I, Portlander

2009-07-27T14:19:00.001-07:00

Michael Jackson

2009-07-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

My thoughts on Michael Jackson, as posted on www.vigilantemind.com:

The undying coverage of Michael Jackson's death is precisely the kind of thing that The Vigilante Mind will not be covering. But since TVM isn't up yet, I'll saying something myself, and it's simple: instead of blaming the painkillers, the doctors, the media scrutiny, the massive debt, or (this is the most recent proposal) his burning accident in the 80s that led to his taking prescription drugs... how about we discuss the concept that the entire Jackson 5 was created out of an exploitative, abusive master plan orchestrated by Joe Jackson? He's still delivering his plan to this day, marketing the "aftermath of Michael" line of products.

The Jackson 5 never would have shown up in the entertainment market had Joe Jackson not exploited his children, causing massive personal psychological damage in the process. There's a very good reason why Janet Jackson seems like the only sane one in the family—she wasn't in the Jackson 5. It's not a coincidence. That's the place that pop entertainers hold in our society—we sacrifice the well-being of these people for our amusement, and in exchange we give them ludicrous amounts of money so we can call them the privileged ones. Michael Jackson was slated to live a short and embarrasing life the second that his prepubescent psyche was sold to America at the age of eight. When he was inappropriate with small children, he wasn't a pedophiliac—he was playing doctor with friends of his maturity level. When he was popping massive quantities of painkillers that led to his addiction, it wasn't because his hair caught on fire, it was because he finally—finally—was presented with something that would temper the demons in his head. The overdose was an accident, for the most part. What wasn't an accident was that we created in a human being a hell so fierce that no amount of drugs would be sufficient to shut it out of Michael's consciousness. But he sure tried.

The Vigilante Mind is now available (I think) as an RSS feed here:
http://www.feedfire.com/site/rss.cgi?ChanContentId=034309
Please let me know if that works. I'm not sure.

Major Stephan Cook

2009-07-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

These posts are going to be more and more frequently links to The Vigilante Mind, once I figure my way around Google Sites... I will still use I, Portlander for my personal opinions and rants about work, and shift all my political commentaries over to the new site. But in the meantime, I bring you this:

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/story/777472.html

Now, those of you who have followed this story know that Major Cook has since been fired from his government job and disgraced, and his case was exposed as opportunism, the lawsuit was frivolous, and his intent in suing was explicitly to force the President to 'prove' that he's an American citizen. So we'll ignore the issue that Major Cook wanted us to look at. Instead, what's this about a soldier committing war crimes if he serves under the orders of someone other than the President?

Have we already forgotten about Blackwater (since rebranded as Xe)? What about the soldiers from Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, et al. who have served in wars that their country was not a part of? Were they war criminals? I was in talks with the Navy a few years back—they wanted me to do some cartography in Iraq (I would have likely been based in Europe), presumably in an effort to find enemy camps. I would have been a plainclothes, as are the majority of people helping in the war. Plainclothes contractors aren't under the command of the President. Are they war criminals too?

The fact of the matter is that we have to stop taking people like this at face value. Major Cook was not a patriot fighting for what he believed in, nor did he honestly believe that anyone in the world was concerned with President Obama's authority to lead the army (though I do believe he is convinced that Obama is secretly not American, simply because that's what he's told to believe). Major Cook is a hack job who is in the camp of The Twenty-Six (tune into future podcasts to find out what that means)—people who don't care one way or another about our country, but are just having fun with their time in the spotlight. Major Cook isn't a patriot, nor is he a traitor—he's just an idiot.

Letting Cynthia Davis speak for herself

2009-06-25T13:22:00.001-07:00

The initial criticism from liberal pundit Keith Olbermann was that State Representative Cynthia Davis wanted to pull funding from feeding impoverished children because those children could just get jobs at McDonalds, who feed their employees for free. The criticism was that it was a "let them eat cake" mentality: that the remark was staggeringly insensitive to the problems that impoverished families were up against.

Ms. Davis responded to the criticism as follows:

We all agree on the importance of feeding children, but we differ on who should do this. I believe this duty belongs to the parents. Instead of respecting this time honored jurisdiction of the family, the summer feeding program treats families like they do not exist.
When government takes over a family function, like feeding children on a daily basis, we take a group of people who are capable and treat them like they are incapacitated. Some have a low view of parents, presuming most of them are inept and
proposing governmental intervention as the only solution.
I believe most parents are good and want the blessing and privilege of feeding their children. When families are sharing a meal around the kitchen table, much more is happening. Mealtime is the primary time for shaping values and strengthening
bonds. All of this is missing or diluted when it happens outside the family. Look into your own heart and ask, “What made a difference in my life as a child?” Was it standing in a line for a cafeteria style meal at school or was it sitting around the kitchen table with others in your family?

Ms. Davis clarified what her solution would be to make sure that the parents could feed the children themselves:

Better education can change the plight of the poor. My sincere hope is that we can lift families out of poverty through compassionate interaction with those who can show them a better way. This is why I agreed to chair an interim committee to study poverty and why I volunteered to teach a cooking class for mothers utilizing the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program to help teach young mothers how to prepare nutritious meals.

That's the problem: impoverished mothers don't spend enough time in the kitchen.

Often I feel compelled to offer my opinion on these issues. Sometimes I don't have to.

Forcibly Rape Journalists

2009-06-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

I just heard something really interesting on Real Time with Bill Maher. They were discussing the rhetoric coming out of the Middle East (and particularly Iran) and how relations are strained by improper translation. One in particular that they focused on is the phrase "death to." When we hear them chant that, particularly in the context of "Death to America," we read it to mean that their ultimate wish is that we were all dead. In fact, that was one of the primary defenses in our torture of prisoners—they, after all, chant for our deaths!

By my approximation, the phrase "death to," though that is the direct translation, is the Farsi version of the word 'fuck.' Just as we drop the f-bomb fairly comfortably here, they use the phrase all the time there. When Ahmadinejad was handing out potatoes to people as a campaign gimmick, people who didn't support him would reply with "death to potatoes!" The person they interviewed would say it's fairly common if someone loses their car keys to exclaim, "death to my car keys. Where are they?" If someone makes a stupid mistake, they'll very commonly exclaim, "death to myself." In context, taking the saying literally is absolutely ridiculous.

Imagine the direct translation of the F-word. It's horrifying. How would people around the world react to Cheney's response to a barbed question he received from a journalist? "When the Vice President was asked a question critical regarding his associations with Halliburton, he responded casually to the reporter, 'well, I'd have to say, I hope you get forcibly raped very much.'"

I don't imagine people would think we were deserving of much respect either.

Jesus and The Worthingtons

2009-06-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow begins the trial of the Worthington Family, religious zealots who allowed their daughter to die instead of healing her through medicine. I actually side with the Worthingtons on the broadest scale—specifically, that a majority of the hyper-religious are actually just self-serving detriments to society who hide behind religion because of its impenetrable veil, that they are exactly the people who are called out in the first commandment specifying that man is not the word of God.

The Worthingtons, on the other hand, are true faithful, those who stand by their beliefs whether it befits or punishes them. The question at hand, then, is whether it is the role of law to protect people like them who are victimized by dogmatic brainwashing, and more importantly, if they have the right to allow their daughter (who may not have grown up to share their beliefs) to die. It's a really difficult question, because if their daughter did grow up to share their beliefs (never mind whether the beliefs are valid), upon knowing that human medicine saved her life when she was young, she would spend her entire life believing that she was irreperably damned to Hell for something that she had no control over when she was only a year old.

Another interesting question with this case is how it relates to the pro-life movement. Under the religious pretense, it can be argued that the Worthington's actions are consistent with the pro-life dogma: mankind is not to intervene in God's Work by killing an unborn child, so similarly they are not to intervene with a born child that God intends to kill. However, the pro-life movement is increasingly set in a political framework, where it more closely pertains to our lives, and they have gone against the political mindset around kin. The political logic for outlawing abortions is straightforward—parents should not be allowed to abort a fetus, as it is a living, breathing thing, and they are no longer in a position to make the decision of whether another living human is to live or die. It is then to be inferred that The Worthingtons should not have been allowed to make a life-or-death decision with their child; rather, it is our societal responsibility to preserve the life of those who are not yet able to preserve themselves, and anyone who gets in the way (including the parents) are committing negligent homicide.

But what I'm most interested in is the metaphysical aspect of this case. Jesus was known to cure the sick. As an agnostic, I am inclined to believe that Jesus was just a man with great PR skills, not an actual divine being. Many religious historians (particularly on the humanist side) are quick to point out that through modern living, we are capable of carrying out all of the miracles that Jesus was credited for. Jesus himself said that it wasn't he who was responsible for the miracles, it was God. "God," as in "that which we are not capable of understanding." Which in Jesus's time included antibiotics. An argument can be made (which I may make someday) that Jesus himself had an advanced knowledge of antibiotic medicine, which he used to cure the sick.

Chew on that, Followers of Christ.

Subprime TARP

2009-06-10T09:22:00.000-07:00

Good news everyone, we're out of the economic crisis! Or so say the bankers, who have returned their TARP funds to the government after deciding they can't meet the terms of the loan. (Oh, so they do understand that sometimes people default on loans.)

Actually, they can meet the conditions of the loan, they just don’t want to. Specifically, the government is placing a cap on executive salaries for any banks who have accepted loans. Essentially, the government is saying that the executives themselves have to help pay back the loan, instead of just cutting the employees. So the banks said they’d rather just give the money back. All twelve were very proud of themselves and immediately released public statements, basically saying “good news everyone—we still can’t afford to help our customers, so we’re not going to be giving out any loans, but the government did let us give back the TARP money designed to enable us to help people so that we can continue to earn huge dividends!!!”

The reason why they’re so proud of this is because the shareholders are all going to get a bigger slice because of it, and they’re taking the slice right out of the actual business they’re supposed to provide. Like the skyscraper that Portland has invested billions into making (by Nordstroms), which has been suspended indefinitely because their bank has said that they won’t front the money, even though it’s guaranteed and has already been collected from people who have dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on leases. Now the investors are trying to figure out what to do for all the businesses who paid six or seven figures for an office that they don’t have. It's like a season of LOST—just when you think that big business are the villains, you find out that they're right there with us as helpless victims of a far greater evil: the banks.

I hope the banks collapse. We’ll all be fucked in the short term, but it’s the only way we’ll ever move forward. Portland has room for a few more spangers, let the fat cats beg for change on the streets.

The truth is in the comments

2009-06-08T13:59:00.000-07:00

Note: This blog entry has some graphic details. Read at your own risk.

The crime is too recent to have the full story, but what appears to have happened is that a woman in Tigard saw a posting online from a girl who was 9 months pregnant, and the woman wanted her baby, so she lured the girl to her house. She planned on coaxing the girl to hand over her baby, and even started out on building her alibi, spontaneously telling people she was pregnant so it wouldn't look weird when she suddenly had a baby.

When the girl came over, this woman tried to coax her into inducing labor (and may or may not have succeeded), and in any case got the baby out of her, then calmly killed the woman and stuffed her corpse under her house. The baby, not yet fully developed, was either never fully alive or died shortly after it was removed. The woman called her boyfriend and had him come over and help her bring the baby back to life. When he was unable to revive the baby, she called the police, saying it was her baby and she needed help, despite showing no signs of pregnancy, no record of having a baby, and a dead body under her house.

There is no ambiguity here. This woman, the reason doesn't matter, was not human. She was severely damaged beyond repair, she is beyond reprieve, and there is no chance that she will ever see free soil again. It's possible that she doesn't even care. At the very least, she will get life in prison for first degree murder of the mother. Then the prosecutors mentioned that if they can determine that the baby was at one point independently alive, it would qualify as a person and they could pin second-degree infanticide on her as well.

The first comments on the news report were fairly straightforward. Condolences to the victim and her family, disgust at the perpetrator. Then a couple people mentioned in passing how awful it was that they were calculating the charges on whether the baby was ever a person. One person casually states that the case makes her want to leave Oregon.

Then the floodgates open.

The pro-choicers come out against the commenter for making it political. The pro-lifers come out against the pro-choicers for not caring about the baby. The Democrats come out against pro-lifers for using the case to push their agenda. The religious conservatives come out against the Democrats for being heartless liberals. Soon everyone commenting have reduced the discussion to saying the other side are all going to hell. Nobody shows remorse for the victim anymore; the only mention of the original article is that everyone states that anyone who disagrees with them are just as bad as the psychotic murderer.

Eventually, someone from the family of the deceased have the misfortune of reading the comments on the page. A mere three and a half hours after the news is released, an acquaintance of the dead adds a comment expressing their anguish. The response is almost immediate:

heathers kin:
Most everyone would feel the same way in your position. I know I
would.
That said...

...and the debate continues. It quickly devolves into people citing statistics on the percentages of pro-lifers vs. pro-choice. Demographics on the death penalty. Geography of crimes in Multnomah County. Rights vs. Suppression of Free Speech. Within less than 28 hours, the conversation thread has devolved into calculating the margin of victory of President Obama.

The only mention remaining of the original tragedy is each side of each argument accusing the other of putting their own political agenda over the death of this poor, poor girl, whom they then use as an instance in furthering their own agenda. Commenters open with a suggestion that all dissenting opinions be removed from the website, then conclude with the pre-emptive accusation that the other side will attempt to suppress them, thus proving their point, whatever that point will be.

Well, now I'll add my two cents to the argument, because let's face it, I'm not better than any of you. I don't even know this woman, and it doesn't affect my life in any way that she's dead. My life is made worse from knowing that this psychotic killer even exists, but even the article itself points to how naive and gullible the victim was, literally to a fault. I do what I can to protect myself, and I assure you that the killer is not that difficult to outwit. Given my personal opinion, I would suggest that she be put promptly to death, and I would suggest keeping a close eye on her two kids—she's surely fucked them up by now.

Now, as far as the other politics: abortion rights, free speech, death penalty in general... I just watched the social discourse, in the span of just one day, completely forget that there's anything wrong with what happened last week. To some degree, every single one of us saw this event as an opportunity. A chance for us to make the world a little better for ourselves. And our anger is not directed at the psycotic baby-killer who caused this, but at our fellow commenters, who have commited the far worse crime of diagreeing with us.

I'm going to say that again in its own paragraph: at our basest level, we consider diversity of thought to be a greater evil than carving a baby out of an innocent woman and tossing her corpse under a house.

Now we know how tragedies like this come to pass. Evidently we have more important things to worry about.

"My Boyfriend is lying to me," pt. 2

2009-05-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

Click here for part 1. Chick is the same person, boyfriend is the same guy. We went to lunch with a friend and discussed. Our friend does in fact refer to her boyfriend as 'Loser.'

FRIEND: "So how are things going with Loser?"
CHICK: "I'm actually really mad at him right now because he's playing games with me."
ME: "How so?"
CHICK: "Because I don't know if he's going to hang out with me over Memorial Day weekend or not, and he won't tell me."
FRIEND: "When did you ask him?"
CHICK: "Well, a couple weeks ago I mentioned to him that since it was a holiday, we'd both have the weekend off (usually I can't hang out on weekends because I do volunteer stuff on Saturdays) and we should get together. So he says that he's going to be going camping with his friends instead."
FRIEND: "So... he has plans."
CHICK: "Well, yeah, so I tell him that he needs to spend the weekend with me, so he should cancel his camping trip with his friends so we could spend some time together, and he said he wasn't going to. So now I don't know whether we're going to be hanging out or not."
(silence)
ME: "Well... it sounds like you're not going to be hanging out with him this weekend."
CHICK: "Well, I don't know, I'm kind of mad at him for not giving me an answer, but I'd be willing to—"
FRIEND: "He gave you an answer. He said he was going camping."
CHICK: "Yeah, but he should be hanging out with me, not hanging out with his friends."
FRIEND: "Hm. Yeah. That was a really stupid thing to say to him."
CHICK: "What was!?"
ME: "You gave him an ultimatum."
CHICK: "What's that mean?"
FRIEND: "When you give a guy a choice saying 'either you do what I want you to do, or you're in trouble,' he is never going to do what you want him to do. He'll go against you just out of spite."
ME: "You may never hear from him again."
CHICK: "But that's not what I did!!!"
ME: "How is that not what you did?"
CHICK: "I didn't give him a choice! I told him he needed to spend Memorial Day weekend with me if he wanted us to work."

Can't argue with logic like that. I don't mean it's solid logic, I just mean, you can't argue with logic like that.

To be continued, I have no doubt...

Satanists and Catholics Unite

2009-05-20T10:57:00.000-07:00

I was intrigued by a passing comment on The Colbert Report that the only demographic which is on the rise in all 50 states is atheists. I actually looked into this statistic and discovered that additionally, the only demographic which is decreasing in every state is Monotheists (the group which includes Jews, Christians, and Muslims), though there is variation for each particular faith.

Religious leaders defend this by saying (and I completely agree with them) that the number of people of true faith have not decreased; they have actually increased for the most part. I personally would suggest that “atheists” also qualify as people of true faith (i.e. they sincerely believe in their metaphysical beliefs).

What appears to be happening is that people who are ambivalent towards religion have long considered themselves Christians because, well, that’s what normal people are. Atheists, however, have done a very good PR job of telling people that, by definition, if they don’t actively believe in God, then they are atheists. Therefore, when people are asked what religion they consider themselves to be, people who used to call themselves Christians are now calling themselves atheists, even though nothing in their belief or lifestyle has changed at all.

Now, I would like to suggest that anyone who casually refers to themselves as Catholic, Muslim, Mormon or Protestant, but don’t go to church/mosque or follow the rituals of their dogma are not actually of that religion, and people who refer to themselves as atheists but don’t really think about whether or not there is a God are not atheists. They’re simply non-religious.

My theory is that if the only people who considered themselves members of a belief system were people who actually believed it, the world would be incomparably better than it is today. If you ever look at debates between devout muslims, devout Christians, and devout atheists, they are almost always completely cordial with each other. Many of the most religious actually believe that they are in the same circle as those from other religions, they simply disagree on the details.

Even some of the higher-ups in the Church of Satan point out that Satanism is merely a rebranding by Christians of the worship of mother Earth, that Satan wasn’t even considered evil until the Catholic church announced that he was the ruler of Hell in the 400s. They don’t condone sinning, deception, or evil of any kind—the church is essentially a nephew of paganism, and are simply victims of a slander campaign 1600 years ago. And much like the other ‘non-believers’ I mentioned before, anyone who calls themselves a Satanist because they drink goat’s blood and evoke the Dark Lord are not really Satanists; they’re just idiots. And really, they’re no worse than the extreme fringe of most other religions, whether it’s radical Muslims, Opus Dei (i.e. radical Catholics), or radical Fundementalist Christians, who condone oppression, mortal punishment of nonbelievers, and provoke violence against innocents, like abortion doctors, gay rights activists, and blacks (lest ye forget the affiliation of the Ku Klux Klan). Even radical Hindus have some issues to deal with. Suicide by fire on a public street is not rational behavior.

Basically what I’m saying is that we need to do a reorg of the country’s religions into the five actual belief structures on our planet:

Fundementalists
The Devout
Casual Believers (i.e. those who merely attend service because all their friends go to church too)
Humanists (atheists, agnostics, Unitarians, certain liberal factions)
Non-believers

We’ve outgrown these geographic clubs. Let the Fundementalists go to war with the Devout, and leave the rest of us out of it.

Scandal Schmandal

2009-05-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

I’m sure you’ve been watching the news and heard about the “protests” against Obama speaking at Notre Dame—their reason being that a pro-choice President should not be giving a commencement address at a Catholic institution. Conservative media spoke from the perspective of how outrageous it is that the university is allowing Obama to speak, despite the cries of their community. Liberal media spoke of how outrageous it is that the community protest our President being able to speak to an educational institution because of their own prejudices. Non-partisan media have made a big deal of just what a big scandal the whole deal is, regardless of the reason. Even the Wikipedia entry for University of Notre Dame has been edited to include the controversy, suggesting that this event is now an integral part of the university’s 160 year history.

What the media haven’t covered is the actual commencement address. When the extreme minority of community in South Bend who did oppose Obama’s commencement address spoke out, a much larger part of the community reacted harshly. When a few people inside the ceremony interrupted the President’s speech with pro-life rhetoric, they were very quickly drowned out by a huge unison chant of “Yes we can, Yes we can,” the rallying cry of Obama supporters. The fact is that the vast majority of students, faculty, and community members seemed to be honored to have the President grace them with his company, and though they haven’t been given the same voice as the protesters, have tried to make it clear that they were proud of their University’s tradition of attracting such influential speakers.

I guess the truth just isn’t as salacious.

As the GOP falls

2009-05-14T09:45:00.000-07:00

Nearly every political scientist is insisting that the Republican Party is not in danger of collapsing, that both major parties have survived far worse than the GOP are now. Well, if they don't collapse, it won't be for lack of trying.

You may have heard that recently the Republican Party, after a failed effort to rebrand themselves, have decided to rebrand the Democrats instead. They have resolved and pledged to now refer to the Democratic Party as the “Democratic Socialist Party.”

The result? In a recent poll done by a conservative polling company owned by Rupert Murdoch, studies have found that only 53% of Americans consider capitalism to be superior to socialism, meaning that nearly half of Americans do not see anything wrong with socialism; in fact, 20% now consider socialism to be superior. In an effort to scare people away from the Dems, they have associated Democrats with pinkos… and because of peoples’ high opinions of Democrats, their response is now “well, maybe then being a pinko isn’t so bad.”

The only group that this did provoke outrage from, in fact, is the actual Democratic Socialist Party of America, who are outraged that the Republicans are applying the moniker to their sworn rivals, the Democrats. So the effect of this decision is that moderates now think more highly of left-wing radicals, and left-wing radicals now think even less of right-wing conservatives!!!

If you don't take your shorts off, we can't pull the stick our of your ass.

2009-04-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

Another day in Tualatin, another God-crazy politician trying to impose his beliefs on his denizens. Stars Cabaret, a dingy strip club, is moving into Tualatin. In Lake-O, they tried to block a new strip club. They failed. In Twally, they tried to block Stars' liquor license. They failed. Now they're trying to add an amendment to the state constitution to block strip clubs. They will fail.

Let's start with step one. The role of government is to cover needs and services of the people. They also have policing responsibilities, to keep people safe. That's why there are liquor licenses— bars have to be accountable for their patrons, ensuring that people are cut off at a certain point, minors aren't given (too much) booze, and no drunken brawls break out. That has NOTHING to do with looking at naked people. Blocking their liquor license is a perversion of their responsibilities and an abuse of power. That is not why they are given licensing authority, and the effort is clearly for the sole purpose of dissuading people "different from them" from doing what they want to do. It is the exact same thing, and I will fight you to the death on this, as preventing Jews from moving into your city because you don't like accountants. It's presumptuous, it's bigoted, and it's flat out fucking prejudiced.

Sidenote: So prejudiced, in fact, that this is how they're trying to include it into the state constitution—where the Constitution states that "no law shall be passed restraining... free expression," they want to add onto the end of it (this is verbatim) "nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or prohibit a local government from imposing... restrictions on the operations of nude dancing businesses."
Let me reiterate: Where the Constitution specifically states that the government shall not impose their beliefs on the people they represent, the city of Tualitin wants to add "except for when the government wants to impose their beliefs on the people they represent." Fucking assholes.

If I lost any of you on that comparison, let's come back for a second. I'm not saying that people who go to strip clubs do so for religious purposes (though some of them might). I'm saying that the only reason why someone would try to ban a strip club is because they have it in their fucked up little Christian heads that anyone who goes to nudey bars does so purely because they have an evil Satan voice in their heads telling them that women are to be used and subordinated, and that the patrons all fantasize about raping the girls as they dance. That is an absolute fucking insult, and borderline hate crime, against professional strippers. Just because you fucking churchies can't go five minutes talking to a little boy without ramming his dick in your mouth doesn't mean the rest of us have demons to expel.

People go to strip clubs purely for entertainment purposes. Believe it or not, it's not even sexual. Very few men (or women) get aroused when they go to a strip club. They just get tired of spending all day and night pretending that there's nothing to appreciate in the female form. It's one of the few things that crazy right-wing puritans and crazy left-wing liberals can agree on: people should be ashamed for having an interest in the female body. No, I don't want to get to know every girl that I want to see naked. Kind of like how I don't want my doctor to fix my car. They're two completely unrelated proficiencies.

So I get fucking tired of forcing my eyes up when a girl walks by. I get tired of people looking aghast at me when I check someone out and proclaim, "you're married!" Most of all, I get tired of dimwitted, bitchy women who spend 4 hours a day making themselves look good getting offended because I don't like their personalities any better now that they got a boob job. To have a place where you can walk in and look straight at a woman and think, "I want her to take her clothes off without me talking to her about her favorite movie," and lo and behold, off comes the top... well, I'd pay good money for that.

So would a lot of people. A lot of people who have no desire to associate with these women otherwise. I actually found out once in college that a stripper I'd seen a couple times went to school with me. She was actually incredibly nice, and I had some great conversations with her, but then I couldn't go to her strip club anymore because I'd feel guilty. It was too... intimate, once I knew her. So you see, I have no idea to get to know these women, let alone get intimate with them. The whole idea is that I can drop the 19th-century conventions that we're held to for one night and watch them do their thing. And you know what? The good ones enjoy it. They've worked hard on their bodies, and they get tired of having to hide them. They want to be able to just shove their implants in some guy's face and say "look at these, fucktard. You want them, don't you? You want these big titties? DON'T FUCKING TOUCH!" Then the guy thanks them and gives them a dollar.

Disgusted? Fucking deal with it.

These are people different from you. I don't fucking understand. People don't like fatty foods, so they want to close down McDonalds. People want to drive by themselves to work, so they want to shut down the bus. People like taking the bus, so they want to install toll bridges. How about we pretend that we're a country that allows you to do whatever the fuck you want to do. Hell, I remember there was a strip club in Idaho that was shut down because neighbors didn't "feel safe knowing it was there." Sharing a building with the strip club was a gun store and a head shop. What the fuck do you care what we do behind the big black door? Hell, even if you happened upon it by accident the bouncer wouldn't let you in.

Which brings me back to the politicians in Tualatin, who should all be fired. Here's the basic math: if your constituents really don't want a strip club nearby, they won't go to the strip club. They're really expensive anyway. If the strip club doesn't go out of business, it's because THE RESIDENTS OF TUALATIN WANT A FUCKING STRIP CLUB.

Don't worry, we deviants in Portland will not be making the drive down to the Twally to check out your nickel-and-dime pastie dancers. We've got clubs here that serve you a porterhouse while the stripper grinds the ketchup. We have peep shows where for five bucks you get to yell "stick your finger in it." We've got an old fuckhouse with heroine needles in the drywall that's being converted into a family restraunt, and—pay attention, now—part of their mission in remodeling is to retain the flavor of the original establishment. So no, you don't have to worry about a new strip club "attracting an undesirable element" into the city. All it will do is give the undesirable element something to do on Saturday night. And in exchange, they'll sleep in Sunday morning, instead of trying to pass legislation to shut down your church.

The History of Liberia

2009-04-22T09:34:00.001-07:00

After Jim Crow laws were passed stating that no blacks were safe in the United States, even in free states, some of the founding fathers of the U.S. (most prominently Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner) decided that black Americans needed somewhere they could really feel safe if they were freed, so why not Africa? A team of Americans , including Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay and Paul Cuffe, a Native American slave ship captain, secretly sent a ship to Africa, taking with them 33 African Americans and settled an unmapped city in West Africa called "Freetown." Over the next sixty years, slave ships going to pick up more slaves would secretly ship escaped or freed blacks back to Africa, slowly populating the secret civilization called the ACS (American Colonization Society) and helping them establish a shadow government in Africa. When the Civil War seemed inevitable in the late 1840s, many Southerners who had been part of the ACS movement started sending boats FULL of blacks over to Freeville.

When Great Britain discovered this secret colony, they made an attempt to annex it as part of the United Kingdom. They figured that the United States would be afraid to admit what they had been building and would abandon the colony, giving the UK prime coastal land in West Africa. Instead, the United States officially granted the ACS their independence and renamed them Liberia. Five states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Maryland, and the southern state of Virginia, who founded the ACS—all pitched in interest free loans to the Liberian government so they could fund an army. In nearly bankrupted the states, but they felt morally obliged to act.

In 1847, Liberia drafted their constitution and was founded as a free Republic. They renamed Freeville to "Monroeville," in honor of James Monroe, who had raised over $100,000 for the colony while he was sitting President of the United States. Though it's just as rife with conflict and war as any African country, it is still a sovereign nation, still in good standing with the Anglican world, and this year elected their first female President, in an election which was completely free of corruption, and are on their way to drafting a balanced budget.

So you tell me that American History isn't just as fascinating as European.

Blessed Economy

2009-04-20T12:23:00.000-07:00

My wife is essentially a student—she's self-teaching so that she can get licensure to work in a specialized field, so as a result she isn't employed. In a good economy, that would be a problem. In the shitheap we live in now, though, my high-end-of-average paycheck ($1k every 2 weeks), we're doing quite well. We don't shop the good stores, but every time we see a liquidation sale, we march in with a fistful of bills and walk out sitting pretty. The missus has doubled her wardrobe, and I've been scooping up all the old games and software that people have been hawking, desperate for money. We've also gotten ourselves a new HDTV, one of those digital frame thingys, and we're moving into a much bigger and better apartment that (after incentives) will end up costing us hundreds less than where we're living now, since they're desperate to get tenants of any kind.

I feel guilty, to a certain degree. I really do feel like I'm profiting off of other people's mistakes. But then, isn't that how it should work? All those pretentious fucks I knew in college kept saying to me in their most condescending voices, "you're an idiot for renting an apartment. You're throwing your money away, not buying a house." Meanwhile, 80% of their house payments went to the bank, and the bank just blew the money on nothing, and then reneg'ed on their loan, and their house depreciated by more than they paid for it. That's not even considering all the money they spent on yard improvements, sewer lines, maintenance, and all the other stuff that's built in to a rental price, but they have to pay for themselves (which doesn't improve the value of their house).

All those fucktards kept chiding me for getting an English degree while they were out getting their MBAs. Then they got a lucrative job at Washington Mutual, while I devoted myself to being a big fish in a little pond, and now they're getting laid off because their company realized they provide no actual value to their employer, while my income has increased steadily and unwaveringly by 28% a year. And because I have practically no investments in high-risk stocks (all my money is in CDs and annuities), I haven't really lost any money in this economy. And once my wife does get her license, she'll be applying for jobs almost completely unopposed, because for all those snobby little assholes who were skating through med school with 'C' grades, their parents started questioning whether it was worth it paying 6 figures on an education that their kid clearly doesn't give a fuck about. So while the health industry itself is recession-proof, and riding a wave of support from a President who wants to amp up health care, there aren't any new doctors coming out of the college circuit, and the ones who are coming out don't know shit about the actual work, they just knew it was a high-paying enterprise. So as the hospitals try to keep costs down so they'll qualify for some of that sweet, sweet government subsidy, they spend a lot more time looking at these alternative-certification doctors who really know their shit, and couldn't care less how much they spent on their education. As Keith Olbermann is fond of pointing out—the fact that he went to Cornell A&M just means he was paying $500 per class for his Cornell education instead of $3,000; the classes were all the same.

So you know what? I take it back. Fuck all you self-congratulatory blowhards. You were wrong—that's what happens when you get your life philosophy off the cover of Greedy Fucker magazine. I learned all my life lessons by living. You see, things make more sense when you find them by thinking things through.

P.S. See my new fiction blog, The New Republic, at http://web.me.com/bonwell.parker/The_New_Republic/Blog/Blog.html.

Teabagging countdown

2009-04-16T20:19:00.000-07:00

Still think news is boring? You don't watch cable:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Next starting at 1:30—

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And, finally:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

It is now that we can see the unforeseen consequences of Republicans not going to college. Otherwise, at least one of them would have known what "teabag" means.

Slick as a seal's ass

2009-04-02T09:49:00.000-07:00

This concept that our economy is struggling because of bloated bureaucracies is absurd. I work for a bureaucracy, and I can assure you that they are a 100% solution-oriented operation. Let me give you an example.

Security is so restrictive here that they spend about $1000 every month just unlocking people's accounts. Mine, for instance, locks up as a precautionary measure every day at about 4:00 because my computer automatically handshakes with a third-party vendor that I have to use for my job, and my computer isn't 100% sure they aren't trying to steal our information. Additionally, since our Internet Explorer is two generations old, it's so slow I can't even do my job with it, so I use Safari, which my computer doesn't recognize, so it locks me out from time to time.

74% of calls to IT, evidently, are people who are locked out of their computer for some reason. So the company has just released a bulletin letting people know how to solve this cost-prohibitive issue. Their solution? Stop calling in to have your computer unlocked. See how simple that is? If nobody calls in, it doesn't cost them any money to fix it! What exactly we're supposed to do with a locked computer, of course, is our problem.

Fuck Catholics

2009-03-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

Now in the news: backlash and protests, as Obama has agreed to speak at the mightiest of Catholic Institutions in America.

Thank God that Notre Dame has their storied football program, or they would be as much of a detriment to civilization as the rest of the Catholic system. Unfortunately, a couple of bible-thumping quarterbacks isn't enough if you still belong to the first anti-Christian sacreligious cult, the largest in the world, the one that didn't even wait for the Christian Church to establish before flat out discarding half the teachings that Jesus devoted (and sacrificed) his life to get out into the world.

Now the institution has invited the Baptist President of our country to speak at their commencement, as well as offer him an honorary J.D., and in exchange he will provide an intellectual debate over his controversial decision to allow federal funding for abortion and stem-cell research.

However, the student bodies of this alleged "house of higher learning" have come out strongly against education. Instead, they are pushing for the Catholic tradition set by the Apostle Luke and which reigned free in the 17th century, directly leading to the darkest time in our history and more deaths and suffering than Christianity as a whole has been able to prevent. That tradition is oppression of dissent and abolishment of thought. They have spoken, and spoken loudly, in their belief that anyone who doesn't blindly agree with their perscribed belief system, someone who considers matters of life, death, and soul to be a little complicated, even someone whose own belief system doesn't allow for the more rational position of pointing out that their own beliefs have long been disproved beyond any shadow of a doubt—someone who proposes even that minimal level of thought, as is dictated in Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Christianity, and every other philosphical system that isn't Catholicism or Islam, should be considered, is to be banned from their institution, and should not be allowed to speak to them.

The only thing Catholics have ever gotten right is that they're not going to Hell. As the world progresses forward without them, as the percentage of people who prefer reason over mythology creeps toward the majority, as the history books start to shift Dogmatic Christianity into the same category as all the other ridiculous religions of primitive humans, this superminority of our kind continue to serve as the single greatest obstacle to the survival of humankind. There are more of us who consider the Catholic Church a tragedy of history than they realize. And as their leaders become more aware of that fact, they press harder to hide their denizens from the collective thought of the rest of us, and in time, they will become so separated from the voices of reason that they will break off and shrivel away as another failed experiment in the forward progress of our kind. Homo Erectus, Habilis, Neanderthals, Catholics. Yet another addition to the list of people we'll look back at and wonder how humans could ever believe something which falls apart before their very eyes.

Believing what they want to believe.

2009-03-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

To begin with, people have to get over this preposterous notion that anything that comes from the mouth of a child has to be true. On the contrary—children spend most of their lives playing pretend. They will lie if it will get them attention. They will experiment to see what the reaction is.

Then you have extreme examples, like the one above. This is a group of hundreds of people listening to the "gospel" of a very young child. As a trained linguist, the fact that this kid has no fucking clue what he's saying is blindly obvious for more reasons than I can list, but let's start with the obvious: his body language shows that he is flat-out imitating people he has seen before. Children do not have the psychological capacity to be as passionate as this kid is about his message. No knock against the kid, it's not his fault, he doesn't have a chance.

On top of that, what twisted fucking world has a mass of adults taking cues from a young child on where we came from? How in holy hell would he know? He hasn't even hit puberty yet. He doesn't even know where he came from. For all he knows, he was born from unicorns. When I was his age, I was open to the possibility that I did come from monkeys, as in my actual parents were monkeys, and those people in the living room were just looking after me. I wasn't detached from reality; I was a normal five year old. What difference did it make to me where I actually came from?

Whoever made this video made the statement that this was child abuse. I disagree. I think that kid's having the time of his life. I'm 29 years old, and I still fantasize about preaching to a huge group of people. As far as what the kid thinks, I'm not worried... yet. Kids can believe anything when they're young, that's why we have the saying "grew out of it." Human psyche is very malleable at that age, and any "damage" done can fairly easily be undone, so long as it is within the threshold of what a child's mind can handle.

I'm more worried about the adults who are watching him. Their minds aren't as malleable. They are, in fact, beyond hope. They have been irreparably indoctrinated into this ridiculous cult, and if they were convinced tomorrow that all of this were untrue, they wouldn't be able to adjust. Their bodies and souls would be forever breached by a grey void, and they would lose purpose for anything they do. That's how the cult is designed; once you join, you're detached from the enemy for life.

Don't feel sorry for this kid. Feel sorry for the adult he will become.

Losing My Edge

2009-03-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

You know, I started this blog so that I'd have an outlet to say all the subversive, offensive shit that pops up in my head, shit that I can't say when my name's attached to it, so I can spew anonymous vile into the internet. Sadly, I don't appear to have been expelling my demons properly as of late, and there's plenty to expel.

Rather than taking out this rage right now, however, I leave you with this simple thought: if a Pro-life Hebrew has a vasectomy, doesn't he have to forgive Hitler? I mean, he's killing a hell of a lot more Jews (no pun intended) than Genocide ever did.

Spring Cleaning

2009-03-12T18:52:00.000-07:00

I could clean out my desk in five minutes, and nobody would even know I was ever here. And I'd forget, too. —Ryan "the temp" Howard

A resolution was made, by me, recently, that I would grind down and really start getting things done at work. No more piles of things that "need to be done eventually" sitting in the recesses of my desk. Whereas I would spend much of my time sitting around trying to explain to my bosses why so-and-so wanted such-and-such completed, I'd just get it done. Instead of going back and forth with my colleagues asking why they won't file the contract amendment I put in their mailbox, I would stand in their cubicles and say "what do you need for this to get completed and I will get it for you.
In one case, a client had asked to do some work for us in a state where he wasn't authorized to work. In another case, a colleague of mine didn't understand what needed to be done so she didn't do it (that was November). In another case, I never really pursued the needs of a particular client because that client had never brought in any work for us. But this was the time that they got their needs addressed. I helped client 1 get authorized to do business. I restarted the case where my colleague was sitting on it and reasssigned it to someone else. I got client 3 rolling, and put him out on the road so he could do some work for us.
Suddenly, management was all over me. Why was work being done that came in four months ago? Why aren't there any records of client 2 being addressed? Why is a processor making decisions that authorize a case that management has been discussing for a week and hasn't come to any conclusions on? Suddenly, the boss is in my space telling me I'm a "problem employee," that when one of these things come up it's just an isolated event, but they're starting to see a pattern of me making things happen. "Making things happen," the crime of all crimes.
Then, my computer starts to break.
Now, I use a significant amount of technology that my collagues don't understand. IE5 takes five minutes to load, so I download Safari, which loads instantly. Outlook doesn't index emails, so I use Desktop Search, which is instantaneous. Instead of printing everything and keeping it on my desk where it can't be searched, indexed, or trigger reminders, I save everything as PDFs and attach them to tasks (they all have to be scanned back into the computer anyway). So my boss is fuming now, and starts demanding to know why I feel I have to load up my computer with all this extra stuff and make it break.
Here's what happened: Adobe Reader poses a security risk to our computers. This affects 95% of employees, as they use Adobe Reader. I don't; I use Adobe Acrobat. Well, when they put in a patch to block this security risk, it blocked Acrobat entirely. That confused Outlook 2003 since the patch was too new, which would send panic messages to Internet Explorer, but since IE5 was rendered obsolete 3 years ago, it can't pull the patch from Microsoft Help, because Microsoft no longer supports IE5. For everyone else's computer, the computer doesn't check to see if anything's wrong. But all of my new apps suddenly started asking "what the hell are all these old apps doing here?" and the whole thing crashes.
IT can't easily fix the computer, and here's why: it's a tier 5 problem. They have to exhaust all tier 1 possibilities before they troubleshoot tier 2. They have to exhaust all tier 2 possibilities before troubleshooting tier 3. And so on. Three days I sat at my desk, my computer on the fritz, getting all the work done that I can on the new, functional applications while the 6 year-old apps fall like dominoes.
Finally, today, the whole thing crashed. My boss sternly advises me that management is going to start discussing me; if their discussion moves as fast as their talks about all my clients, that won't affect me for months. But I needed some sort of catharsis. So, while IT sits at my computer, gradually escalating my issue, I started cleaning. First, it was organizing all the letters clients have sent me. Then, I started cleaning coffee mugs. Then I started shredding old documents from resolved issues. Then I started putting my paper clips in the supply cabinet. Then I started removing my desk accessories—pen holders, staplers—and at last I take down all the decorations, from posters and calendars to cheat sheets that I've since saved as excel spreadsheets on my computer, until all that's left is a pile of work to be done and my Dell.
At 3:00 PDT, my computer was finally fixed. I sat down and started closing out the existing issues. It's pretty slow these days, so I think I can have everything done on my desk by Monday. Then, the second an issue lands on my desk, I'll use the same panicked "have to get it off my desk" strategy that I used when I was behind. When my work is caught up, I'll finally get around to indexing the department's old excel spreadsheets into one easy-to-use database.
And I'll be happy. Not because my work is done, or because I'm moving forward, or because the boss is off my back. I'll be happy because of that clean desk. It's a psychological reminder that at any time, however hard things get, I could be gone in five minutes, and everyone would forget I was ever there. And I'll forget, too.

2009-03-09T10:32:00.000-07:00

They said Obama would turn this country into a liberal haven.

They were right.

Over the weekend, on the heels of talk about nationalizing AIG and Obama's announcement that his top priority this year would be establishing a federal healthcare system, AG Holder indicated that the federal government would be decriminalizing marijuana, leaving enforcement purely to state decision, and Obama made strong statements today that the government would not only lift the ban on stem cell research, but vigorously support any new efforts to utilize the resource.

You heard 'em, America, it's free reign on morality, just like the cons warned us. We'll be stuffing zygotes in our bongs before you know it.

Let the 2012 campaign begin!

2009-02-25T10:06:00.001-08:00

Please, please, please let Bobby Jindal be the next Republican Presidential candidate. He’s charismatic, well-spoken, popular, he’s obviously interested in the position, and he is mind-bogglingly out of touch with 80% of the American people in a way that makes perfect sense to the other 20 percent. I think he would seem like the perfect candidate to someone who doesn’t have a damn clue, and he wouldn’t make any effort to appeal to moderate voters like McCain did. It would be an idiotic, classless campaign that no conservative pundit could find any way to criticize, and after they find themselves unable to garner more than 26% of the votes, they’ll give up on our country and, hopefully, leave. Africa’s a big country—they can take up the time-honored tradition of parceling out a section of the Heart of Darkness and giving it to neocons, where they get slaughtered by genocidal heroin-addled warlords.

Ahh, the idea alone puts a calm over me…

Finally, a cure

2009-02-25T09:45:00.001-08:00

The Destructive Hypocrisy of the Democratic Party

2009-02-24T09:16:00.000-08:00

The Republican Party continue to show that they are the heartless, insensitive organization that they have been for the last eight to twelve years, which is why the American people ousted them… let me tell you about the unique hypocracy of the Republican governors… Republicans’ ideas are pure tax cuts, the same tired idea that Americans rejected on November 4th, that didn’t work, that got us into this mess in the first place, that took us from a record surplus from the last Democratic administration into the deficit we’re in now… if you’re a Republican, you don’t understand that if you repeat history you’re doomed to get more of the same… but we want to work with the Repblicans; we’ve extended the hand of bipartisanship. —Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-FL

Problem Solved

2009-02-12T12:43:00.001-08:00

I have a solution for our economy. All the people who have invested in Morgan Stanley, AIG, and Bank of America get all their money back, cash, and the three companies are shut down and every executive is let go without severance. All regular employees get one year’s pay. Then the government uses the money they make from auctioning off those three banks to create jobs of real value to society.

Fuck Haleigh Cummings

2009-02-11T15:27:00.000-08:00

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

In this case, those who forget every other white trash, half-baked kidnapping scheme of some helpless little girl which ends in a national spotlight being put on people who brought their own mess upon them will find themselves worrying about some trailer trash kid on the Georgia border being used as bait in some pointless squabble that has no impact on any of us whatsoever.

How people from the civilized world keep forgetting what a useless stretch of land the area is between Ft. Lauderdale and Memphis is beyond me. I couldn’t care less about some girl getting swiped from her home in Northern Florida, even without knowing the facts. The endless fascination this country has of 5-year-old white girls borders on pedophilia.

Then it shows up on the front page of The Oregonian (because this is the most pressing issue for people literally on the opposite corner of the country) and the pieces all fall together. The dad, who was not home with his kids, who does not get along with their mom, leaves them in his trailer with his 17-year old girlfriend. The girl is taken after the trailer is broken into with the brick that they use as a door-opener, which is discovered when the teenage girlfriend (12 years older than the girl) wakes up at 3 a.m. What part of that story could possibly make me give a shit? Is there anybody who thinks this girl has a chance, anyway?

Without some sort of intervention, this five year old girl would end up dying exploding a meth lab in ten years anyway. Maybe this experience will instill some sort of character in her and she’ll become a better person than the other people in her lives because of it. Or maybe she’ll sue Quaker Oats in fifteen years because she was kidnapped while raiding the kitchenette for some instant oatmeal.

[update 3/9/09] Reflecting on the gravity and seriousness of this continuing case of a missing girl, the following are the news reports on Haleigh so far this month:

Family of Haleigh Cummings Gets Visit from Family of Tiffany Sessions

Psychic claims she watched the kidnapping of Haleigh Cummings

Video: Woman dreams Haleigh Cummings is in ‘Adison,’ Missouri

Geraldo Confronts Haleigh Cummings' Dad

So rest assured America, this case is being treated with every bit of seriousness as it should be. They may have called down the police search for this random white girl from the trailer park, but they still have the Sessions family, a psychic, some chick's weird dreams, and Geraldo on the case.

What the children can learn from A-Rod

2009-02-10T10:49:00.000-08:00

You can commit any offense, no matter how heinous, so long as you aren't caught until four years after you did it. If you stopped doing it after it gave you the success you need, you can just say you were young and stupid, and you can reap all the benefits of your unethical actions without taking any of the responsibility.

Cheaters can win, so long as they wait until after the moral statute of limitations expires to "own up" to their actions.

Hope in the Hardest of Times

2009-01-30T08:28:00.000-08:00

The following is from the Oregonian. Enjoy.

Ten minutes before it reopened Thursday night, things could have gone either way at The Zone, the site of Portland's worst mass shooting. Five days afterward, would people be too scared to return? Would the place be packed?

Outside, news cameras pointed toward the entrance. Inside, workers waited, nervous but hopeful. Healing will take time, they said. Might as well start now.
On its first night since the shooting, the club would give all proceeds to the families of the two girls killed.

At 7, they opened the doors and waited.

Five minutes later, the first customer walked in, handing over $10 instead of the scheduled $3 cover charge. "Keep the change," the teenage boy said. All night teens overpaid. Passers-by popped in to donate.
The benefit was originally planned for Jalontae Howard, 16, a Northeast Portland dancer who was shot during the melee that left seven wounded. But Thursday morning, Jalontae's mother called the club's owners. Yeah, I'll have medical bills, she told them. But I also have my son. Give the money to those who lost their daughters. Having Jalontae safe is all she needs, Dyrenda Waller said, as she surveyed where a bullet blew through her son's right ankle, breaking it in two places and possibly ruining his chances at a dance career.
She couldn't walk by the spot where shooter Erik Ayala, 24, of Milwaukie fired on the crowd. Instead, she used the back door. "I'm nervous," she said. "I didn't want to come. I had never been here before, though, you know? It actually feels pretty safe."

Other parents -- about a dozen showed up -- echoed her thoughts.

Sandy Schroll never wanted her 16-year-old daughter, Kristina, like Jalontae a student at Centennial High School, to hang out downtown. She certainly didn't want her returning to The Zone so soon.
"I thought, 'What if there's a copycat shooting?'" Schroll said.

Opening the club up to parents was a rare opportunity for them to check the place out, though, and she wanted to show support. "We actually get to see the personalities that hang out here," Schroll said. "The kids are all hugging, not cussing or acting up." Schroll looked around at more than 100 teens, dressed in Nikes, hoodies and tight, hip jeans.
"I'm the oldest one here," she said. "And I feel at home."
Jalontae, the only victim who attended the benefit, showed up at 7:45. The owners had placed a couch on stage for him. Some of the teens knew him from school. Others recognized him from years of going to the club. As Jalontae sat down and took one deep breath, they thronged to hug him.
The doctors said Wednesday he probably won't dance as he used to. He'll have a cast on for three months, and they expect he'll suffer from severe arthritis the rest of his life. "But he's strong," his mother said. "Nothing's going to stop him."

Club owner Dan Lenzen asked everyone who worked Saturday night to come up on stage. "These are your heroes," Lenzen told the crowd. As all went silent, Josh Dudley, a 21-year-old employee of The Zone, prayed for the victims. He added, "God, thank you for letting us live," and closed with a solemn "Amen."
It was time to heal. Time to dance.
-- Casey Parks; caseyparks@news.oregonian.com

The Layoffs

2009-01-29T12:49:00.001-08:00

One of my company's five campus buildings is being shut down and everyone who works in it is being laid off, regardless of job description… the President sent out an email reassuring us that is was not due to the economic crisis or lack of financial strength, but their continuing effort to decrease their bottom line to keep pricing competitive.

That’s like telling my wife that I’m not staying out late with my secretary because I’m having an affair, we’re just relying on each other for emotional and physical support.

Erik Ayala

2009-01-28T15:33:00.001-08:00

The reports on the Erik Ayala massacre in downtown Portland this week are the same as the reports of all the others. The killer was young, quiet, kept to himself. He had a history of mental problems and depression, but had been showing no signs of violence. He had no criminal record, and he was perfectly calm when he walked into the pawn shop and bought a semi-automatic pistol shortly before he turned it on a group of girls, walking down the same street I walk down every time I hit the town, just like they were doing.

There are a few things people have been clinging to as the blame for all of this. The Oregonian put in big headline letters, “fan of video games.” The Tribune was quick to point out that he was born in Mexico, though they downplay the fact that he legally entered the country and was completely assimilated. Today the media focus on how easy it was for someone with a history of mental issues to acquire a gun.

Basically, nobody gives a fuck about this kid; somewhere inside of them they’re grateful that another group of innocent bystanders was shot down in cold blood, because with all the optimism we’ve had recently, they were running out of statistics to point to in furthering their cause.
Me, I noticed the little things. The fact is, I’ve written a suicide letter in my head much like the one which was published from the kid. I’ve written the letter not because I’m suicidal, but because sometimes I’m just angry enough at someone that I want them to have my death on their conscience for a little while. Your mind goes to dark places when it’s past its pushing point.

But you can only have that much anger towards someone you love, and anyone with any empathy could never do that to someone they love. So your mind recovers, and you move on to better times. You turn to your friends, you rant to your parents, you lash out at your significant other, and they understand it’s just something you’re going through.

That’s where Erik Ayala was different. He was detached from his parents. His friends were there but unsupportive—after the incident, none of his friends even knew he was fighting depression. Erik didn’t have any loved ones, and he was just a temp—there was no one he could turn to at work. He didn’t have people who loved him. He just had anger. So he found a group of people he felt he could kill without guilt, probably to ensure that his suicide didn’t just disappear without notice, and then turned the gun on himself, punishing all the people he loved for not loving him back.

I’d like to share something from this story that affected me on a personal level. For any of you who have followed this blog, you will know that I have long faced problems being happy at work. With that in mind, I want to share with you what Erik's old employers said about him (not at the temp agency; at the place that laid him off after two years of service). They asked his old employers what they remembered of him, and this is exactly how they replied:

Erik was our top employee in terms of reaching performance standards both for production and low error rates.

That’s the bonds we have at work. That’s how people who you’ve spent 2/3 of your waking hours with remember you. They ask what someone was like whom they’d known intimately for two years, and that’s how they answer.

If you want to start asking questions about how someone can slowly collapse into homicidal depression without anyone noticing, I’d like to suggest that this is where to start looking.

All Hail the Conservatives

2009-01-13T10:14:00.000-08:00

One interesting byproduct of Obama taking office is that it tarnishes the reputation of liberals. You notice that? I certainly have. Obama’s pretty far to the left—I’d go so far to say that a majority of Americans are to the right of him ideologically, if only slightly, but because he’s a true president (lower-case), he takes more conservative opinions into consideration.

Meanwhile, liberal pundits like Maddow, Olbermann, Randi Rhodes et al are starting to look like freaks and assholes. They’ve wasted no time sharply criticizing Obama for not being critical enough. One of the people on Countdown last night went so far as to say that Obama should be lumped in with Cheney and Ashcroft as being pro-torture, because he has not vocally and unwaveringly called for their immediate arrest and detainment. I’ve heard a few liberals (they’re literally lying around on the street here) rant about how Obama’s a traitor because he’s still going to spend the bailout money on businesses instead of giving it back.

So for all of us who tend to be in the center ideologically, all these liberals who were on the same side of the spectrum as us when compared to Bush are starting to sound like a bunch of ideological dipshits, while people like Shepard Smith and Wolf Blitzer are starting to make some sense.

Les Entendres

2009-01-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

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Portland Represent!

2009-01-07T12:10:00.001-08:00

Check it y'all—Portland was represented twice in last night's Countdown:

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Obama's First Controversy

2009-01-06T09:08:00.001-08:00

Well, this is a first in my lifetime, and I mean that literally. Obama has released his first budget, for $775 billion, including $300 billion in tax cuts. The controversy? Democrats as a whole are taking credit for the budget, as it clearly is in the best interests of Democrats everywhere. Meanwhile Republicans are boasting their influence on the President-Elect, as the budget is clearly in the best interests of Republicans everywhere.

In other words, Obama hasn’t even taken office yet (he’s submitting the budget now so he can approve it in his first month in office) and the biggest problem with his first budget is that it benefits so many people that it doesn’t leave any room for partisanship.

In a Portland with no guns...

2008-12-30T08:39:00.000-08:00

Carwash incident

The Greatest Performer on Earth

2008-12-20T13:16:00.000-08:00

That 1 Guy plays at the Doug Fir on February 13th. I have recanted my story of how I first came upon That 1 Guy before, and I shall probably do so again on this blog before the show, but in the meantime, know this:

Fuck Chrysler

2008-12-20T08:41:00.000-08:00

What pisses me off about the “bailout” is that the amount of money they’re asking for is more than the profit margin of buying a car for every adult in the United States. So, even if EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US had bought a brand new American vehicle, it wouldn’t be enough for them to pay the bills, and they should still be in existence… why? To hell with "bankruptcy," Chrysler should just shut the fuck down. Ford can stay, they should just fire every single one of their managers, and then Ford and GM should be forced to make an IPO. Instead of "bailing out" the auto industry, the government should be able to just buy $75 worth of stock and give it to the people. It could just be sent in the mail based off our income taxes.

Fuck Detroit. It’s not like there were IT people fifty years ago. New industries do emerge.

Those moments

2008-12-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

There is only one thing greater than that moment: you're working away, just listening to music in the background. This particular playlist is your "upbeat" playlist; the one you play towards the end of a Friday, to give you the energy to keep working until 5:00 at your dead-end job.

Then That Song comes on. It could be one of several, but at that moment it feels like the only song ever written. Your plan to keep working by listening to music backfires in the most wonderful way—you're so captivated by your music, you can't think of anything else. There's nothing in the world that can pull you away from the feeling the song gives you. These songs are usually the "singles" on an album—really catchy, uplifting songs. The ones where you buy the whole album, and it's pretty good, but then that one song plays, the anamoly, that incredible gem that the songwriters themselves couldn't conjecture how the song came to be. Maybe the muses are real, if for only that one song. Finding that song, especially after you've forgotten it, buried deep in your playlist... hearing that song again for the first time is hands down the second-greatest feeling a person could possibly have.

The greatest feeling in the world is when it's a song you wrote.

What the fuck am I doing here? What possible value does this job have to culture? What contribution am I making to anyone in the world by typing addresses into a computer? What strides has our civilization made, in having companies whose sole purpose is to give the richest 5% (that's my client base) a little extra luxury that they don't even need? Could that possibly be more valuable than sharing songs like this with the world?

Some songs I write purely for myself. Introspective songs that mean something personal, something special, to me. This isn't one of those songs. This is a song I pored over for 2½ years, adjusting, altering, stealing from other songs, to make the perfect beast. It's a process I've only gone through 3 or 4 times in my life; most of my songs are written in an afternoon, and only slightly modified over the years. This was an intentional effort, with the express purpose of making something wonderful.

For what? For me? How is that of any value? Even if I tried getting the song out to the world, it would never reach open ears, drowned out by the literally millions of cheap one-off efforts from high school kids who have been deluded into thinking that all you have to do to make it in the music world is to be more persistent and ornery than everyone else. People get so soured to new music that by their 24th birthday, they call it a lifetime and spend the next 50 years listening to all the songs they remember from their youth. They won't open up to new songs. And for the under-24 crowd... well, even if they did still listen to rock music, how would they know that I'm not just another pushy obnoxious kid with a guitar, trying to force myself on them like a pubescent teen in eyeshot of a D cup? One of the most common compliments I get from people is "this is really good... I'm surprised!" The surprise comes from the presumption that it will be terrible, and they listen to it begrudgingly because they figure I won't leave them alone unless I do.

Well, you know what? I'll tell you right now that I have a handful of songs, maybe 5 or 6, that are fucking wonderful. I don't just think so, you think so. You just don't know it. And if you think you're open to listening to them, that you'll give them a shot, well... fuck you. My culture doesn't want me, so I don't want my culture. You can continue your life with your soul a little emptier than mine. Just writing this blog has pissed me off, but I'll be over it in 5 minutes and 13 seconds.

I have the remedy for a darkened soul.

I couldn't have put it better myself

2008-12-19T10:22:00.001-08:00

And, therefore, won't.

Special Comment

2008-12-17T10:40:00.000-08:00

Olbermann's special comment last night was his most concise ever. Yet, it said just as much as most of his do. For those of you who don't know, Olbermann is fairly famous for his long, soaring diatribes at the end of his show. See the comment he makes in this video, from the 1:15 mark until the end:

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Remember job loyalty?

2008-12-16T12:54:00.001-08:00

I remember when I first started in the job market, one thing people would always say is to stick with one job for a few years. If you switch jobs to often, companies will consider you a "job hopper," i.e. you don't have sufficient job loyalty.

A friend of mine just applied for an internal job transfer about three weeks ago—they chose him for the position, then laid the position off while he was still in his two weeks notice at his old position. The only people who knew he’d gotten the new job were his current boss and prospective boss. Consequently, he’s just keeping his old position as if nothing had happened. So the only thing that was influenced by the whole process was the dropping of his morale.

Sadly, that’s not the first time I’ve heard of that happening (and not just at my company). Another friend of mine had a stable job once, then was hired into a better job somewhere else, and was laid off within weeks of taking the new job. They still hadn’t filled her old position, but she had officially left the company. She ended up having to apply for her old job back, just a week after leaving. She got it back, but what a humiliating experience.

This is why you never see “job loyalty” in this day and age. It’s an unrequited relationship. Maybe if all these companies that are going under really want to blame the job hoppers, or unions, or employees in general for all their problems, they should treat their employees with respect to begin with, and give employees a reason to help the company out.

My job loyalty reaches as far as my next paycheck, and it's not because I don't care. It's because I do care, and because I pay attention to how I'm treated as an employee. Once in a while there's a job out there where somebody goes to work and provides a service, and their employer compensates them for their time. They don't necessarily "love what they do," they just do it and do it well so they can be appreciated. The more common relationship, though, is that a company needs an ass in the chair so they can convincingly charge their clients as much as they do, and they're bribing me not to vacate that chair while anyone is watching.

Our exiting music at the wedding.

2008-12-14T11:45:00.001-08:00

We're still America

2008-12-11T14:07:00.001-08:00

Apologies to Management

2008-12-10T14:44:00.001-08:00

Management at my company hates me for being likeable. Many of them are my friends. My proudest moment was when someone said to the director “that guy is really, really smart, isn’t he?” to which she replied somewhat ironically, “yeah, we’re trying to rein that in.” She has since quit, but her replacement feels the same way about me. As does my new supervisor, who has often invited me out for drinks.
Earlier this week, management had a closed-door meeting discussing the possibility of requiring employees to work over Christmas vacation. Most employees didn’t pick up on that message, but I know how to read people, and I knew it was a consideration. I sent an email to the entire department, proactively warning of the dangers of making such a request, and at the very least, if the option is on the table, to come out and say it now, instead of dropping it on people the week of Christmas.
As it well should, the email caused an instant panic. Many of the more resigned employees laughed it off— not because they didn’t think it would happen, but that they would expect no better than to have Christmas cancelled. The newer employees started looking for the signs that it was an option, and started seeing them.

My boss called a meeting with me.

He started the meeting with explicit instructions: this meeting was purely for documentation purposes, to record that I had been made aware of the company’s email etiquette policy. He listed the reasons why the email was not appropriate. He asked me, as he is bureaucratically required to do, what my side of the story was. I gave it to him, he wrote down his notes, and then gave the response that the director had already fed him to give. I pushed back, pushing him to tell me outright if cancelling Christmas was being considered, and he replied, “that’s a fair question, I’m just saying that’s a question that you relay to me, not replying to the whole team.”
“Well, I think we’ve resolved the communication issue. I will parlay all grievances to you directly. I’m giving you one now– I’m not speaking for myself; I’m telling you as management, our department can not afford to rely on employees coming in on Christmas.”
“That’s a valid concern,” he reiterates, “I just want you to understand that you need to bring these to my attention, and not to the team.”

I really like the guy. I specifically asked to work with him. But this isn’t personal. This is me, the employee, fully aware that what I tell him is going on record. I say it again, as my concern had not been addressed.
“I am not saying this in my own defense, nor as an individual employee. I’m asking on the behalf of the team, has the planning been put into action that if we do not provide the results you need, that it will be demanded that we work over the holidays?”

He looked down at the table, mumbling almost incomprehensibly, “okay, it’s just how you communicate it.”

He looks up at me, begging me with his eyes not to do this to him. The meeting was a policy-mandated reprimand, not him criticizing me personally. But I'm not attacking him personally either; I'm attacking management. I just wait for a response. Finally, he meekly closes his book and says, “okay, I’ll send you a write-up of our meeting for the records,” and stands up.

Sorry Chris, it wasn’t personal. For what its worth, I’ve stood up against nearly every authority figure in our department and never once reached an accord. I understand why. The fact is, they’re just here because it’s a living. Words matter, and when I criticize management, it hurts.

He made it very clear how much it hurt for the director to read my email, outright asking her, “are you planning on taking away Christmas?” She never wanted to be that person, and still doesn’t. He never wanted to be the guy on his side of the table, reprimanding someone for standing up for what he thought was right. But he is the guy on the other side of the table.

His job as a supervisor is to keep me quiet, and I respect that. My job is to speak out, and I take pride in my job.

Campaigning for Change

2008-12-04T10:29:00.000-08:00

The man makes a good point:

Remember in 2000, I was the one who campaigned for change. I campaigned for change when I was running for governor of Texas. The only time I didn’t campaign for change was when I was running for re-election.
–George W. Bush

Fuck this

2008-12-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

As this day is coming to an end, do you know what occurs to me? I would get 4x as much work done, at least, if I worked from home, or even from a Starbucks. Even if every other aspect was the same—I still had to interact with my colleagues (by email, IM or phone), I still got the same amount of inquiries from clients, everything else the same, I can tell you that this job sucks the productivity out of me. This morning, I was absolutely juiced to get some work done. I was seriously rolling. Then, at 9:00, I was pulled away for a one hour meeting that had three minutes of information and 57 minutes of people whining. I even warned my supervisor that I had a full head of steam and was afraid the meeting would have a serious deflating effect.

Then, as I started rolling again, I was interrupted by the QA folks who wanted me to give them a report of information they already had, in a format I don’t usually use, so I had to sit and do stuff that had nothing to do with my job, typing out information I already had somewhere else. By then, I only had a half hour or so to do any real work before my mandated lunch break.

When I got back from lunch, I was deluged with a bunch of trivial, two or three minute interruptions that were in no way related to my work (they were solving problems created by my coworkers). Not only did I have to fix the problems, but I had to go over to my colleagues’ desks and listen to them explain to me for ten minutes why it was that they weren’t going to fix it themselves. Not only am I not a supervisor, but some of those colleagues are my superiors. Unfortunately, my supervisors don’t believe in doing any supervising themselves; instead, they just have us type up reports explaining how it is we’re doing their jobs.

Last, but not least, my ex-supervisor kept interrupting me asking me how I was doing. I said fine, and tried to get back to work, but she started moping about how she wasn’t important anymore, now that I have a new supervisor. Meanwhile, my new supervisor, the one who had coffee with me and talked to me about how I had more potential than just being a processor, has been denying every request I have submitted to attend conferences and meetings to help make things more efficient and sustainable, saying it was more important that I was at my desk entering addresses.

Now I feel completely sapped. I barely have the energy to return to work. Worst of all, I have the distinct memory of how I felt six hours ago, rearing to get things done, and the knowledge that the energy would still be in me if I had been actually working all day instead of dealing with all of the above. As it is, I’ve barely gotten anything done today, and now I don’t want to.

Maybe it's actually a spaceship!

2008-11-25T12:47:00.001-08:00

"My boyfriend is lying to me."

2008-11-21T08:50:00.000-08:00

CHICK: “I need advice. My boyfriend is lying to me.”
ME: “How so?”
CHICK: “Okay, so a couple days ago, we went out, and everything was cool, and he was saying how much he liked being with me, right? But then the next day he does not call me once while I’m at work. Then after work, I call him, and I try to be all nice and ask him what’s going on, if he’s mad at me, and he says no. So I say, “okay, if you’re not mad, let’s hang out,” but he says he’s already got plans to hang out with my friend from Vancouver and her boyfriend, who I hate. So I ask, “where are you going to hang out?” and he says “probably Vancouver.” So I just stay at home while he’s out with his friends. THEN, last night he comes over, and we’re hanging out, and in the couch cushions I find a receipt for the Marathon, which is like two blocks from my house. FROM THE NIGHT BEFORE. So I confront him on it, and he makes up this excuse, like, “oh, well I went out to see them in Vancouver and then we decided to go down to the Marathon.””
ME: “Sounds like a viable situation.”
CHICK: “So he lied to me.”
ME: “Sounds like he’s telling the truth to me.”
CHICK: “He lied by not telling me where he was.”
ME: (pause) “You know, this sounds like a textbook case of smothering.”
CHICK: “What do you mean?”
ME: “Well, he’s made an effort to say how much he enjoys spending time with you, and you still get mad at him if he doesn’t check in with you at least once every eight hours, and then you appear to have your friend doing spy work on him…”
CHICK: “What friend!? Spy work?”
ME: “Did you show him the Marathon receipt?”
CHICK: “What? No, of course not, I threw it away as soon as I saw it, I was so angry.”
ME: “Did you tell him you saw the receipt?”
CHICK: “Of course!”
ME: “So you’re mad that he is ‘lying to you’ after he had been totally straightforward with you, and amazingly patient with you giving him the third degree, and meanwhile you’re blatantly lying to him, claiming that you just happened to find a receipt in your couch cushions of a place he had been when he was wearing different clothes, when it seems perfectly obvious that you grilled your friend, with whom he was at the Marathon, about where he was and what he was doing.”
CHICK: “Well, he isn’t exactly trustworthy.”
ME: “How so?”
CHICK: “Like I told you, he doesn’t tell me where he is, and for all I know he could be out with his ex-girlfriend.”
ME: “What would possibly make you think that?”
CHICK: “I know he calls her. I checked the call history on his cell phone.”

This is why they lost the war

2008-11-20T08:26:00.001-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3477293/Brothel-offers-free-entry-to-men-who-have-its-name-tattooed-on-their-arm.html

at 2:49

2008-11-14T16:12:00.000-08:00

New Pet Peeve

2008-11-14T11:21:00.000-08:00

I guess this never came up before because it was beyond my imagination that someone would do this, but I'm seeing it often enough at work for me to call it out: people who write an email, but instead of sending it, print it out and fax it.

They must believe that this is a more secure fashion of sending emails. I will concede that ten years ago, there were problems with emails being intercepted, and as recently as two weeks ago, Sarah Palin's emails were broadcast over the web, but that was because she used Yahoo Mail and had a really easy password to guess. Technology has done some good things recently, and although email is still not secure, it's just as safe as mail, or fax, or telephone. But that's not what bothers me.

What really bothers me is how mind-blowingly wasteful this is. The only waste of resources I can accept from people is when the way they're doing it is easier than the more efficient option. I never like going out of my way to be more sustainable. Ever. I do it because I have to. But to type something into a program specifically designed to communicate without paper, then to print it, especially when most email programs have a built-in fax option, is ludicrous. It's actually a huge inconvenience to type something, print it, then submit it electronically. Especially since most peoples' fax machines are their scanners. There's something inherently and fundementally wrong about that.

Also, it's not for nothing that emails are searchable, modifiable, resizeable, and can be manipulated, read and archived by computers. When you print it out and fax it, all of that functionality is lost. And when we get these "printed emails," they are always requests for something to be entered into our computers. Hey jackwad—you already did the computer part for us, why not just pass it along? Selfish fucking prick.

Linguistics and mid-management

2008-11-11T16:36:00.000-08:00

ME: “Boy, my boss is dumb.”
ME: “How dumb is she?”
ME: “She heard me sneeze, and sent me an IM that said ‘kazoontite.’”
ME: “Hmmm, that’s not very funny.”
ME: “Oh, it wasn’t a joke. My boss actually thinks it’s spelled ‘kazoontite.’ I replied that I didn’t know what she was saying, and she confusedly explained to me that that is what you say after someone sneezes.”
ME: “Oh. Oh dear.”
ME: “Yeah. I had to cover my tracks for implying she was an idiot by saying ‘Oh, I didn’t realize it was a reply to my sneeze.’”
ME: “Well, thank God you’re witty enough to still convince your boss that you’re dumber than her.”
ME: (sound of blowing brains out)

2008-11-11T09:25:00.001-08:00

The election's over. What now?

2008-11-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

Hope Isn't Supposed to be Real

2008-11-05T10:14:00.000-08:00

I will just tell you, that sitting in a bar full of Portlanders, from ages 21 to 45, I have never seen anything like the moment when the CNN graphic came on the screen saying “Barack Obama, President-Elect.” People who have been voting since Nixon have said that this was the first time in their adult lives that it had even occurred to them that the government could be a force for good, and not an obstacle to overcome. Even when Obama had 230 votes with the polls still open in the 81-electorate West Coast, there was not a single person who was presuming victory for Obama. They kept saying that “theoretically,” he could win the election with just California reporting. It just seemed so obvious that over the span of the last eight years, and especially with 2004 in mind, everyone was just used to the bad news coming at the 11th hour.

Every time I look online at the news today, it’s still there: Barack Obama is going to be our President. I’m only 29 years old—I don’t have any experience having faith in our country. Having an Obama-Biden ticket take four hundred electoral votes isn’t something that really happens, it something we fantasize about over Thanksgiving break, of a world worth living in that might have, in another universe, actually existed.

I’ve got a new universe to get used to.

2008-11-05T09:32:00.000-08:00

My final plea

2008-11-03T12:55:00.001-08:00

As the election season finally draws to a close, let’s take one last look back at what we have seen.

This election has, in many ways, drawn Americans further apart from each other. Supporters of the conservative movement have been very vocal in their fear and mistrust of their liberal counterparts. Beliefs of liberal supporters, while more subdued in the statements of their opinions, are in many cases no less extreme.

Liberal-leaning Bill Ayers’ questionable history with this country has been well covered. Palin has bluntly referred to him as a terrorist. She has also referred to the pockets of this nation who agreed with her as “the real America,” implying that any part of the country who disagrees with her is fake America. Nancy Pfotenhauer mirrored this sentiment when she referred to “real Virginia.” With her husband the presumptive candidate of the favored party for President, Michelle Obama was finally proud of her country, implying that she had not been for the 26 adult years prior. In response, Michele Bachmann opined that the Obamas could be considered “anti-American.” Some conservatives outright consider Obama himself a terrorist. Frank Schaeffer, of the liberal Huffington Post, has stated in no unclear terms that “McCain is a threat to America.” And finally, Palin invoked the almighty Bill of Rights just this Friday by saying that the First Amendment itself could be in danger if she continues to be criticized for the statements she has made.

But the First Amendment, in fact, is what has made these past months possible. What sets America apart from any country which came before it, and many which have come since, is the foundational basis that who is right or wrong is irrelevant. When a civilization deems one group the authoritative source, any corrosion of that group defiles the entire nation it represents. It doesn’t matter, then, whether McCain really is a threat to America, or where Obama supporters’ patriotism lies. What is important is that all sides express their views and allow the people to decide.

Unfortunately, there are even those who are trying to suppress that allowance. However, both sides have aggressively worked to prevent voter fraud and suppression from rearing their ugly head in any significant way. Efforts like those in Virginia telling Democrats to vote on the 5th, when their ballots will be worthless, have been quickly extinguished. Conservative governor Charlie Crist quickly worked to extend voting hours in Florida, even though all signs indicate that the move benefitted Barack Obama.

So we can all brush aside these ideas of fake or anti-Americans. This election has had a profound effect on many people. At least one quarter of Americans will feel betrayed, ignored, and possibly even rejected by their country this Tuesday. Yet all of this ugliness is symptomatic of what makes this country great: that we are allowed to say what we think, and exercise our Constitutional right to vote based on those thoughts.

The only truly un-American thing to do at this point is to waive that right.

2008-10-29T11:05:00.001-07:00

Fox News Gives Me Hope

2008-10-28T22:17:00.000-07:00

I know a lot of people are getting absolutely sick and tired of this election and all the ugliness, but I've seen the ugliness of this underbelly of America for years, and I find a lot of hope and inspiration in the fact that as it rears its ugly head, America is banding together to fight it. So I'm not passing these on as ugliness, but as optimism.

That said, Joe The Plumber was quoted today as saying that an Obama Presidency would mean the death of the State of Israel. The comment was explicitly defended by a McCain spokesman, stating that this showed the perception of the American people, proof positive that we can't trust Obama.

Fox News' anchorman is Shepard Smith, their top newscaster and an right-wing loyalist who has staunchly defended both McCain and Palin, and taken great effort to spin everything they say in their favor. I want to share with you a direct quote, on air, from Shepard Smith, at 12:50pm today:

"I just want to make this 100% perfectly clear: Barack Obama has said repeatedly, and demonstrated repeatedly, that Israel will always be a friend of the United States. No matter what happens, once he becomes President of the United States... the rest of it... some things... it just gets frightening sometimes."

At that point, he hung his head in remorse, and cut to commercial.

I see that as hope.

Mature as I may be

2008-10-28T16:06:00.000-07:00

None of the memories from my teenage years seem unappealing to me. I would have no problem sitting in the back of my friend's truck, listening to punk music, driving down the road to a kegger where we would take acid and watch Teletubbies. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would make more mistakes the second time around.

State of Modern Journalism

2008-10-23T08:47:00.001-07:00

JOURNALIST: “How can Palin still be the champion of Joe Six-pack when she spent $150,000 on clothes in the last month so that she’d be pretty enough to be electable?
PALIN SPOKESMAN: “Oh, now that’s just taken out of context. See, after we’ve won the election, she’s going to give all those clothes away.”
JOURNALIST: “Oh! Well, that’s just charitable.”

Ed Murrow is rolling in his grave.

I am not making this up

2008-10-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

One of the assigned responsibilities of our “tier one,” as she is called, is maintaining printer supplies and such. I walk up to the printer to print off one page, and she’s just staring blankly at the printer. She looks at me and asks, “did you print something?”

“Not yet,” I reply. “My job’s in queue.”

“Well, it’s not working for some reason,” she says. I look at the screen on the printer and >TONER EMPTY: REPLACE CARTRIDGE< is blinking. So I point out that there’s no toner in the printer. “I see that,” she says as she rolls her eyes, “I didn’t expect that that would stop it from printing!”

“Yep,” I say. “It can’t print without any ink.”

“Well, the toner cartridges are right over there,” she points, and walks away. I’m wearing all white today, but I need that printout, so I grab the toner and carefully replace it (we have one of those old printers that blow out a plume of toner whenever it’s replaced). I close up the printer and print the queue.

My supervisor walks up and looks at the printer. “Oh,” she says, “did someone get this working again?”

I shrug, “we just needed to replace the toner, so I swapped it out.”

She laughs. “Yeah, I saw that it said replace cartridge. I asked J.J. to do it, but he didn’t know how, and I don’t know how. I figure there had to be instructions somewhere.”

I look at her, trying not to make any sort of judgmental face. “You just swap it out from the toner tray.

She rolls her eyes, “well, I know that. I know that the toner goes in this tray right here—” she says as she opens it while it’s printing, causing a loud XKKRYNGH sound as seven sheets of paper get jammed up inside. “Whoops,” she says. “I’ll go get J.J. and see if he knows how to fix it.”

Side note: J.J. is our accountant. He is not our tier one.

I volunteer to un-jam the printer, and I calmly open it out and start weeding out all the jammed paper. At this point, the tier one comes back in and sees me pulling things out of the printer. She’s visibly upset. “I already called the service guy,” she says, “exactly so this doesn’t happen. You shouldn’t be trying to swap out the toner yourself.”

“The toner wasn’t the problem,” I say. “We just got a paper jam. It’s easy to fix.” I pull out the last piece of paper, close up the printer, and re-send the queue. I grab the one page of paper that I need, while the other 50 print back out, and I leave.

I pass J.J. on my way out of the printer room. I hear him talking to my supervisor behind me. “Oh,” he says, “did you get the toner cartridge replaced?”

“Yeah, Robert did it,” the supervisor replied. “I guess you just have to put it on this tray here—” XKKRYNGH!!!

So now the printer’s “out of order.” I’ll pull out the paper next time I need to print something. Which will probably be Wednesday.

On the other hand, we do have two printers…

There were good moments in the last 8 years

2008-10-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

Now we know

2008-10-16T11:16:00.001-07:00

Of all the goofy post-debate polls, there were two which I think were the most telling: 28 percent who thought that McCain won the debate, and 28 percent who said that Ayers mattered “a great deal” in their decision. I think it’s clearly obvious that the Ayers thing is absolutely ludicrous to anyone who has a thought in their head. The only people who would say it mattered to them would be obedient neocon loyalists. They would also be the only people to say that McCain made any sense at all in the debate last night (I’m really not sure what’s happened to him; he appears to have been brainwashed). He was an absolute buffoon who made no sense and was unable to respond to anything Obama said. He was very temperamental and outright rude, and in a roundabout way said he was proud of the people at his rally who were calling out to kill Obama. So we can now determine the exact percentage of people who are blindly following McCain to the ends of the Earth: 28%. Now the question is what exactly the other 14% who have said they’ll vote for him are thinking.

"Mafia" is just so... Italian

2008-10-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Besides which, they're virtually extinct in the U.S. (thanks in part to a Mr. Barack Obama). I believe there is a new syndicate being born. You can see the planted seeds in the crowds that amass for Sarah Palin's speeches. What originally seemed a dry, politically-motivated choice for veep may have given emergence to a new, all-American collective. All the elements are there. They do not consider themselves criminals– they see themselves as the last scion of their cause, the great hope to reveal a great new civilization which has peeked out its head in the last 20 years and now has the promise of being realized.

Time will tell (four weeks of time, specifically) whether this syndicate will come to form, but I believe that Obama's election could serve as the great catalyst to make them happen, and their coming out party will be January of 2009. Stay tuned...

How I will win the presidency

2008-10-08T14:41:00.000-07:00

When I run for President in, oh, I don't know, 2024, I can tell you exactly how I will win the presidency, in two sentences. I will first give you a guarantee that the tactic will not be tried before then, it will not be proposed by a single advisor, and not only will the press find it brilliant but the people will be drawn to me and will vote for me in drove for this tactic alone. My opponent will call it a brazen parlor trick, and he will lose.

I will hold rallies and town hall meetings with my party. In addition, I will hold public town hall meetings, very loosely organized (think a college Q&A), where the people invited will be my opponents constituency.

That's all there is to it. Endure their tirades for an hour, reply when I deem it necessary, and I guarantee you that a sufficient number of them will say to themselves, "I may not agree with him, but he's listening to us." It will work.

See you in 2024.

I will answer the call to arms

2008-10-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

There's something different about this campaign. Mud-slinging, smearing, and rhetoric have been around for centuries. People like Sarah Palin have been around since the start of democracy 2500 years ago. But there's something different about the followers.

McCain can fuck himself. His time is over. But Sarah Palin is building her own following. Her speeches are lined with hatred, intolerance, scornful mockery. As she makes speeches tying the Democratic party to terrorism, her followers literally call out for their blood. They can't even refer to Barack Obama by his actual name, instead using customized epithets and thinly-veiled hate speech. They seem to believe that they're the majority, that they have control of the United States. They have echoed the rallying cry that planted the initial seed in extremist Islam, Naziism, and the genocidal assaults in Darfur: our enemies are a threat to our very existence. The mere presence of a Liberal is a threat to my well being.

We're so confident that the United States is the great beacon of hope that we refuse to see what is happening. They're starting a war.

Supporters of the Republican ticket had their votes cast before they even knew who was running. They started the campaigns advertising how liberals threaten their very existence back in 2004. They're gathering on chat boards, spewing hatred and intolerance towards their fellow Americans using many of the same words that the South used when describing blacks in defense of the slave trade.

We are no longer one nation.

This new era, which can be traced to the war between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1996, is beyond the breaking point. The only way that we can be a united nation again is the eradication of the other side. Either the conservatives will mandate that all Americans think like them, the conservatives will self destruct, the liberals will threated to secede, the liberals will be driven into bankruptcy with the spoils going to the super-rich conservatives, or there will be revolt.

I will fight to protect my way of life from anyone who threatens it. For now, I am protected by living in the Pacific Northwest, who (with the exception of the collapse of WaMu) have been largely unaffected by this brewing war. But I am a liberal. I hold no grudge against those with conservative opinions or lifestyles, but The Conservatives—this new tribe, borne from the taste of sheer power given to them since 9/11—are traitors to the United States, and for the first time as an American I have seen a threat that inspires me to defend my country from a foreign power.

Any man, woman, or child who joins this new army, the army of Mavericks, is my enemy.

The seed has been planted for the second civil war

2008-10-05T23:08:00.001-07:00

You may know about Rob Ayers. Ayers is a Chicago activist who Obama worked with in his early years as a state senator, in an effort to get charitable funding for a philanthropic effort. When Obama ran for President, someone dug up that Ayers was associated with a radical militia group in the 60's and was arrested at one point for a conspired bombing. When Obama found out about this, he disavowed Ayers and reassured everyone that he was only involved with Ayers on the most superficial level. It came up once during a primary debate, and all the candidates agreed it was a non-issue.

Well, Palin found out about it this morning. There was a New York Times article chronicling some of Obama's obstacles in the campaign, and it mentioned Ayers. That morning, Palin made a speech to a group of supporters. Here is her exact words: "This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America. We see America as the greatest force for good in this world... Our opponent though, is someone who sees America it seems as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

She then made the reference two more times in just one day, each time using the phrase "palling around with terrorists."

Now, aside from that comment making absolutely no sense, and is a ridiculous leap to say that because Obama knows someone who was a domestic terrorist that he thinks America is not a force for good, here is what she actually read: "Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama, who together served on education boards in Chicago years ago... A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.'"

The New York Times, along with AP, immediately launched a response to Palin, stating that her accusation was deliberately misleading, and that The New York Times took great care not to say he was palling around with Ayers, quite on the contrary, and there was absolutely no reason why Obama would have known Ayers' past, which makes the statement that Obama was involved with Ayers because Ayers was a terrorist completely absurd.

Palin was asked for response. Her statement: "The Associated Press is wrong."

The McCain campaign has already produced a TV ad around Ayers and released it to the TV stations to air in a few weeks. The campaign manager has defended the move and Palin's statements.

What a fucking cunt

2008-10-03T16:58:00.001-07:00

Palin said today that the reason why she sounded like such an idiot with the Couric interviews is because Couric wasn't asking the questions she was prepared to answer. I guess when you only talk to Fox News, you actually believe that's what journalists do? What a twat. And to rise to the level of this dumb whore actually offending me, she actually tries turning it around on Katie Couric, saying that it just showed she was "outside the media elite," so she doesn't know how to respond to those hoity-toity news people who know... stuff. So if you came away thinking that Katie Couric is more suited to being President than some random Alaskan bimbo beauty queen, you must be one of those "elitists" who think that the leader of our country is supposed to know something. Anything. Like, more than one Supreme Court case (since she'd be choosing the judges). At least one news magazine (since the executive branch's main role is to be the reactionary branch). One instance of ever having done anything of value to... oh, fuck it. Anyone who doesn't believe by now that this bitch should never be allowed to leave Wassila unless she's wearing a bicycle helmet should go live in a fucking igloo and hunt moose, and give us back our country instead of running it in to the fucking ground. The U.S. is becoming the next Phonecia. Where's Phonecia, you ask? Exactly.

I'm sorry, is it sexist to use every derogatory feminine term I could think of in this rant? I'm just defending Katie Couric, a poor, defenseless woman who is being heartlessly attacked by a mysogenist yokel hockey moose-hunting neo-Christian retard. See I can say gender-neutral things about her, too.

Thoughts on the Debate

2008-10-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

Well, we were right on the media appraisal of the debate. They were very impressed that Palin made it ninety minutes without peeing herself. But I could only find one article that even mildly suggested that Palin was in any way worthy to share the stage with Biden, with the following sentence:

"Biden was expected to score. Palin looked like a teacher who had won a contest to debate a senator, and for a moment, was winning."

Impressive. In other words, She was very cute and very impressive trying to be a real politician, but she didn't have anyone fooled for a minute. There were also a lot of people saying that while everyone was paying attention to whether Palin would make a fool of herself, but managed to give a respectable appearance by completely ignoring anything the moderator said and obediently sticking to the talking points she spent all week memorizing, a lot of the real political woks were watching Biden just intently to see if he would make his trademark gaffs. Instead, he ended up looking like the most presidential person to take the stage thus far, including McCain and Obama. He was respectful, passionate, consistent, honest, aggressive, succinct (whaaaaa...?), and most of all, right.

The media are trying desperately to show both sides of the issue, but the fact is, Obama's campaign was helped greatly by the VP debate, and while Palin didn't hurt McCain's campaign (not right away, we'll see what they say in a couple days after watching it and analyzing it), she definitely didn't help it. I don't think anyone... ANYONE... is even considering McCain a contender anymore. They're just being polite to the old war hero and the nice hockey mom for trying, and giving them a "participant" ribbon and a pat on the back.

A can do anything with my life

2008-10-01T14:01:00.001-07:00

You know what I've been doing with it thus far? Making excuses. That's why I am where I am now. Hell, I'm at work now and I'm not even working. I'm blogging. And it's not my break. Which is why I'm the least productive employee in my department. And least accurate. Quite a change from the prodigy I enjoyed being for most of the last 25 years.

So... now what?

Can you tell the difference?

2008-09-29T16:32:00.000-07:00

I saw an interview last week, and I thought it was a rerun, because it looked so familiar. Then today I put my finger on it. Can you tell the difference between these two interviews? I sure can't:

Welcome to entry #100!

2008-09-24T21:53:00.001-07:00

So, I'm playing Dance Dance Revolution in my apartment, and it occurs to me the problem with my job: I can't be perfect at anything.

I'm playing the game at a very respectable level (difficulty 6), and even occasionally stumbling upon a level 7, and I'm actually doing really well. Not passing the levels, mind you, but keeping pace to be sure. Then I pop my knee which makes my leg a little sore doing the really tough ones, but I set a goal for myself (700 calories) and by God, I'm going to keep it, so I just do some easy levels. I figure, this will be a nice cool-off period before I call it a night.

Plus, I've never seen the screen when you get a perfect score. So, since I can easily keep up with level 6, I do a couple level 3 songs—ones so easy, they verge on boring. And you know what? Not once did I get a perfect score. I can hit a 100-combo on fast speed no sweat, but I do a comfortably-paced song with only 80 steps and I will screw one up, guaranteed.

This is the exact same thing that I keep getting in trouble for at work. I am "above expectations" in every single category except one: accuracy. In accuracy, I still do very well (92%), but according to the job detail, you have to be 100% accurate. You're allowed a 98% average every three months, to allow for the occasional slip (that comes out to 3/4 of an error per month). I have never hit 98%, let alone made the average.

I can't be perfect. I've never been perfect at anything. I've never sung a song and gotten every word, even if I'm reading the lyrics while I do it. I've never played a song without missing a note. I've never typed a letter without a typo or mistype (which I have to pick up with a proofread). The only true 100% grade I ever got in school was when I was taking the Social Studies GED, in my second year of college, and that was entirely by luck; on every other test, I missed exactly one question.

This isn't me complaining or self-deprecating. I'm very, very good at a lot of things. In fact, there are tons of things which I can do and only make one mistake every time. But I am never perfect.

This month at work, I've made special arrangements to game the system; i.e. get a "perfect" score, not by avoiding any mistakes, but by guiding QA to the ones without any mistakes in them. Now, you may ask, if I know what QA is going to look at, why don't I just fix the mistakes that they would have found before they see them? And if you ask that question, you obviously missed my point with this blog.

Don't beat yourself up over it, though. We all make mistakes.

Wanna buy an insurance company?

2008-09-17T11:12:00.001-07:00

AIG, the second largest public insurance company, is selling itself off for parts. The Feds bought 80% of their stocks for $85 billion, which AIG immediately lent to itself, giving it $170 billion to work with (I'm not really sure how that's not fraudulent), and are now paying something like 30% interest on the loan, so they said they need to sell off their services. So they've put up their aviation department, casualty insurance, life insurance, and property insurance departments up for sale, along with a few smaller business units, which they said they will sell for and "reasonable price." They're hoping to pull $150 billion dollars, use $85 billion (plus interest) to pay off their loans, buy back $48 billion worth of their stocks (80% of the remainder), and give back the other $12 to the shareholders, who just watched their stock drop from $62 in January down to about $2 and dropping by the minute.

I am tickled pink. I've thought the stock market was a ridiculous idea from the moment I learned about it in high school economics. I'm going to get hurt by this financial crisis, of course, but not NEARLY as much as the people who have bought into it. The only investment I have in the stock market is my 401 (k), which is worth about $1,500. Currency isn't an actual object; it's a unit of measurement, and comparably I'm getting wealthier and wealthier the longer this crisis continues.

Lunches

2008-09-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

I tend to reminisce about lunch. If I had the means, I would love to go eat lunch at all of the following places:

The lunchroom of my junior high
The 2nd floor hallway of my high school in Idaho
The lunchroom of my high school in Europe
The dorm cafeteria of my college
Old Chicago, my old stomping ground
The kitchen of my quad apartment from my upperclassmen years
The kitchen of my best friend's dad's old house
Hot Cake House in Portland at 1 a.m.

Some of these are easy. Hot Cake House, for one. The "dorm cafeteria" doubles as a functioning restaurant, and I don't think it's changed all that much. If I went back to Europe for any significant amount of time, I'm sure it'd be easy to eat there as well.

I can't really go back to eating on the floor of my high school, and I think they'd frown on me hanging out at the Junior High. Obviously, my apartment and my friend's dad's house have been sold to other people; even if I randomly ended up eating at the new tenants' residence, it would be indistinguishable. Similarly, I actually tried going back to Old Chicago, but it was totally remodeled, and anyway, the whole appeal was being on a first name basis with literally the entire staff, all the way up to the owner (who has since sold the joint).

It seems like a silly thing to reminisce about, but I get all emotional just writing about it, and to this day I have dreams, where I walk down those gray stairs into the basement of my school, take a left into the little dining hall, and put my money down in that little window that goes to the kitchen, and they hand me my macaroni and half tea/half sugar, and I walk to the back table and pull out my math book and work on my homework.

Sounds like a dreadful thing to dream about, doesn't it? Well, it so happens that I got a bout of insomnia the last couple days, and you know how I fixed it? I laid in my bed, and pictured that little dining hall in my mind. Within half an hour, I was asleep and on my way there.

So I guess I can go back.

Those who support Palin

2008-09-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

The following is an actual online conversation between me and someone online. This is in response to Charlie Gibson asking Palin about the Bush Doctrine, which Palin had never heard of. WARNING: Graphic language, read with care. I started this blog as a place to be as crude as possible, but even I find this content offensive.

Charles Gibson is the dumbass here she knows what the bush doctrine is she just told him

My response: the Bush Doctrine is an actual specific mandate, similar in procedure to the Emancipation Proclamation. It's a historical item. It's not Palin's opinion of what Bush does. Think of it this way: if you hit someone with a car, even as an accident, would you hire a lawyer who had never heard of vehicular manslaughter? If you are in a country which is at war, would you want a Vice President who has never heard of the statute we wrote as our reason to go to war?

Give it up. You have no dam idea what you are babbling about.

My response: Why would I give up if I could learn something from you? The Bush Doctrine (capital letters) has been in political conversations since 2003 referring to the official justification for the Iraq war, why a preemptive strike was justified. A doctrine (lower case) can refer to a general opinion, but Charlie Gibson here was clearly talking about The Bush Doctrine. Which part of that am I misunderstanding?

And he goes straight to this well-thought response:

You're a nigger faggot. Ever notice how it is the high school and coolege aged kids that hate on Palin? It is also the welfare niggers, gays/lesbians, neo/socialists, drug addicts. Thats the voting base Obama has.

This is the mindset we're up against, folks.

One thing I can say about Palin

2008-09-11T22:11:00.000-07:00

She's getting people to care about politics. Especially women. Never mind all the polls, I'm talking about people I know in real life. People like the women in my family, friends at work, people who I know on a purely professional basis who are saying to me, "I know we're not supposed to discuss politics at work, but what's up with this Palin character?"

People whom I've never known to care about politics have suddenly grown a fire in them of sheer, unadulterated hatred. People who, even with Bush, have said "you know, I'd rather just not think about it." Suddenly I'm getting emails from aunts and distant friends, passing on things they've read about her, warnings and revealing facts about Palin's ruthless neo-con history. My lunch buddy getting all red in the face because his grandmother in Wisconsin is supporting the McCain-Palin ticket.

For several reasons, I believe the polls are wrong, and in some cases, intentionally misleading. A result of the pulls saying that the race is deadlocked is absolute panic and fear from people that McCain could be elected, and Palin with him. She is a true enemy. My father, a war veteran and himself an American politician, has started talking about leaving the country if they win. If those polls are true, and McCain somehow wins this one, people will not just be depressed for a couple weeks over the loss. There will be war, civil disobedience, people on the streets.

2008-09-10T13:34:00.000-07:00

Joe Biden made a speech about the Republican promise to help kids with disabilities, yet they oppose stem cell research. The Republicans now say that Biden has reached "a new low" in politics by attacking Palin's child with Downs Syndrome.

Wait a fucking minute. Palin was the one who said in her speech that parents of children with disabilities will have "a friend in the White House." That's a campaign promise. And it's an out and out fucking lie. The single most effective way to treat disabilities is with stem cell research, which Biden, Obama, and McCain all support, which the conservative Supreme Court has allowed, and which Palin opposes without exception.

So the Republicans get to make these blanket statements promising the world, and if Democrats respond, even tacitly, they're sinking to a new low and using schoolyard bullying? What the fuck?

Just like Obama's statement about putting "lipstick on a pig," a saying that McCain has himself used, and which they immediately say is a sexist jab against Palin (even though he was talking about McCain). But it was Palin who used the lipstick line in her own acceptance speech. Once again, they can make statements that appeal to voters, but it's below the belt for Democrats to respond.

And just to top it off, they're boycotting any news station who challenges any of them on their records. An interviewer asked for examples of what executive decisions Palin has made as governor of Alaska, and McCain's campaign said they would no longer appear on that station because they were being prejudiced against small states. What!?!? Jesus Christ. Then they're blaming Obama for accusations (which are incidentally, true) against McCain and Palin made by nonpartisan political analysts. They're essentially claiming that intelligence as a whole has a liberal bias.

Well, at least they got that one thing right.

Muzak

2008-09-08T09:40:00.000-07:00

Once a friend of mine pointed out a great injustice. We were in a department store, and elevator music was playing over the PA. He turned to me and said, "you know, they pick this music because they're trying to put in music that won't be offensive to anyone. Well, I find this music offensive. Music like this presumes that there is no value to actual feeling or purpose in music, that all people really want is someone blowing into a saxophone. I could understand if they just played some soft jazz, but this music has intentionally had all the emotion and feeling sterilized out of it, because they're afraid people will be uncomfortable if they are made aware of their soul."

Never more did this ring true to me than just now, as I was put on hold with a client, and their hold music was a watered-down version of a Sting song. They were actually afraid that someone would find Sting abrasive. Sure enough, I was offended; I would have found listening to Sting somewhat pleasant, even an instrumental version, but instead I was forced to listen to a droning sterilization of it, only provoking my emotions, knowing that they could be feeling something pleasant but were instead left with an empty void. Ironically, that provoked emotions of their own, none of them pleasant.

Okay, I'll say it out loud

2008-09-02T19:21:00.000-07:00

Pretty much the only people who are saying this out loud are insensitive asshole intolerant pricks, but there's some genuine truth in it, some non-assholic truth. That is this: is it really heroic to get caught by the enemy? Nobody thought it was heroic when McCain was in the bottom 10% of his graduating class, but once he uses that (lack of) knowledge in the battle field and gets captured, did that suddenly make him Presidential material? Really?

Maybe the reason why our country is continuously dragged into unnecessary and unpopular wars is because we keep electing warmongers and military brutes as our commanders-in-chief. What if we elected a diplomatic genius instead, who saw standing down as a more powerful option than killing anyone who disagrees with us?

Make No Mistake

2008-08-29T16:38:00.000-07:00

He will win. I have no doubt in my mind. People have been analyzing this election to death, and people have been saying they won't vote for Obama because they don't know him well enough, etc. There are almost no undecideds, they allege; everyone's in their own camp. And McCain hasn't even been selected yet. There has not been a single debate. We didn't even know who his running mate was until this morning.

So I think there are a hell of a lot more undecideds than they say. This is what we're up against (direct quote, nonbracketed ellipses from the author):

I was a Hillary supporter who would have voted for Obama IF he had chosen Hillary as his VP! [...] Now along comes John McCain…with whom I agree with on some things…and he picks a female GOVERNER as his VP! I’ll tell you right now: McCain has my vote come November.

That's how "decided" the decided voters are. They're picking a candidate "with whom [they] agree on some things" because they want a woman to be Vice President. That's not decided. One word from Palin that she thinks abortion is God's choice alone, that education is not a high priority, and that the government should control what goes on in your back yard, versus Biden, who is directly credited with reducing violence against women and street violence by as much as 20%, whose wife is a teacher (as is Obama's), and those votes will go snapping over to the Dems' side.

People are trying to discredit Obama's lead before his campaign has even started. His campaign kicked off last night with his acceptance speech, when he laid down the foundation for a concise, aggressive, proactive campaign. Biden has already gone on the attack against the Republicans' policies, and both have in no vague terms rendered personal attacks, questions of character, and the "celebrity" offense unusable. And the Republicans don't have anything else in their bag of tricks to use against the undecideds.

My prediction: they will lose every independent vote in the country. The so-called "Hillary Democrats" are claiming to back McCain. But two months is a loooong time to consider the gravity of such a comment. And with Hillary supporting Obama, there's no one to keep them. The Republicans don't know how.

It's not worth it

2008-08-26T22:26:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to wrap my head around these alleged 21% of Hillary supporters who are adamantly saying that they will vote for McCain, many of whom were campaigning of McCain right outside of the convention while Hillary is onstage inside saying "No way, no how, no McCain!" They asked one woman why she's insisting on voting for McCain instead of Obama and she said, "because Hillary deserves our respect." Yeah, that's how you respect someone, by ignoring their please to help their cause and devoting yourself to helping their enemy to succeed (and in this case, run/ruin their country).

Ultimately, it's just easier to destroy something than it is to fix it, and for a few moments afterwards, it feels pretty good to watch something get destroyed. Those 21% of Hillary supporters would get a nice feeling for a couple days watching Obama fail, as punishment for what he did to Hillary. Then, their husbands will lose their jobs. Their bosses will stop offering health insurance. Their kids will get sick and bankrupt them. Their house will foreclose. Their brothers will die in Iraq. Their country will be the laughing stock of the entire world. They will never get a raise again.

All for a few minutes of watching someone who desperately wanted to help them being punished before their very eyes. God damn you for trying to destroy our happiness for your own selfish little purposes. Fuck you.

Watch

2008-08-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Internet Strikes Again

2008-08-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

Every night, without fail, I sing a half hour or more of my songs. To this day, I clear out my living room and put my microphone stand in the middle of the room. The west wall—the one without windows—is my stage. I put together a set list, I announce myself to the wall, and I perform a full set. I thank the wall between songs, I mind the fourth wall with every step, I choreograph my moves in synchronization with the invisible musicians in the room with me. I consider it my aerobic exercise for the day, as I'm always drenched in sweat by the end, after giving my all to the performance. My throat is sore, my arms are tired, my neighbors are irritated by me singing full throttle, full dance moves, thrashing into the ground with the music.

I haven't performed my own material to a real audience in six years. I don't have the hair for it anymore anyway. I don't have real band mates. The only people in this city who have even heard my music are my ex-girlfriends and friends who knew me from back when. My old bandmate lives here, but we don't play together anymore. I don't think his wife has ever heard my music. He sits with me at the bar sometimes and talks about how bored he gets, but he never calls to invite me over.

I manifest myself to the public as an employee for a mid-sized insurance company. I was in a kid's musical this summer—one of my coworkers happened to see me perform- her input was "it's great to have hobbies outside of work," like that shouldn't be a given. Like I don't spend ten hours a day letting my life waste a way, and just half an hour a night reliving the times when it wasn't.

An old groupie found me online the other day. She was my biggest fan ten years ago. She was fourteen, I think. She used to call me and invite me over. She listened to my music every night. Once, online, she gushed to some guy online about what an enormous crush she had on me, only to find out that she was actually talking to me (she got her screen names confused).

She's doing well. She's twenty four, living in Boulder. She's the lead singer of a band. She called me on video chat. I remembered her, referred to her by the name I used to call her, forgetting that it wasn't her real name. She laughed and said she remembered the night I gave her that name, every detail of it. "I was such a girl then," she said. Then she went on about all the things going on in her life, all the music she's playing, the people who come out to see her perform.

When I was her age, I was playing shows, too. In fact, I was just getting ready to move to Portland, ready to show my music to the big city. That year, the band broke up. Over the phone, no less. I was already living in Portland, and was driving back home for a show. I still wanted the band to make it. I'd travel for shows, no sweat. My bandmate, the one who lives here now, called me to see if I was already on the road. The show had been cancelled. I found out later it had never been booked; they just didn't have the nerve to tell me. And anyway, the drummer quit. He said that he didn't feel my heart was in it anymore, or I would have stayed with the band.

I never played with a band again.

Luckily, she didn't ask how I was doing, what I was up to. I mentioned something in passing that I had done a little acting, but I think she just assumed that I had gone on to be a successful Portland musician. Why wouldn't I? I was her hero, after all. I'm the one she looked up to, that made her decide to be a lead singer too. She was living the dream.

What would she say if she knew I'd given up music and got a job at an insurance company? How would she look at me then? Would it scare her? I could tell by her voice, the way she worded her sentences, that although she was grown up now and realized I was just some guy, she still respected me. I don't care about the respect, not from my side of it anyway. I'm just worried about how that would change her life view.

I'm not saying she'll be a successful musician. I'm not even saying her band won't break up soon too. I just want to make sure that she stays onstage long enough to inspire some fourteen year old in the audience, like I inspired her. Eventually, one of us will make it, and one of us will enhance people's lives. It won't be me, but I still want to be a part of that. I don't want to break the chain.

Morbid

2008-08-19T21:42:00.001-07:00

So, I'm going through my financial paperwork, and realize something: as of December 17th of this year, my life insurance covers a $50,000 benefit if I commit suicide. I always thought that suicide was an instant disqualifier, but I guess not. Of course, it's well over double that if I just die. Still, it's nice to know that the Cobain option is on the table if things get really bad.

Do-over

2008-08-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

God, let me relive the second half of the 1990s. They told me it would be the best years of my life, but I didn't believe them and now it's too late. I will tell my kids, but they won't believe me either.

On second thought, don't. Those five years were so wonderful and magical because of that strange thing that happens in a young man's chemistry, where the colors are brighter, the emotions are stronger, and every day lasts a lifetime. Then it seems that the chemicals drain out, leaving the cast that you've molded from the impressionable years.

Tell me, then, what it takes to refill the cast. There has to be something to trigger that part of my brain again. There has to be more than this.

Everybody Chill

2008-08-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

Everyone's got their panties in a twist over this Russia-Georgia thing. We've been so inundated with this rhetoric that Russia is in shambles because we so totally thumped 'em in the Cold War that we're in shock when we see them flex their muscles.
They flexed their muscles in Afghanistan in the mid-nineties, and nobody cared, because it was just a bunch of towel heads. They flexed their muscles in Serbia and nobody cared, because we wanted Serbia to go down as well. They flexed their muscles in Chechnya, and Bill Clinton tried to get people to care, but our life was going so well at the time that it didn't really seem like anything bad affected us.

All these skirmishes have common threads—they were fights with former Soviet republics, autonomous countries which never really earned their independence, we were just hell-bent on splitting up the old Soviet Union and didn't care that we were essentially creating a litany of rogue states. Every time, the Pentagon would watch, and Russia would pull out weapons we'd never heard of, and just mop the floor with whoever they were fighting. When they took on Afghanistan, they knew it would be a tough fight, so they started pulling out weapons you see in science-fiction movies: suitcase bombs, roving missile launchers, heat-seeking blanket missiles. Bill Clinton tried to warn us, and even sent troops to defend our then-allies, but Americans accused Clinton of making it all up to distract us from Lewinsky.

The skirmish in Georgia is practically identical to Desert Storm. Georgia stepped into a territory they didn't own, announced that they were running the place, and killed anyone who disagreed with them. The territory was a protectorate of Russia (like Guam or Panama is to us), so Russia came in to end the conflict. Here's how Russia ends a conflict: they go in full force and just clean the place out. They flatten anyone who isn't waving a white flag. They finished the job in five days.

If we had used the same tactic in Iraq, we would be 5 trillion dollars richer, the world would be more stable, and we wouldn't have the widespread animosity of the world we do today.

We care now, though, because Georgia isn't a foreign sounding name. We've got a state named Georgia. So we could picture Bolsheviks marching on Atlanta. And while the Russians gave up on their quest to spread communism after they lost the Cold War, we are continuing our quest to impose our government on the entire world, and are very proud of that fact. Georgia one of the only countries to actually adopt our form of government (constitutional republic), so we feel that any attack on Georgia is an attack on us. In fact, we even tried to get Georgia to join NATO, an effort which was vetoed by NATO for this exact reason—because Georgia takes this confidence that the US will back them unconditionally and exploits it, intentionally drawing the ire of the Sleeping Bear. They knew they were going to get the shit kicked out of them, and they did, and they had no problem having 300 Georgians killed a day, because they wanted the attention that we obediently gave them.

When a child throws a temper tantrum in the middle of Safeway because you won't buy him a candy bar, what happens when you give in and buy him the Twix? That's why you don't start stirring up shit with Russia because our little protege in Eastern Europe is throwing a tantrum. Like it or not, Russia is still their daddy, and they don't buy them candy bars—they give them a spanking.

Unbelievable

2008-08-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

In an ongoing effort to prove that there is not a single facet of Clinton or her campaign which makes her the worst possible candidate for President (and therefore continuing to draw the praise and support of 20% of Americans), the Clinton campaign has now come out and blamed Edwards for Clinton losing, stating that if he had not lied about his affair, then Hillary would have won the nomination. It sounds exactly like something Bush's people would say.

Fucking Genius

2008-08-07T21:31:00.001-07:00

In general I'm not particularly fond of TV, and I never really like Jimmy Kimmel overall. However, there's one bit that I can't stop laughing all the way through, and I should point out that I very rarely actually laugh at anything, even my favorite shows. I think they're very funny, I'm just not much of a laugher.

The clip is the last video here, but I need to set it up first. This was the culmination of a very long-going running joke on Kimmel. Anyone who watches Kimmel is aware of it, and most people who just casually browse the net have already seen it, but for my own gratification, I'm putting it up on my blog. We start with the running joke:

The running joke hit its punchline after literally a year continuing on, which was itself brilliantly executed:

Then the joke was over, and a new joke was born:

which, while brilliant in its own way, was simply lead in to the best late night production ever:

you're welcome.

When Disclaimers Go To Far

2008-08-07T10:04:00.001-07:00

I am eating peanut butter crackers for breakfast, and on the side of the package they felt obligated to write "Caution: Contains Wheat, Peanuts."

I would think it more apt to write a caution if it in fact did not contain either wheat or peanuts. Given that those are the two main ingredients.

A fucking tip

2008-07-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

Hey, if someone looks really pissed off, a really good way to piss them off even futher is to come up to them and say, "are you okay? Is everything all right? Is there anything I can do to help?"

Just leave them the fuck alone, asshole. You're not the fucking pope. Who the fuck do you think you are, that you have all the magic fucking answers that they must be missing? On top of that, why the fuck does everyone think that 'talking it through' is the answer to all the world's problems? Oh fantastic, I've been able to express how I feel! Why, having you tell me that "everything's going to be okay, I just know it" has suddenly dug me out of debt, got me the perfect job, and cleaned up everything that's wrong with the world.

Unless you're fucking Jesus, eat shit. I'm competent enough to fix my own fucking problems, I don't need your fucking charity.

Move back to the trailer

2008-07-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

Hey there, guy who bought his house at eighteen. We had a little chat about ten years ago, and I just wanted to revisit that discourse, see how it went. You see, when I hadn't even started college yet, a lot of my friends were already buying houses. They couldn't afford them, mind you; they were just buying them. Viva la difference.

You see, out of the two of us, myself and this group of trailer trash hosers (for the sake of readability, we'll refer to the demographic collectively as "Jake"), I was really the more responsible spender. Even at that, though, I still proved incapable of managing a $10,000 debt. See, ten thousand dollars seems like a pretty piddly amount of money to an eighteen-year-old. I used to do official surveys of college students, and whenever I asked how much they expected to make right out of college, most of them said "well, obviously I expect at least $60,000 to start, but I expect to be into six figures soon enough." Oh really, and what's your major? "French Humanities." Good luck, kid.

They also miss another pretty important point. Even if you do have a job paying sixty thousand dollars, you don't get to keep all of it. To be generous, let's say every month you spend $100 on food, $300 on healthcare, $150 on bills, $50 on student loan payback, and 30% on taxes. If you're earning $40K a year (i.e. what I make now after 10 years experience and a college degree) and you have no credit card debt to pay off, that leaves you with about $1700 a month to spend on housing and everything else in existence (toothpaste, couches, porn, etc.). That's still a decent amount of bread. So let's cut to my conversation with "Jake" from ten years ago.

With my money, I spend $775 a month for a downtown apartment in Portland and $500 a month on paying off debt (though no student loans). My overhead is actually significantly higher than what I stated before, but let's say that leaves me with about $400 a month to spend on everything else. That's really not too bad. But here's what Jake dwells on— he considers that $775 a month to be "throwing away my money." That was the catch phrase at the beginning of this century. I heard it everywhere– on TV, from friends, in restaurant discussions. Why are you throwing your money away on rent to some landlord?

Well, here's one: my landlord pays for busted water mains, unlike my mom, who was hit with a $6000 bill the first month she bought her $250,000 house. Second, I can move at any time, and do, because I have no responsibility to find someone else to occupy my house, unlike many of the Jakes' parents, who tried selling their homes in the late nineties when people just weren't buying. They would buy a new house, and put their old one up for sale, only to be unable to sell the old house. One set of parents ended up selling their house at a loss, while another set had to move back into their old house, and lost tens of thousands of dollars for reneging on the new purchase. Third, I don't want to throw my money away on interest payments. Even after a solid down payment, you're dealing with a bill of $2,000 a month on a house in Portland. Even in smaller towns you'll be paying at least a thousand. Taken out of that thousand is interest payments on a $150,000 debt. I don't know the exact math, but that comes out to about 600-700 dollars a month. The only intelligent way to buy a house is by making double payments, which I can't afford.

Ahhhhhhhh, what were those magical words? I can't afford to buy a house. Thaaaaaat's the step we're missing. I have to save up just to buy furniture, so why is it presumed that I can buy an entire fucking house!? Well, I can't. And neither can the Jakes of the world. That doesn't stop them though. Not because they REALLY believe that they're throwing their money away on a house, but because they are deluded into thinking that they can just possess a house and everything else just works out.

Well it DIDN'T.

Suddenly, to nobody's surprise, we hit the subprime mortgage crisis. Oh really? So you're telling me that lending HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS to people who can't even afford an iPod is a bad business move? Tell me more. I'm fascinated. I am SOOOOOO shocked. So while I've been "throwing my money away" on eight years of rent payments, with no debt to speak of, having lived on a college campus, an affluent neighborhood (I lived three blocks away from Paul Revere of The Raiders), a liberal paradise, a church property, a kooky inside-out castle with two balconies, and a downtown historical apartment with a view of the Fremont Bridge, and once October rolls around, I can just get up and move somewhere else, the Jakes have been stuck in one place, fixing up their homes, trying to make ends meet, and FAILING, resulting in foreclosures and auctions, taking losses of tens of thousands of dollars that they don't have, because they were naive to think that I was the one making a stupid business decision.

So, anyway, here's my the question, not just to the Jakes, but to their lenders, the financial giants who provided the money, and the realtors who closed the deal:

WHY THE FUCK ARE WE BAILING YOU OUT?

Government support is for people who were failed by the system. You're just white fucking trash. The only lesson there is for you to learn is that you can continue taking more than you can afford, then giving up and leaving us with the bill. I made all the right decisions, and now I'm stuck paying your bill? Fuck you. I don't have a single drop of sympathy for any of you shitheads. you know who I have sympathy for? The Mexicans in Hillsboro, with eight per apartment living in secret because their lease only allows for four, pitching in on a $600 rent because $75 a month is all they can afford. You fuckers are white, spoiled little shits, and now the Government is cleaning up your mess with my money. Fuck you. The subprime "crisis" is not a tragedy. It's punishment, and now daddy is going soft on you because of all your fucking whining. Well, don't expect me to care. You know how you could have avoided this "crisis?" Rent a fucking apartment.

It's an indicator of morale

2008-07-18T14:50:00.000-07:00

when one of the senior team members gazes longingly out of the window and says to me, "I think I'll become a window washer."

I say, "are you fond of heights?" He looks at me with a terrified look in his eyes and replies, "not at all. But I'm not really fond of what I do here, either. It'd be something... different." He sighs, and walks out of the office.

No Honor Among Thieves

2008-07-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

When I was fifteen I was a fairly habitual shoplifter, and had been doing it for years. I wasn't so much a thief as I was fascinated that I could just walk out with something and completely violate the agreement that I would pay for it. Then I got stopped by security. A man had reported that he saw me pocket something and they wanted to check my pockets. I had a jumbo candy bar in my left pants pocket, but I just looked at the security guard with a confused look and said, "what do you mean by 'pocket' something?" He explained that he meant "steal," and I just glared at him like the concept was completely foreign to me.

I shrugged and told him that I respected his job and encouraged him to check all my pockets, as was his responsibility to keep the store safe. I gave him my jacket, and as he rifled through the pockets, the man who accused me of stealing kept his eye on me. While the man watched me, I calmly slid the candy bar out of my pocket, into my sleeve, and into the band of my jeans. I then pulled out my front pockets and showed him my sleeves. He asked to pat me down, so I slipped the bar of candy into my sleeve and held up my arms. He patted me down, apologized, and let me go, and I vowed to never steal again... it was just too easy for me to get away with it, and I knew I was heading down the slippery slope into a criminal lifestyle, which it seemed I would have been very successful at living.

In April, I made a boneheaded mistake at work and ended up costing someone hundreds of dollars. I prolonged the situation for months, and now our client is outraged that they were cheated out of money they earned. I made no conscious effort to screw them out of their money, and I profit in no way from it, but that didn't mean I wasn't responsible. I went straight back to the client and said nothing could be done about it, which was true, but of course they still wanted someone to blame. I explained the situation in full fact to both my supervisor and the client and at no point making any effort to defend myself, yet both of them are now walking away thanking me for going to such great lengths to try and make everything go right, and for helping them fix the mistake that they are now convinced I had nothing to do with.

Not once did I lie, I omitted no facts, and yet I have again been absolved of all responsibility for something I unequivocably made happen, and once again, I'm walking out of the store scot-free with the candy bar still in my pocket.

It's not always a good feeling to succeed.

Statutory Rape

2008-07-14T11:18:00.001-07:00

God Help Us All

2008-07-07T15:47:00.000-07:00

The "Alternative" genre is now "Adult Alternative" and includes such acts as John Mayer, Jack Johnson, and Lifehouse. Am I the only 29 year-old in this country who hasn't already turned 40? Are they afraid that they're going to get a high blood pressure from listening to musicians who aren't on Oxycotin and Valium?

I spoke with God today

2008-07-02T13:22:00.000-07:00

There's a preacher out today. He was going on about how we were all sinners, waving his bible and telling us how we're all going to hell, blah blah blah, so I just sit out there smoking a cigarette and wait for him to get to the part where his church wants our money. Sure enough, suddenly he says, "you can get to heaven, but you can't get there alone. Man can help you. Are you a private believer? Are you someone who says he believes in Jesus at night, but doesn't act upon it in public? You must show your faith before man!"

Sweet macrame, he couldn't have set it up more perfectly. I shout out, "what about Matthew 12?" He stops and looks at me. He says, "I'm not familiar with..."
"Matthew 12. You've got your book on you, look it up." "We'll talk later," he says, and starts up his spiel. "Talk later? Then what are you telling us? Are you speaking for God or for your church? What about Matthew 6?" He just starts talking right over the top of me.

Then, this girl with a shirt from his church on comes up to me and asks, "what were you saying about Matthew 6?" I reply, "well, are you familiar with Matthew 6?" "Sure," she says, "the Lord's Prayer."
"Right, where it says Our Father, who art in heaven, all that. Well, have you read just before it?"
"No, what does it say?"
"It's a part with Jesus talking to his followers, they're asking about church—well, synagogue—and he says... well, God says..." and then I completely blanked on the passage. So I say (verbatim), "Oh, God, what is that passage?... Oh! 'Speak not before man, as the heathens do, but speak privately at night with your father in a manner such as this.' Then he recites the Lord's Prayer, but it's a paraphrase, not to be recited in church. It actually says specifically in the Bible, do not pray before man, but pray privately to God, at night. It's the exact opposite of what this guy is telling us."
She just stares at me for a long time. Finally, she just says, "thank you," stands up, and leaves the square completely, while her church mates are still busy trying to recruit people.

A moment of non-political correctness

2008-06-26T10:49:00.001-07:00

My dream is to one day speak to a Floridan under 70 who doesn't have a Cuban accent.

I want to work Freelance

2008-06-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

I think, ultimately, that's what it comes down to. I know for a fact that I can better manage a workflow than the people I work for now, and I would be able to set my own system, without having to compromise for the people who have been doing things "the way they're done" for the last 15 years. I think it'd give me a genuine edge on corporations which have been operating under the status quo. I have no desire to run my own business, the risk is just way too high.

I guess the concept isn't new. Something like 60% of Americans say they want to be their own boss. But I think most people just say it because they don't want anybody holding them accountable. I think a lot of people just believe that "being your own boss" means you can get up at 10:30, start working sometime around lunch, and call it a day once you're bored a couple hours later.

Besides which, people don't "start" working freelance. People work for a stodgy corporation for 20 years and then go out on their own, taking the corporation's leads with them.

Anyway. Just thinking out loud.