulting on loans made to it from those banks.

Clinton said on the documentary that (pph) “If we had not have bailed out the Mexican government, the Mexican economy would have gone into the tank, millions of Mexicans would have poured across our southern border looking for work here, and the Mexican government would have hated us for a long time because we were not there for them in a time of need.”

Well, our taxpayers were forced to ante-up to bail out what they thought was the Mexican government. Even so, the Mexican economy is in the tank, millions of Mexicans are illegally pouring across the southern border, and the Mexican governmental officials and its ruling elite hates us.

The answer to that riddle was stated above. The bailout did not bail out the Mexican government in Mexico City; it bailed out multinational banks in New York City and environs.

2. A few years back, PBS ran a documentary on new concepts in public education. One of the featured schools was a recently-built elementary school in a near northside Chicago neighborhood, one that is mixed black/Hispanic.

The documentary profiled an African-American mother and her daughter, the daughter being a student at the school. The mother said that, one afternoon in the beginning of the first school year that she put her daughter in that school, she (the mother) and her daughter’s father (i.e. not her husband) were standing in around in a public park, both smoking marijuana, and they missed the daughter’s afternoon bus stop and location while they were high.

Therefore, the mother blames the school for the fact that her daughter was wandering around on Chicago city streets unsupervised. (Naturally.) So mother decides this will never happen again, and she became a parent volunteer at the school. She told the documentary that, while she was volunteering, she paid attention to the instruction, and in the process, she said she learned a lot of new things. Keep in mind that this was an elementary school, and this mother appeared to be in her early 30s.

My, What Big Bureaucratic Teeth You Have

This webmaster thinks that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has gotten too large to secure the homeland.

Once upon a time, a fashionable ancedote that us right wingers told each other was that the Federal government was so large and its numerous parts so disconnected from each other that, on the one hand, it maintained an official proclamation that smoking was bad, and spent oodles of money to convince people not to smoke, and on the other hand, it handed out agricultural subsidies to tobacco farmers. Because the latter does not exist anymore, this example is no longer valid, but the Feds keep coming up with ways to contradict itself.

This time, the paradox is entirely contained in the Homeland Security cabinet department. At least with the tobacco question above, the objects of interest and spending weren’t under the same department, they were split between Health and Human Services for the former, and the Agriculture Dep’t for the latter.

As we all know, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have forced untold thousands of people from their homes and into shelters or other temporary accommodations. In earnest, some forward-thinking computer geeks are coordinating efforts to hook shelters up with computers and online access. At the website , one can find out that older and otherwise jettisoned and dust-gathering computer equipment can be donated to shelters, and a special bootable CD-ROM that will load a Linux OS Distro straight into the Firefox browser with a special Katrina-themed home page will run just fine on these systems, in contrast to resource-hog Windows XP. (Of course, that’s missing the point that Microsoft would still charge $100 a piece to install one copy of XP on one computer.) As one can see, the website coordinates hardware donations and has links to downloadable files so that anyone can download the .iso file, burn it onto a CD-R, so it can be used at the shelter web stations (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Fine, as far as that goes. But imagine you’re someone driven out of New Orleans or environs, and you’re staying in a shelter in, say, the Dallas, Texas area. You sit at one of these computers, surf the internet using this bootable CD-ROM, ergo you’re surfing with the Firefox browser. Then you log onto the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) website, and follow its links so that you can apply for emergency FEMA assistance.

You’ll get one of those friendly error messages that you need to run Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (IE ver 6.00.2900) in order to fill out an online application for aid. Otherwise, they give you a FEMA toll-free phone number to call to apply, and give you a web link to download IE 6 for XP SP2 if you want to take the online route. Be mindful of the fact that IE won’t run on Linux, and at that, IE6-XP2 won’t run on any Windows version older than XP SP2, and the computer you’re sitting in front of might not have a hard drive to download anything into, as boot-from-CD setups don’t need one.

How’s that for a good swift kick in the nads?

Now, FEMA is within the Homeland Security department, at least it has been since HLS became a cabinet-level agency. HLS also has another appendage, called the US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) . In June 2004, US-CERT issued an official proclamation the the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser was too great of a security risk, and considering how many Osamas and Omars out there with broadband would love to cripple America by unleashing digital terrorism, and considering how the almost ubiquitous use of attack-susceptible IE was the terrorists’ turn key for such a plan, that they advised people to switch from IE to a more secure alternative, like Firefox or Opera, for their day-to-day browsing.

(As an aside, if you haven’t done that yet, the graphical hyperlink buttons at the bottom of this frame are your first step to doing so.)

So, what do we have here? Within one single cabinet-level department, the one supposedly responsible for protecting us from all the evil in the world, one of its arms is telling us that Internet Explorer is too dangerous and shouldn’t be used, and another one of its arms is requiring Internet Explorer if victims of a natural evil want to apply for Federal assistance.

All this drives me so bonkers that I’m tempted to take up smoking.