Michael Jackson

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.

Letting Cynthia Davis speak for herself

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.

Subprime TARP

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

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.

Believing what they want to believe.

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.

Fuck Haleigh Cummings

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.

Hope in the Hardest of Times

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

Don't Panic

The press has finally latched onto the fringe feminist voters and turned Hillary Clinton's presidential race into a gender issue. In the continuing tradition of irresponsible journalism, they have put the onus on the public at large, perpetuating their fabricated myth that the media is not blatantly trying to manipulate their readers. Once again, however, they have pushed out a message so reactionary that it will only cause a backlash. So, for any of you out there who are worrying about the possibility that a callous, intolerant, pro-censorship, elitist, corporate whore (gender-neutral whore, pertaining to anyone who will accept money from corporations in exchange for getting fucked) will be elected purely as the token minority, rest assured that her more radical supporters are doing more to push away voters than they are helping her.

The main coverage is of women who say that they never intended to vote for Hillary before, but after the Iowa caucus, they realized that a woman candidate can't even take one primary vote because of her gender. Yes, they actually said that, and yes, they said that after one primary worth less than 1% of the country's votes. The fear is that democratic voters are frightened by the concept of a woman being president, and are unwilling to support a minority candidate. As proof, they point to several instances where democrats have referred to Clinton as a cold, calculating evil Washington insider, which they allege is playing into the stereotypes of women. So, they have fallen back on the safe vote of a beltway conservative that won't ruffle up too many feathers as he meets the description of every president elected in American history: Barack Obama (pictured right). Rest assured, however, that these people are not the majority of Americans. They may have pushed the Hillary vote in New Hampshire, but the nice thing about reactionaries is that they're traditionally lazy (after all, if they had any sense of perserverance, they might actually take the route of fixing their own problems instead of blaming everyone else for bringing them down). So, after they've pulled New Hampshire and maybe a couple of the Super Tuesday states (I predict Nevada goes to Obama and South Carolina goes to Edwards), a majority of them will either be exhausted from the fight or will give up after a couple small defeats in other insignificant states. Above all, remember that they don't really want Clinton to win– after all, if there isn't a man in charge of the country, who will they have to blame for all their problems?

Blackfacing Angry Black Men

I don't blame Bennie Demetrius Washington for claiming that he was illegally searched when the police found a gun in his car in 2004. To the contrary, I would call it responsible action; it is every person's responsibility to defend themselves to the best of their ability when accused of a crime, or else you just get another Gideon (of Gideon v. Wainwright fame, not the bible people). But the fact of the matter is, he's a felon who was stopped on suspicion, and the suspicions turned out to be true when the police search turned up an illegal firearm that landed Washington another six years in federal prison.

The claim, according to the Oregonian, is that he "wasn't breaking any law when Portland police approached him... and asked whether they could search him and his car." After consenting to the search, they found a gun and arrested him, and now he's doing six years. Now I could go back and forth on this forever. On one hand, possession of an illegal firearm is a crime, and thus he was doing something illegal. On the other hand, a case could be made that we all do barely-illegal things all the time, and could probably all get arrested for something, but 90% of us (at least in the Northwest) don't get busted because the cops don't profile white people. Then again, you don't just throw someone in the slammer for six years because they had a gun in their car. But on the other hand, if he consented to the search, he probably thought there was no way they would give him anything worse than a slap on the wrist for the gun. If you commit a crime that you know would lock you away for six years, you don't just let the cops waltz in and make the arrest. Either you make things difficult for them, as is your right under the fourth amendment, or you turn yourself in.

Anyway, what it comes down to is that he pulled the race card on a situation where it very well may not apply. It's more likely, even in Portland (where the cops have a long, continuing history of blatant racism), that we're dealing with a repeat felon who has so proven himself detrimental to society that simply owning a gun exhibits intent to do something far worse. No matter who you are, you don't get six years for possession of a firearm on a first offense.

So I blame the Oregonian. An irresponsibly shitty article by Aimee Green that doesn't cover the details, but instead paints Washington as an angry black man hiding behind his skin, does a disservice to black people, to Portland, and the Portland police. Adding insult to injury is posting the article with top billing in the Metro section, with an enormous headline stating "Man claims police bias in suit." If you're going to do a feature, cover the facts. If you're going to do a recap or brief, as Green did, put it in the corner on page 5. By putting an incomplete article front and center, really all you're doing is screaming "look! Look! Blackie got hit! Blackie got hit! LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENING TO THE BLACK GUY!!!!!" For anyone on the fence towards African Americans (or as I call them, black), all this will do is reinforce their stereotype that black people aren't really the victims of racism, they just claim to be so that they can get away with murder. Or possession. Whatever. Be fucking responsible.

Oh, The Guilt

Once again, there are those who would try to coax me into feeling guilty for my situation. My ex-girlfriend was fired from her job a couple weeks ago–she has known about her impending doom for over six months, and had many chances to do something about it, but was so resigned to her "miserable luck" that she just let it happen. Another old friend was fired last week–his job started at 5 a.m. and rather than adjusting his schedule so that he would be going to bed at 7:00, he continued staying up until midnight as if life were just a continuation of being a teenager, and after one too many tardy appearances and (I presume) multiple warnings, they let him go.

The Gay Pirate continues to not have a job–though he has been offered various day jobs, he has rejected them on the basis that he's not a "office type person," but unlike many office-type-people who have outside passions and aspirations, his only real passions are easy women and massive amounts of alcohol. There are spangers with more impressive resumes than him. So, he continues living in complete deficit, accumulating a thousand dollars a month in debt, which he has been doing for years now. It's fascinating for me to experience, and if he weren't a raging alcoholic I'd still keep in touch, if only to see the actual process people go through on their path to being one of those dirty crazy old alcoholics on the street. They weren't always that way, you know. Once they were a twenty-something idiot who threw their lives away, too.

Me, I got up in my downtown apartment at 5:00, made myself an omelette, and sat out on my balcony and had breakfast while I read the newspaper. I went inside, put on a festive holiday tie, and made my way to my office in the financial district. Tomorrow night I'm going to set up my music studio and record a Christmas album. I'm going to give it out as a gift, but it's mostly just for fun. You know, because I have an artistic life outside work. There's a really cute girl I met from my apartment complex that invited me over, I may swing by and say hello before I take a flight to Washington and spend Christmas with my family, mostly composed of rocket scientists and professors (no, I'm not kidding). Then I'll get ready for my trip to Europe, tickets compliments of a family travel fund, and spend two weeks paid vacation with the most beautiful, wonderful woman God ever put on this Earth.

Ask me if I feel guilty that my life is so different from theirs. Go ahead. And let me tell you why not– they all had their chance. None of them are from broken homes. Boring homes, maybe, but of the four of us, only one of us had to sleep at his parents' store as a kid, so they could work through the night. Only one of us had to get his shoes extended with duct tape when he outgrew them. Only one of us has divorced parents. Only one of us has never gotten prematurely married, pregnant, or a VD (and only one of us has never cheated on any significant others). Only one of us gave up drugs when they got in the way of day-to-day activities. The only thing all four of us share is that we're all from white, middle class backgrounds, and have been given numerous opportunities to succeed. I may not have taken every opportunity, but at least I'm the one who took a few.

Fuck you

Isn't it a little ridiculous that people still try to stigmatize office workers? Maybe sixty years ago, during the era of the "Company Man," you could tell a lot about somebody by where they worked, but the offenders weren't alive then. No, these self-aggrandizing mavericks are from the slacker generation. You know, the ones who started Apple, Google, Starbucks, and Paypal. There's a quote from Mission Hill that I can't remember, but it goes something like this: "while I was busy living my generation's dream of fighting the system and living through art, everyone else in my generation was out getting jobs."

Here's my surprise for all these 30 year olds who think they're looking down at professionals: every teenager, from every generation, dreams that they will be the first person to earn a living just doing whatever they feel like. Most of those people, however, grow up. It's very romantic that you're living in a paint-covered studio apartment with furniture that you found in the basement. You are so kafkaesque. I was in college, too. Then I grew the fuck up. I thought to myself, hey, you know what would be fun? Being able to buy an iPod. Maybe I'll go out and get a real fucking job and I'll have the money to do that. You know what else would be neat? A trip to Europe. Too bad I can't afford plane tickets when I'm still making $7 an hour.

You know why people get paid to do things? Because someone out there wants what they're offering so bad, that they'll pay to get it. You have a debit card? Surprise, asshole– you're paying someone to be your banker. (And I know full well that you pay $200 a year in overdraft fees.) You want to buy a piece of shit car with the quarters you scrounged up? Good for you. The government knows you're an idiot, though, so just to be safe they're going to require you to spend hundreds of dollars a year on car insurance. That money will be given to–guess who–someone who works at the insurance company. And if you want to live somewhere other than your parents' house (actually, even then), you're either going to be paying a property management company to buy an aparment for you, or you're going to need a realtor to sell you a house. And guess fucking what.

When you were eighteen, there were all sorts of exciting words to describe people like you: cool, exciting, unpredictable, artsy, deep, ambitious. Unfortunately, after a few years of actually going to our college classes, learning a trade, and being successful, we became a bit smarter, and we learned that those very poetic-sounding ambitions of yours were missing a vital piece: common sense. I'm not saying there isn't a market for emo punk-rock guitarists who don't spend more than ten minutes writing their songs, I'm just saying that they have plenty of NOFX albums to go around in the four dollar bin at Borders. Yeah, you're still living the life of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, except that it's all a farce, it's just bullshit posturing that would only fool you and a fifteen year old you (which, due to your complete lack of evolution, are the same thing).

But look at the bright side– while I'm working a "nine to fiver" that pays me triple your salary, with vacation time and bonuses, that allows me to go home at five o'clock and write my own songs, which are better than yours, with equipment you can't afford, and then I can get shitfaced and call in sick the next day, and they'll pay me my wages anyway, no questions asked, and despite the fact that you get all sorts of self-destructive co-dependent needy bimbos to have meaningless sex with at the cost of constant haranguing and possibly violence, litigation, and herpes thrust upon you, I can get a tight, wet nineteen year-old any time of the night because my ironed clothes scream out that I have real value... you know what, now that I think of it, there isn't a bright side.

A conversation with Electrum

I, PORTLANDER: In a democratic presidential debate, one of the candidates, Mike Gravel, was asked why he should be trusted to run the country when he went bankrupt himself in the 70s and never paid them back. He replied, "if you want to make judgments about being greedy... I left the Senate no better than when I came in. I left the American credit card companies $90,000 out, and they deserved it."
In a poll after that debate, he was polled as having 0% support. His campaign has raised approximately $500.

ELECTRUM: At least he’s honest about how he feels.

I suppose that's something. So's Bush.

It will be interesting to see if Bush is honest about how he feels after his presidency is done and he is asked to explain his decisions. I think Bush is sneaky with hidden agendas.

No. Bush will never come clean. Bank on it.

I don’t think he could come clean, then he’d have to deal with hypocrisy.

I don't think he'd come clean because he doesn't really realize that he's President. He's like America's Peter the Great. He comes from such an absurdly overprivileged background that he thinks the presidency was given to him as an amusement for eight years. He doesn't have any problem with killing tens of thousands of people or costing trillions of dollars or handing our country to China, because he doesn't have to suffer the consequences of his actions. He's entitled, in his mind, to do anything he wants. He is the only person who matters. Hell, his own dad campaigns against him on a regular basis.

Prior to George Bush Senior’s Presidency he was a diplomat over in China for the US, and when he became president, he lifted the trade embargo with them. Now his son has sold American off to China, and the Chinese government has blue prints to our military ships because we are on “friendly” relations with them now.

When I was in 10th grade debate in 1994, the topic of the year was "should China receive Most Favored Nation status?" There wasn't a single student, after looking at the material, who would answer yes (except for a few kids who heard somewhere that you get better grades by being adversarial but never backed their points). The debate topic became which reason was the biggest reason not to give them MFN. A bunch of high school kids, two years into the Clinton era, had a better understanding of diplomatic consequences than our standing president.

Straidar

There are so many tests people come up with to determine if someone's gay. Well, now that being gay is chic, what about ways to determine if someone is not gay? I'll start: if you see a happy straight couple walking down the street and you feel the need to taunt them and call them "breeders," you're not gay. You're a fucking prick. Every ethnic and religious group has their fair share of assholes. I've seen black people call white people "cracker," Latinos calling Anglos "gringo," dumb people calling smart people "nerd." All of those people are fuckwads. That being said, they all have one thing that gay people don't: if the entire world was composed of just black people, we'd be just fine. People further from the equator would lose their color over time (they already did once), but there would be no short-term consequence of an all-black, all-latino, all-dumb world.

If everyone in the world were suddenly gay, humanity would cease to exist within eighty years.

So that makes me a gay-hater, right? Just like if I'm not particularly fond of vegetables, I must hate food. Gay people have all sorts of genuine problems to deal with in their life. And every time someone comes prancing into the mall wearing skintight see-through clothes and squealing with a lisp, they become one more challenge that gay people have to face. I've got a secret for all you flamers out there: I get it, you're a teenage schoolgirl trapped in a man's body. You know what? Every time I see a teenage schoolgirl dressed like a whore squealing in the mall, I want to kick her in the teeth until she forgets her middle name. There are two reasons why I don't: I respect people's ability to express themselves, no matter how misguided they may be, but more importantly, eventually those schoolgirls will grow up to be self-respecting women with consideration for people around them.

My roommate acts like a flaming gay man. She has a lisp, she's flighty, she spends all her time doing her hair and checking to see if her ass looks big, and shops for the lattest slutty clothes on sale at Forever 21. Once she was reprimanded at work because her tits fell out of her halter top and she couldn't even figure out what she did wrong. My roommate is fucking retarded. So why would I have any sensitivity for a grown man acting like my idiot roommate? All the affirmative action in the world cannot protect a grown man who wears clown makeup from being a failure. Christ, even Eddie Izzard dresses appropriately when he's in a film.

So it's not your being gay that offends me. Its your acting like a 12 year old. We stopped playing house years ago, we went out and got jobs and a life. But you clearly don't care what I think, so think about this instead: every time you're out talking trash to someone for not being straight, you just added one more step for real gay people to climb before reaching equality.

Oh, and those kids that the breeders are having? A third of them will be gay. You're welcome.

Thanks to Brandy for her contribution to this blog.

Have some fries with that, tubby

You know why there are so many ludicrously fat people in this country? Because we're not allowed to call them fat. Some jock kid gave them one too many wedgies because they were too pudgy for gym class, and now they're on the affirmative action boat. Earlier today I passed by one of my fat coworkers waiting at the elevator. I went down one flight of stairs to the break room. A couple minutes later she waddled in. I was half-tempted to tell her "you know what, I think I may have figured out what you're doing wrong." It actually takes less time to take the stairs, and once you're down there, you'll just be sitting in a chair for ten minutes, so I'm sure you'll have time to catch your breath.

My fat friends make fun of me for taking dance classes. So I should be entitled to call them out when they need an armrest to get out of their chair. I take dance classes because it's a fun way to keep in shape, jackass. I walk two miles to work every morning, and it actually takes less time than waiting for the MAX. Instead of walking to Saturday market, I jog there. It's faster, and I get more exercise. You picking up a pattern? Instead of eating burgers every night, I make a casserole and save some money. Instead of getting a coke at work, I buy a chocolate milk. You don't have to be a jock, or a gymnast, or a yuppie with a gym membership to stay in shape. Just be active.

So I'm not going to backpedal because people make the excuse that some people are just born heavier. I wasn't born thin. I've just been active my entire life. And I'm terrible at sports, but that's never stopped me. I play video games all the time, I have a day job where I just sit at a desk, and I'm quite fond of hamburger helper. I've certainly got more fat on me than is biologically necessary, but my gut doesn't hang over my belt and I can jog a mile or two without needing an IV. You're fucking fat. Deal with it. I don't mean "cope with it and accept it," I mean fix your fucking problem. And it's not because you're going to cost government healthcare money when you get diabetes. You will, but it's not like I see you on the street and think 'there goes my FICA.' I don't care about that. What I'm saying is, when I see you on the street, I have a low opinion of you. I think less of you than I would if you stayed in shape. I have "big" friends. I know what "big" looks like. You just never knew when to put down the remote and chocolate bar.