Fortress Disneyland

Edmund Burke on the American Colonial History

2012-01-17T13:36:00.000-05:00

All this was done by England whilst England pursued trade and forgot revenue. You not only acquired commerce, but you actually created the very objects of trade in America; and by that creation you raised the trade of this kingdom at least fourfold. America had the compensation of your capital, which made her bear her servitude. She had another compensation, which you are now going to take away from her. She had, except the commercial restraint, every characteristic mark of a free people in all her internal concerns. She had the image of the British Constitution. She had the substance. She was taxed by her own representatives. She chose most of her own magistrates. She paid them all. She had in effect the sole disposal of her own internal government. This whole state of commercial servitude and civil liberty, taken together, is certainly not perfect freedom; but comparing it with the ordinary circumstances of human nature, it was an happy and a liberal condition.

— Edmund Burke, “Speech on American Taxation,” 19 April 1774.

A great speech. I am not a Burke partisan, but I admire his strategies. Burke is the great Humanist who formed the gentler side of Thomas Hobbes’ absolutism, noting in Reflections on the Revolution in France that Englishmen would rather die than exercise the right to hire and replace public officials.

This prediction was not quite… fulfilled, as you may have noted. From the same speech, he discusses George Grenville and the habits of office:

He was bred to the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences,—a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion. Passing from that study, he did not go very largely into the world, but plunged into business,—I mean into the business of office, and the limited and fixed methods and forms established there. Much knowledge is to be had, undoubtedly, in that line; and there is no knowledge which is not valuable. But it may be truly said, that men too much conversant in office are rarely minds of remarkable enlargement. Their habits of office are apt to give them a turn to think the substance of business not to be much more important than the forms in which it is conducted. These forms are adapted to ordinary occasions; and therefore persons who are nurtured in office do admirably well as long as things go on in their common order; but when the high-roads are broken up, and the waters out, when a new and troubled scene is opened, and the file affords no precedent, then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind, and a far more extensive comprehension of things is requisite, than ever office gave, or than office can ever give. Mr. Grenville thought better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserves. He conceived, and many conceived along with him, that the flourishing trade of this country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not quite so much to liberty; for but too many are apt to believe regulation to be commerce, and taxes to be revenue. Among regulations, that which stood first in reputation was his idol: I mean the Act of Navigation. He has often professed it to be so. The policy of that act is, I readily admit, in many respects well understood. But I do say, that, if the act be suffered to run the full length of its principle, and is not changed and modified according to the change of times and the fluctuation of circumstances, it must do great mischief, and frequently even defeat its own purpose.

Austrian Economists and Fellow Travelers

2011-11-15T13:12:00.000-05:00

Sweet. The Ludwig von Mises site has photos of various economists. Above we see one Friedrich August Hayek, author of many substantive works, and one massive hit: The Road to Serfdom.

2011-10-18T18:37:00.005-04:00

This sounds like the crappiest movie in the world. The characters are: first grade teacher (at a private school, not one of those public school losers), a biographer of George Bernard Shaw, a social worker, and a non-profit service lawyer.

Who are these awful little people? The teacher should be teaching art and science, but “is better known for his musical adaptations.” Uh-huh.

No machinists. No IT techs. No insurance agents. Just soft little people in soft little jobs; the only thing post-modern Hollywood knows. Oh, and hey: the box office was soft, too. Odd, that.

Harry "Keynes" Potter and the Mindless Automatons

2011-10-12T14:29:00.000-04:00

Via The American Magazine, Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims won the Nobel prize in economics:

The state of the economy was set by the intersection of aggregate demand and aggregate supply curves. An adept policy maker could, by pulling the right levers and twisting the right knobs, shift these curves and thereby set the economy on the proper course. Implicitly, to such a policy mastermind, the economy was populated with individuals who acted in reliable, predictable ways.

Some are accusing Sargent and Sims of finally recognizing that people aren't rational. This is not what they mean: the old Keynesian model did not utilize rational actors, but robots who acted according to simplified models without self-correcting behavior. In fact, some people are ahead of the curve, predicting the economists, and some people, well, some few people never learn. People are not perfectly rational, but neither are they mindless automatons.

Obama's marginal counter-revolution

2011-10-12T12:40:00.000-04:00

But why should we worry about them? Imagine for a moment that Buffett’s sentiments are fairly common and that even 19 out of 20 employers would just pay the higher taxes and only one would throw in the towel. What does it matter if there were only one tax-sensitive outlier in the bunch? That would be a mere 5 percent; should it really drive the whole conversation?

Why, yes… yes it should.

Clive Barker and the Dearthly Imagination

2011-09-17T02:50:00.000-04:00

Anyone else read Clive Barker? I'm halfway through Imajica. Is there a reason why the fiendishly creative author of the Books of Blood, the most inventive horror since H.P. Lovecraft, has done nothing in The Great and Secret Show and Imajica but re-write Weaveworld, only not as well? Damn it, “In the Hills, the Cities” almost made my brain explode. Ian made me read it while he sat there so he could watch me experience the reading of it. Imajica makes me feel like I'm forever reading with the next clause pre-ringing in my head, already surfing the next sentence I haven't read yet.

(Not to mention Hellraiser, the single greatest re-imagining of Hell since Dante Alighieri. That is why an ex-girlfriend scorned sequel Pinhead in the Catholic church: the Cenobites were miles away from Christianity.)

Hitchens on “The Personal Is Political”

2011-08-29T19:06:00.000-04:00

Christopher Hitchens on the most awful catchphrase ever:

As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

The Dead Horse theory

2011-08-10T14:02:00.001-04:00

From the Steitz for Senate page, the Dead Horse theory:

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

However, in government and education more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

Buying a stronger whip.
Changing riders.
Appointing a committee to study the horse.
Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse's performance.
Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And of course....

Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

US Congressional term limits

2011-07-13T11:54:00.004-04:00

Recently on Facebook, I wrote:

Actually, I am opposed to a balanced budget amendment. Simply, I call it a “tax-hike amendment;” better by far to pass a “flat tax amendment:” if the “proles” want a 50% tax rate on the rich (I do not think the U.S. has many proles, nor do I think they want a rate this high), let them pay it, too. Under this amendment, any deviation from the flat tax would last 2 years and require a 3/5 majority in Congress to pass.

The idea is to make tax laws written for special interests more expensive. Only the broadest exemptions will be allowed (e.g., personal and dependent exemptions, &c.).

But someone asked about term limits. Will we weaken the Legislature against the bureaucracy if they are too low? Yes, but I have no idea how low that effect would begin. (Perhaps low term limits would simplify procedural rules, or not.)

That being said, I think 30 years is a good start on eliminating the Robt Byrds. Go to the Wikipedia page on the U.S. Senate members: click the small graphic under the column header “First took office.” We would eliminate 9 Senators: Inouye (D-HA), Leahy (D-VT), Lugar (R-IN), Hatch (R-UT), Levin (D-MI) (a sacrifice I will gladly make), Cochran (R-MS), Baucus (D-MT), Grassley (R-IA), Bingaman (D-MN). 5 Dems, 4 Repubs: 9% is not bad. We could also allow a Senator to serve less than half an extra term if raised to office in a special election.

The House should be lower, but how much? Let's try 28 as a start. Let's look at the House membership lost: Dingell (D-MI), Conyers (D-MI), Young (R-FL), Rangel (D-NY), Young (R-AK), Stark (D-CA), Miller (D-CA), Waxman (D-CA), Markey (D-MA), Killdee (D-MI), Dicks (D-WA), Rahall (D-WV), Lewis (R-CA), Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Petri (R-WI), Smith (R-NJ), Dreier (R-CA), Rogers (R-KY), Hoyer (D-MA), Frank (D-MA) (YES!), Hall (R-TX), Wolf (R-VA), Berman (D-CA), Burton (R-IN), Levin (D-MI), Ackerman (D-NY), Towns (D-NY), Kaptur (D-OH).

17 Dems, 11 Repubs. 6.43% of the total. Sadly, Frank would still have been around to cover Fannie and Freddie and get a job at the former for his then current butt-buddy. (I'm bisexual, I can say it.) So this amendment, as I noted, will not guarantee good government: we're basically eliminating deadwood.

Boehner is serving his 10th term and Pelosi was well under 28 years when she served. McConnell (who opposed McCain-Feingold) is fresh on his 5th term. McConnell could be replaced by Shelby, McCain, Hutchison, Kyl, Inhofe; all have 15+ years in the Senate right now, and more would accumulate that experience in the next 4+ years. Going back to the Nixon era, all Senate Majority Leaders were serving under 30 years during their leadership tenure, so leadership would not be affected.

Of Wine and Whiners

2011-07-09T20:18:00.000-04:00

We read in Althouse some manufactured Talking Points Memo rage after Congressman Paul Ryan's (R-WI) tablemate ordered a bottle of $300-plus wine. Ryan had a glass and insisted on paying his share. Please note this prevents Ryan from being indebted to this acquaintance, you'll be a step ahead of the game. (The Leftie and her Enraged Ovaries do not mention Pelosi One and the $100,000.00-plus liquor bill she racked up.)

Althouse notes:

TPM should be ashamed of itself passing along this embarrassing story and for the way it presented this material. In the middle of the piece, TPM informs us of Congressional ethics rules barring expensive gifts from lobbyists. I was thinking: Oh, maybe this is a serious problem. But if you keep reading, much further down, you see that Ryan paid for the meal with his own credit card, and TPM saw the receipt. Ridiculous! What hackery from the once-respectable Talking Points Memo!

Why is this so surprising? My mom listens to Rush Limbaugh religiously, so one day, when I read Josh of TPM babbling about how good he was to complain about Bush putting troops into Afghanistan, since righties were complaining about US involvement in Kosovo, I wrote him to tell him I had heard Limbaugh (mentioned specifically by TPM as one of these Cassandras) assuring his listeners not to be worried if the US military needed to put boots on the ground in the Balkans. His response? "Well, he probably said something else like it, so it doesn't really matter!"

Once a dirty, lying shitbag, forever a dirty, lying shitbag. Why so surprised?

Democratic Astroturf and false flag operations

2011-07-05T23:38:00.001-04:00

I have just gotten some Democratic false flag astroturf in an email from some outfit calling itself the National Tea Party Alert. These people are busy trying to convince us that the Gipper loved tax hikes, just like Joe Biden. Email follows:

Throwing The Gipper Under The Bus

It's impossible to overstate both the importance and impact that President Ronald Reagan had on the modern conservative movement. Actually, one could be forgiven for definitively stating that Reagan was the founder of the modern conservative movement. The problem with holding such an exalted position is that it's easy for people on both sides of a debate to co opt your legacy for their own purposes.

Reagan is rightfully exalted for being the godfather of supply side economic theory. He didn't develop it (Economist Arthur Laffer did), nor did he even modify it, but he was certainly his most enthusiastic supporter (with former congressman Jack Kemp coming in a close second) and the economic growth that his policies helped create were unprecedented in American history.

The problem with the Reagan presidency is separating fact from fiction, and nowhere is this problem more evident than in the current debate over extending the national debt ceiling. House republicans, led by John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan have insisted that no tax increases are up for discussion, with Speaker Boehner saying, "...tax increases are unacceptable and are a nonstarter"

Oddly enough, the record shows that supply side cheerleader Ronald Reagan himself incorporated tax increases into his economic recovery plans, most famously into 1982's Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, though there were four more tax increases in the remaining six years of his presidency, with a total of $190 billion (in today's dollars) in revenue increases coming from those tax hikes. That's an amount significantly above what Vice President Biden is calling for during the recent deficit talks with GOP leaders.

In hindsight, one of Ronald Reagan's most enduring legacies was the economic recovery from the 1970's "malaise" and it's staggering, long-term positive impact on both our economy and our society as a whole. No one is doing Reagan's legacy any favors by misstating it's essential truths.

Ronald Reagan's revolution, despised and fought by, at the time, 95% of America's media establishment, was and is incomplete, and in the same way that America's revolution is incomplete. All men are not yet free. All are not guaranteed their rights, due by Nature and Nature's God, of life, liberty and property. Reagan famously said, "Better to get 80% of what you want now and go for the rest later." Reagan, working with a Democratic Congress after 1982, managed to rein in government growth. I appreciate the man for what he did, against all headwinds. But we must surpass the teacher, not repeat his mistakes and forced strategic retreats. Ronald Reagan is dead. Long live Reaganism.

And political death to tax-and-spend Leftists and con men.

From Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin

2011-05-27T01:03:00.000-04:00

Inspired by this.

I was born in January. I was 11 for the 1980 election.

The Iranian Hostage Crisis is my first political memory. The '81 recession is my next. After that was the glorious recovery; everyone could see it. Berke Breathed (a self-described "schmiberal") teased libs in Bloom County over the success of the Reagan Revolution.

Ronnie rolled over the '84 election like the USS Iowa over a sailboat. Iran-Contra was a bit of a black eye, but frankly, if he was trying to deal with the fscking Iranians, how could the Democrats have ever called this guy a warmonger?!?

I was a libertarian: I'd read Heinlein from junior high on, but aside from a belief in small govt., I was terribly uninformed. I did keep my eyes open, learned about the Venona intercepts (which helped vindicated the anti-Communists) and generally sneered at socialism—but my understanding was terribly shallow.

Hell, in 2000 I voted for Gore.

Please understand: I'm half gay (I'd say "bisexual" if it didn't sound so damned pretentious) and Pat Buchanan repelled me. (Still does.) Now he's a recognized pariah, but in 1992 he had addressed the Republican convention: hey, I hadn't expected him to lurve teh gheys, but he was seriously bent about the whole subject.

The first Gulf War? I supported it. Congress approved hostilities 2 days before my birthday. I was just 22.

I thought I was cannon-fodder.

Again, please understand: I was brainwashed by the media. Do you remember how they hyped that "fourth largest army in the world"? Aside from Grenada, what had we done since Vietnam and Jimmy's abortion of a military op that ended in fire in the sands of Iran? Our Congress-critters and the media were warning us to expect 20,000 casualties!

See, I didn't know. I didn't know how close we came to sealing victory in Nam before Congress cut off the money. I didn't know the military had, in fact, seriously revised its tools, tactics and strategy. I was also seriously unaware that those damned $600 hammers no one could shut up about were, in fact, seriously worth every G-d damned penny and that they were in fact all copies of Mjolnir because I was dancing around my rented room in my buddy's house when the U.S. military swept in like the wrath of an angry god.

I was treated to the sights of preening Congressional braggadocio only days after they had been staining the marble floors yellow.

And then we left Saddam Hussein in place. Remember how that felt?! After all that build-up, it was like a body blow. It was terrible hearing about the Shia, but a friend who was in the Army for Desert Storm explained exactly just how messed up the Middle East was, and how our occupation of Iraq would probably indeed set the place on fire just as I had been imagining only weeks before.

Clinton. I never hated Clinton. Gingrich could be a bit much, but he wasn't in the media so often. It was nice to see a Republican House. I was only upset that they never passed term limits. Government shutdown? Yeah, and that wrecked my day how, exactly?

I mostly voted Republican or Libertarian. It was easy to see how the unions were hurting Michigan; easy to see how their job rules, future pay pensions and hidden costs were hurting Detroit.

I know that the Federal government would have nothing to do with homosexuality if it wasn't for its Socialist tendencies. Social Security makes gay marriage a necessary Federal issue, nothing else. If all the Federal government had to say on it was about gay partners of US citizens being granted citizenship after a few years, we'd have it already.

One more down, and the future…

2011-05-02T13:59:00.002-04:00

Famous asshole Osama bin Laden is dead. Kudos to President Obama for pursuing a military policy of targeted killings that former President Bush would applaud. Meanwhile, for the Left, war is still all about us. As for bin Laden himself… I have nothing to say. Islamist terror long preceded him and will, sadly, survive him. We must endure.

But let's take a protip from the Left, and talk about us. Besides, I wanted to link these yesterday afternoon, and why start a new post?

Hillsdale College's Paul A. Rahe ticks down the list of Republican contenders for President. First, he covers former Gov Romney, former Speaker Gingrich and former Gov. Huckabee, contrasting Gov. Mitch Daniels and Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Second, he covers two very different fiscal hawks: Paul Ryan and Ron Paul. Rahe then finishes with Sarah Palin, admitting he draws a blank on her. But, Rahe suspects, Palin will not let him remain blank on her for long.

Dr Helen Stumps for Trump

2011-03-30T08:39:00.000-04:00

Elsewhere on Google Blogspot, Instapundit’s prettier, smarter half, Dr Helen, tells us Why I Like Donald Trump. She has very sensible reasons, of course, but I have one caveat.

As much as I dislike politicians, their Statism and their arrogance, they actually do have job skills. They build consensus, lead legislative and partisan rebellions and attacks, and generally politick and maintain diplomatic relations with people they want dead. They also have to establish and maintain a relationship with large groups in their political base. I have not yet seen Donald Trump do any of these things, but if he starts displaying these skills in public, I will willingly vote for him.

Net Neutrality: Threat or Menace? Part II

2011-03-24T13:01:00.002-04:00

ETA: Part I here.

From last year, a notice on regulating the Internet. Henry “Socialism with a Human Face” Waxman (D-CA) was trying to get Republicans down with his Net neutrality bill, which contained God knows how many unspeakable traps for the future of conservatives and classical Liberals alike. This was a classic shakedown, using the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) illegal threats to regulate Internet speech as cover.
Why is Net neutrality bad? Net neutrality comes in two forms, the Greater and the Lesser.

Greater Net neutrality is the attempt to make charging for network latency illegal, or at least regulated.
Proponents say this is lovely because evil ISPs (Internet Service Providers, like dial-up, DSL and broadband, and did we mention they’re CORPORATE!?!) want to feed you laggy packets to destroy your EverCrack accomplishments (a-hem) and make your YouTube Caturday vids shudder.
Of course, the idea of charging latency to end users is ridiculous.
It would be impossible to track latency on packets from 1,000,000,000 computers.
This is for the computers at YouTube, Netflix, &c. Big corporate customers with easily identifiable packets.
Why should they not be charged for latency?
Don’t they get charged for bandwidth? How is bandwidth any different than latency or setting a maximum lost packets Service Level Agreement?
How do the ISPs expect to get away with making latency worse for their big corporate clients?
They don’t.
In fact, latency advisory bits are in the TCP/IP protocol and have been since the early ’80s.
The real problem with latency is making all ISPs and Internet backbones support them to a certain level.
See, since they outlawed “collusion,” any industry-wide agreement must have political support.
Which is why corporations give lots of money to politicians,
Who are very busy fondling underaged pages and don’t want to take time out to work on legislation for some stupid industry,
Just because it creates or enables thousands of jobs in their state or district.
They have lives, you know.
So they demand money from the corporations.
Which would not be too bad, really,
As the corporations have the dough,
But the politicians insists that they are “protecting” us from the evil corporations,
When in reality the politicians just did the corporations a service for a huge fee,
Which makes sense seeing as how most of them are lawyers and they’re used to acting this way.
But the lies the politicians tell us cause the rest of us to live in fear, either from corporations or politicians.

So, that is the Greater argument on Net neutrality. It’s a little technical, and a little corporate lawyerly, but there it is. The only problem with Net neutrality is that the politicians want to lie to us about a fake threat to make themselves seem more important.

In the Declaration of Independence, this was called “the Insolence of office.”

The Lesser argument is the argument of so-called Free Speech, and comes in two parts. ISPs tend to use software packages to set up home computers, these frequently set up your browser home page. AT&T has a partnership with Yahoo!: the latter provides and administers email accounts and provides the newspaper-like home pages for Web browsers. (Please note, these home pages can be changed at any time.) Almost all Americans are so inured to advertising that this is barely noticed.

However, the corporations are limited in what they can offer. It has to be pretty bland, lest they annoy their paying customers. My dad, a person who regards his computer in much the same way most Americans regards Europe, as barely-reliable allies, managed to change his home page (to something equally as bland, heh).

But if the government starts setting standards, we run into a corruption and rent-seeking problem, where the limits on possible home pages will be jiggered to certain sites. Home page providers will be incentivized to buy politicians to keep their content legal and acceptable. Sadly, money will be the least of the dirty goods offered in exchange. Content will also be neutered and emasculated, lest it upset the Would Be Powers That Be in the crappiest school district in the United States.

(Washington, D.C., you dumb lefties.)

As Friedrich A. Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, the power of, say, fathers over their children is fairly large, but it also has a time limit and various traditional limits. But if the State (or the Feds) usurps this power, they wield the combined power of a hundred million fathers as a united tool — or weapon.

Bad. Very bad. But it gets worse.

See, the alternate definition of Net neutrality is the prevention of ISPs from blocking traffic to various websites. But again we must, per Frédéric Bastiat (or Penn Gillette), look not at the seen, but the unseen. No government law will protect access to child porn or such; it is impossible. Therefore, the law that demands that ISPs not block traffic to some websites will protect those ISPs that block traffic to others, ipso facto.

There is no reason pass Net neutrality, unless it is to create an industry standard for latency for traffic sensitive to lag. The rest is rent-seeking and politico-criminal shakedowns.

So there.

The Donald hits a popular vein

2011-03-24T09:33:00.000-04:00

Yes, Obama should publish his real birth certificate. But he won’t. And this is why (50/50):

His birthplace is outside of the United States. And so what? So is McCain’s. Obama is the son of an American mother and so he is an American citizen. But what if Mummy renounced her citizenship in her revolutionary fervor? This is actually kind of hard to do now, the United Nations Declaration is against it. (Haha! Sorry, just a sec…)
His birth certificate says, “Muslim.”

None of these things really matter.

Long story short, because Adolf Hitler was staatlos in Germany after renouncing his Austrian citizenship, stateless people are seen are problematic, so everyone is “assigned” a nation by the UN. Now, even before this, the U.S. was in the habit of accepting people back: think of it as an international hygienic protocol. So if his mom did renounce, the U.S. would likely have accepted her back anyway. But it would be immediately contested and, ultimately, come down to nothing more than a judge’s opinion as to whether the light bulb really wanted to renounce its nationality.

Finally, if his birth certificate really does say Muslim, and if we accept that the Rev. Wright’s church is… nominally… Christian, then he is an apostate, a religious unperson, a legitimate assassination target in most of the Middle East. Now, while we might cheer W when he said, “Bring it on,” we must be clear that Obama is no Bush and not likely to weather such a storm well. For the peace of mind of the American nation, and our foreign policy, I hereby approve of the CIA breaking into the Hawai’ian Hall of Records, scratching out “Muslim” and substituting “Christian.”

So there.

A general strike in Michigan? Yes, say teachers

2011-03-17T16:00:00.000-04:00

A Conservative Teacher writes that teachers will try for a general strike in May. This is a little insane, but not too insane for the unions:

My sources in the MEA indicate that the MEA is preparing for a teachers strike in May and will ask that other unions also join in this strike… Michigan's striking teachers would be supported and joined by all union workers in the state of Michigan, from government employees, police, fire, and private labor unions like the UAW…

Let's be prepared for the fight of our lives.

God save us from the peaceful non-violence of the Left...

2011-01-12T06:22:00.001-05:00

During the era of the Fairness Doctrine:

Harry Truman was shot at by Puerto Rican separatists,
JFK was targeted by an elderly postal worker before he was killed by a Communist,
RFK was killed by a Jew-hating Christian Palestinian,
MLK was killed by a George Wallace Democrat,
Malcolm X was killed by Nation of Islam thugs,
Richard Nixon was targeted by a Jewish would-be Black Panther,
George Wallace was shot by a actual nutjob,
Jerry Ford was shot at by a filthy hippie and a stupid radical,
Finally, Ronald Reagan was shot by another actual nutjob.

Then Ronald Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, and all this ended. Saddam Hussein tried to kill George H.W. Bush in Kuwait after the Gulf War (a war act by a Stalin fan) and one guy died landing his plane in front of the Clinton-era White House (friends suggested it was a publicity stunt, not an assassination attempt).

Bill Clinton saw an ex-military ex-con (convicted and imprisoned by the US Army for violent assault) subdued by the Secret Service for shooting at people on the White House lawn. Thank God, no one was harmed.
George W. Bush, of course, lived through several assassination attempts, almost all connected with al Qaeda, except for another nutjob who tried before 9/11. Again, no one was harmed.

Two plots against Barack Obama, mostly staffed by moronic losers, were interrupted by the Secret Service and other officers. This is made possible entirely by better policing. Final summation:

Thought control: ineffective.
Suppressing conspiracy theorists: lets them fester and explode.
Exposing them: shrinks and humiliates them.
Effective law enforcement: saves lives.

End of argument.

“Finally, America has a black President again…”

2010-12-11T13:15:00.001-05:00

… was the response when Barack Obama put Bill Clinton in charge again. As Fox News’ Andy Levy said, “That was the best episode of VH-1’s I Love The 90s ever!”

Clinton said he was “excited and honored” by the appointment, and would work “day and night” to defeat all the key policy objectives proposed by Mr. Obama during the campaign.

Ed Driscoll linked the above, noting that the above was written November 24, 2008, making Iowahawk, along with IMAO’s Frank J., who predicted the U.S. would slam an explosive warhead into Earth’s satellite, one of the few true prophets of the Internet. /bows head “May death come swiftly to their enemies.”

Jim Treacher asked, apparently watching TV with the sound off, echoing others: “Did Obama just quit?… Say what you want about Sarah Palin quitting her job, but at least she finished her own press conference.”

In “Great news: Bill Clinton apparently now president again”:

The depressing truth: Given the alternative, it really would be great news.

I can’t do justice to what you’re about to see. The spectacle of the president bugging out of his own press conference to go to a Christmas party is weird enough, but having Clinton back at the White House podium fielding questions on the hottest domestic issue of the day shoots past deja vu and lands firmly in “am I hallucinating?” territory.

At Pajamas Media, Bryan Preston wrote:

Clinton looks quite a bit older now, true, but he also looks like he’s in charge. He handled the press as well as he ever did, which is a stark contrast to the way the current president mishandled the press — twice — earlier this week.

After Clinton ended the press conference, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan came on and asked about the “optics” of all this.

Here’s what I saw. I saw a current president who has never looked less interested in doing his job. I also saw a former president who never lost interest in doing that job.

The New York Times tells how it happened. Even MSNBC was shocked.

Thank for the heads-up from the mighty, puppy-drinking Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, in whose great, dark Shadow we all serve. And, of course, more death, more enemies. /unbows head.

p.s. National Review’s @JonahNRO Goldberg tweeted in agony, “Arrrrrgh!! I missed the whole Clinton-Obama press conference! Was busy buying an X-mas tree.” Andy Levy haughtily scorned: “Worst media-running Jew ever.”

Net Neutrality: Threat or Menace?

2010-12-10T00:05:00.002-05:00

ETA: Part II here.

“But one expert says Net Neutrality isn’t about regulating content on the Internet or the Fairness Doctrine.” Heritage.org via Mackinac.org.

Stupid, guys. First off, we already have per-GB pricing. Every server hosting account, every home machine is tied to a tier plan, priced and measured for bandwidth. Net Neutrality is very, very late to this battle. Presently the FCC is considering the legality of per-bit pricing, as opposed to tiered service. This is a power the states have already.

Net Neutrality has two different advances: one is outlawing latency billing, the other is outlawing ISPs from blocking or rate-limiting some sites. Latency billing first: I approve of it in principle, though an ISP could abuse it. TCP/IP has a latency protocol built-in. ISPs already charge you more per GB and for GB/s. What, I’m sorry, is it in the Bible that bandwidth pricing is true and holy, but those who charge for latency shall surely die? I don't recall that bit.

Government control of site access: it would allow the U.S. government to choose which least-favored sites get to be hamstrung. In the hands of a corporation, this is a nuisance; in government, it is a menace. Basic Hayek, c’mon.

Most providers now set up a home page for you: AT&T teams with Yahoo for their consumer home page. This can easily be reset. But the government is considering ruling on legal and illegal home pages: a power the states already have and the U.S. government does not need.

Net Neutrality: a power government does not need.

The Monumental Stupidity of WackyLeaks

2010-12-01T12:57:00.001-05:00

@daveweigel Alas, Leslie Nielsen will never get to star in my comedy about a bunch of bumbling anti-war hackers, WackyLeaks. #toosoon

Michael Ledeen of Pajamas Media is old and wise enough to have his laughs while he can about WackyLeaks, quoting Kissinger: “the only reason to write a memo is to have it leaked.” But again, still wise enough to note:

Second, the leakers should be punished violently. It has to be possible for our leaders to talk privately, both among themselves and with foreigners. If it’s all going to be leaked, candor will vanish and we will be locked into a wilderness of mirrors.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg notes James Rubin of TNR noting that, while some leaks are laudable (his and my valuation differ greatly):

… The essential tool of State Department diplomacy is trust between American officials and their foreign counterparts. Unlike the Pentagon which has military forces, or the Treasury Department which has financial tools, the State Department functions mainly by winning the trust of foreign officials, sharing information, and persuading… Destroying confidentiality means destroying diplomacy…

The Wikileaks document dump, unlike the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, shows that American private communication with foreign leaders by and large reflects the same sentiments offered by U.S. officials in public… The big hypocrisies here are not being perpetrated by Americans; they are being perpetrated by foreign governments, namely non-democratic ones… The hard left, so quick to demand that America accept other countries’ political systems, now seems blind to the fact that other governments want to have the right to say one thing in public and a different thing in private. By respecting that difference, American diplomats are doing their job.

Important to the Left, certainly. But why did Ledeen recommend punishment? Heather Hurlburt notes (I have greatly condensed, please read the article for the meat of it):

Fear of candor in diplomacy,
Middle Eastern officials are already getting more skittish about cooperating with America and the West,
Even Russia, an infamously hard case, is getting worse,
Historical document preservation is damaged,
The anti-paranoia movement for classified documents is damaged,
Again, the military is undamaged, but the diplomatic corps is pierced in its internals.

Three pictures of the U.S. Women’s Water Polo team

2010-11-18T15:44:00.001-05:00

Being bisexual, a classical liberal, and anti-Marxist, I am neither a prude nor a Puritan. Nevertheless, I am not happy about this ESPN nude pic of the U.S. Womens’ Water Polo team. Not that it is nude, but it is simply not very good. The pose is contrived, but not well constructed, and almost everyone looks uncomfortable as hell. Now, wild fantasizing about lesbian sex in the locker room to one side (take a moment to clear your mind, I’ll wait), most of these women are straight. A bunch are likely leery of intramural relationships as well, so, straight or gay, they probably are not into the close contact. Not only is it not a good picture, but we’re also pulled out by empathizing with their discomfort when we should be celebrating with them.

We now move on to this nude pic of the team, though it may not be all the same people. The comfort level is up a lot; they aren’t all bunched together. Also, it is both more and less revealing than the other picture: some of the women are in the background, some are surrounded by bubbles. The dappled underwater light also distorts and hides. This picture is far superior.

Finally, we move onto the last team picture. I was about to call this one fully-clothed, if only in comparison to the last two, but of course they are wearing standard womens’ one-piece bathing suits; they are hardly union suits with a strategically placed hole. But the confidence here is at an all-time high. These are proud, happy people working together: a team. We get to really see faces and body language here; we see individuals. Attractive, athletic individuals, yes, but consider: not many people can project personality over their own nudity. It just doesn’t happen; it’s why Madonna was often far sexier covered up than completely nude.

(I would also like to note it bunches my favorites in the second row; they must be the linebackers in water polo, phwaaaaa! And second from left, second row... sigh.)

Finally, I would like to denounce the nude pictures… but not for nudism, or not directly. The nude pics were undoubtedly money-makers for the team; again, I have no problem with that, per se. But where money and nudity meet is a place filled with moral compromise and other hazards. I would recommend care to all involved.

Some points

2010-11-05T01:47:00.005-04:00

I don’t have a TVTropes.org account. I had one, lost the password and now am locked out because TVT’s super-easy sign up has no recovery facility. So when I read about the Golden Mean Fallacy:

Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity could be seen as this.
The premise implies that both the far left and far right are full of crazies and those in the center are sane. His point is more that channels like Fox News are deliberately invoking this trope by presenting wildly extreme right wing ideas and contrasting them with relatively moderate left wing ideas, creating the impression that the truth is somewhere in the "middle"... which is actually still fairly far on the right.

I have no mouth, yet I must gag. Stewart is presumed innocent of trying to pull the conversation Left, and the writer of the second block is blissfully unaware that he has surreptitiously, or simply unconsciously, defined a middle all by him or herself. Pathetic.

Not to mention, an attempt to place the Overton Window.

Sagan against the current state of AGW

2010-10-13T09:01:00.003-04:00

Immanuel Velikovsky promulgated theories that astronomical collisions and near misses had caused various Biblical calamities and other catastrophes. Certainly, when it comes to mass extinction, he may have had something of a point. Scientists, of course, are no strangers to the herd mentality, and Velikovsky’s publishers, Macmillan, was threatened with scientific boycott.

Carl Sagan in Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (ep. 4) noted:

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong, thats perfectly all right, it’s the aperture to finding out whats right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that many of his ideas were wrong, or silly or in gross contradiction to the facts, rather, the worst aspect is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s ideas. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place for it in the endeavor of science.

6 more of the 15 books that always will stick with me…

2010-05-22T18:00:00.009-04:00

More of the same…

The Birds, Aristophanes: Okay, The Frogs is a more interesting premise, but The Birds actually shows us more of what the contemporaries of Socrates thought about various things by contrasting the ludicrous wishes of the foolish protagonists with what could only have been the sensible opinions of the Athenian middle and working classes. The wish for fathers who berate unemployed Sophists for not sexually stalking their teenage sons sinks the entire Foucauldian mess in a swamp.
The Book of J, Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg: Bloom is useful at all times, but his marvelous critique and rediscovery of the J author, along with a fantastic translation by the poet Rosenberg, drags the most unique voice in the Old Testament out from under King James: “The KJV, with its unified, high-toned and poetic voice, is the ultimate work of the Redactor.” Indispensable.
Sexual Personæ, Camille Paglia: Sadly, I have nothing to say about this book, except that it is the other half of my mind; what isn’t Paines-ian politics and Burkean temperament simply is Sexual Personæ.
The Iliad, Homer, trans. by Robert Fitzgerald: The Bible is an ancient work, written in ritualistic styles in four languages over many centuries by dozens of authors, and today hidden under translation. The Iliad, on the other hand, is immediate, accessible and mostly modern. Mostly, I say, because the morality is entirely foreign to us modern Westerners; I have as much trouble understanding the morality of the ancient Greeks as I do your average Hong Kong chop-socky flick. Everyone does nothing but whine about how long their name will live and how they will avenge their father, and I am utterly stymied at getting where they are coming from, because I, as a Westerner, am so Judaicized that I obsess over morality and my relationship with God.
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, George Santayana: “In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of Heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; as when we hear that to him that hath, shall be given, and from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath. Such characterizations appeal to our sense of fact. They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that He is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavor. For we naturally seek to express His awful actuality, His unchallengeable power, no less than His holiness and His beauty.”
Leaves of Grass, the first edition 1855, Walt Whitman, introduction by Malcolm Cowley: About the only useful thing I've ever seen from a Marxist (and editor of The New Republic, but I repeat myself), Malcolm Cowley resurrected the original 1855 first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with an introduction that, aside from a single snide comment on “bumptious American nationalism”, is a marvel of clarity and original thought on author intent (indeed, on the authorial state of mind). Cowley’s simple thesis is that Whitman was inspired by a transcendental experience: what Freud called “oceanic” and the Zen Buddhists call satori. Later rewrites clouded the original vision, but the 1855 edition may be seen bright and clear.

DONE!

2010-04-15T04:48:00.000-04:00

Brad Thor of Big Journalism writes:

I have just received word that the New York Times is preparing to go public with a list of names of Americans covertly working in Afghanistan providing force protection for our troops, as well as the rest of our Coalition Forces. If the Times actually sees this through, the red ink they are drowning in will be nothing compared to the blood their entire organization will be covered with. Make no mistake, the Times is about to cause casualty rates in Afghanistan to skyrocket. Each and every American should be outraged.

As chronicled here, here, here, and here the Central Intelligence Agency via the New York Times has been waging a nasty proxy war against the Department of Defense over its use of former military and intelligence personnel to do what the CIA is both incapable and unwilling to do: gather the much needed intelligence that keeps our troops safe.

Read it.

Two different views

2010-04-14T04:58:00.000-04:00

Robert Reich, as cutting as only an out-of-power Leftie can be, notes The Jobs Picture Still Looks Bleak, “Many outsourced jobs will never return, and median income will likely continue to fall just like it did during the last so-called recovery… Since the start of the Great Recession in December 2007, the economy has shed 8.4 million jobs and failed to create another 2.7 million required by an ever-larger pool of potential workers. That leaves us more than 11 million jobs behind.” Reich also makes the mistake of assuming that spending, not investment, creates wealth: the anti-Hayek.
On the other side of the aisle, New Jersey Gov. Christie gives the voters what they've been starving for: Reaganism, New Jersey Style:

Mr. Christie knows he needs to put the hard choices before the state's citizens, and to speak to them as adults. Budget cuts are unfair[?] “The special interests have already begun to scream their favorite word—which, coincidentally, is my 9-year-old son’s favorite word when we are making him do something he knows is right but does not want to do—‘unfair’… One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life, and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits—a total of $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?”

The Democrats’ Free Press Nazi

2010-03-26T05:07:00.000-04:00

So, if we’re going to be killing journalists like Chavez, can we start with Robert McChesney?

But most galling in light of Free Press’ assurances that we have nothing to worry about by inviting the feds into the media business, is McChesney’s defense of Chavez’s crackdown on opposition media in Venezuela. Regarding Venezuelan broadcaster RCTV, a persistent Chavez critic whose license was revoked by the president himself, McChesney suggests that if the station were broadcasting in the United States, “its license would have been revoked years ago,” and that “its owners would likely have been tried for criminal offenses, including treason.”

Davey Crockett answers a hard one

2010-03-19T03:09:00.001-04:00

No, Colonel, there’s no mistake. Though I live in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by a fire in Georgetown. Is that true?

“Not Yours To Give,” Col. David Crockett, Rep. (D-TN)

Public pensions: “The $2 Trillion Hole”

2010-03-16T02:02:00.000-04:00

Jonathon R. Laing writes at Barron’s:

Making the state and local pension problem all the more trying is that government entities can do little to wriggle out of their exposure, even if spending on essential services is threatened. The constitutions of nine states, including beleaguered California and Illinois, guarantee public-pension payments. And most other states have strong statutory or case-law protections for these obligations. “One shouldn’t be surprised by this, since state legislators, state and local judges and the state attorneys general are beneficiaries of the self-same public pension funds that they’ve done so much to promote and protect,” Orin Kramer notes wryly.

Lovely.

A distant mirror?

2010-03-14T14:21:00.001-04:00

Doctor Zero at Hot Air forwards a challenging theory in Obama by proxy:

They dismiss Going Rogue as “ghost written” while ignoring the specter of Bill Ayers plodding through Obama’s books, a sputtering bomb clutched in its skeletal fingers. A few lines scribbled on Palin’s palm glow more brightly in their imaginations than terabytes of data flowing across the screen of Obama’s teleprompter. They accuse Palin of being a “divisive” and “polarizing” figure, while Obama launches Taxi Driver rants against evil insurance companies, cops acting stupidly, tonsil-stealing doctors, and everyone else who crosses his path.

I used to dismiss these contradictions as simply hypocrisy, but perhaps these people are angry at Palin because of her perceived similarities to Barack Obama, not in spite of them. They need someplace to ground the lightning of their frustration and disappointment, and they’re not allowed to be angry at Obama.

Or maybe it isn’t unconscious at all, it’s intentional: accuse the other guy of a history of lying just as you’re laying down your biggest whopper.

Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you

2010-03-13T07:42:00.014-05:00

Oh, all right:

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany: What Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow tried to be, Dhalgren simply was. Circular, impressionistic, post-modern, but what the book did best was convey a world without time. I have read too many books to ignore the creaking of sets and plot behind the curtains, and I hate them. Dhalgren creates a real world where things just happen, on their own time, for reasons you may never know, yet is utterly gripping. The space and freedom in this book is so massive it may have inspired Grand Theft Auto 3.
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein: His juveniles are often more direct and vivid (see the marvelous Tunnel in the Sky for seat-of-your-pants adventure and angst) but SiaSL is where The Mighty Bob (gentile twin of that other, equally mighty Bob, Dylan) pulled theology, science and philosophy right into the heart of the sphere of the man of action.
A Fine and Private Place, Peter S. Beagle: Not as mature nor as expansive as his Folk of the Air, nor as purely inventive as The Last Unicorn, both great reads full of careful intelligence, this book was written when he was only 19 years old. It reads far more maturely than you would think (as you mentally handicap it). The raven is my personal hero: “There are people who give, and people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don't do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It's born in you, whether you give or take, and that's the way you are.” Chilling.
Walden, Henry David Thoreau: Once you read this you can never be satisfied simply with more (not even with more pointless self-sacrifice, an idea that would have disgusted Thoreau). You will weigh your life and analyze it to see how you are being wasteful, or profligate, or simply not thinking things through. Thoreau was a product of Harvard before the demise of that institution; his intelligence, his awareness of his own marginality, is immense. He critiques his neighbors the local farmers, but I think he was never quite unaware of what they thought of him, and I think he took their opinions seriously. Did you know he ran the family business purifying graphite to sell to pencil makers, building and improving the machinery?
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard: The New York Times called her “no mere romantic twirling a buttercup,” which is hilarious and wrong both ways. First off, she is a romantic twirling a buttercup, and apparently no one at the Times knows just how dangerous they can be. Put this next to Walden and it will happily share the shelf, both alike and utterly different. There is no higher praise.
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu, trans. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English: Memory fails. I may have read The Tao of Pooh first, but this book cemented itself on my mind. Clear, spare, profound in its silence lest it stutter, this is honestly the only book in the world I would stand next to the Bible. Chuang Tsu's Inner Chapters is subtle comedic relief compared to the first.
Engine Summer, John Crowley: Yes, I read Little, Big first, and again, more expansive, more mature, more everything, but Engine Summer stood me on my head. Some reviewer said he wrote “as if the author had never read science fiction, but had only had it described to him.” Yes. Elegiac as only science fiction can be, as only it and high fantasy can compass the death of civilizations, and sad, and so carefully written you will have no idea how bold this book is.
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien: What could I say about this book? Tolkien, who created his own languages for fun, never wrote an ugly sentence. Ever. Read the chapter in the Mines of Moria again. See how quiet everything becomes? Some post-modernist cheesehead would have repeated “dark” and “grave-like” thinking himself an impressionist; Tolkien simply writes dark and quietly. Amazing. Actually, the series has three ugly sentences, all in the mouths of his irredeemable villains. The man, a World War I veteran, had no understanding of evil because he had none in him. For more on the Oxford don's morality, I turn to Spengler: “The Ring and the Remnants of the West” and “Tolkien's Christianity and the pagan tragedy.”
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny: Again, I could choose the more expansive Chronicles of Amber (first five only, please) or an eclectic short story collection such as The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth. But Lord of Light is the one book I returned to again and again. Zelazny was a poet writing prose and, similarly yet so different from Heinlein, the man of thought bringing to life the man of action. Bring your demon repellent.

Okay, nine (Princes in Amber) is all I have time for tonight. This morning. Six more later.

ETA: Okay, I ended up with five-six, no-yes, more later.

Walter Russell Mead on Israel and lobbies

2010-03-12T14:04:00.002-05:00

Walter Russell Mead, author of the best essay on American foreign policy as an offshoot of domestic policies, "The Jacksonian Tradition" of 1999, confronts many of the misguided critics of "the Israel Lobby" in his blog at The American Interest.

In "Don’t Blame The Jews":: A conspiratorial-minded and paranoid Jew could come up with a description of the modern Zionist movement as a gentile plot against the Jews: to push them all into a narrow, inhospitable strip of desert land entirely surrounded by people who hate them. This in fact is one reason so many American Jewish leaders opposed the Zionist movement in the early years. They saw it as a kind of “Jewish Liberia”; just as whites once hoped to recolonize African-Americans in Africa they might want to send the Jews ‘back’ to their ‘home.’
In "The Israel Lobby and Gentile Power":: Politicians don’t fear the loss of National Rifle Association PAC money nearly as much as they fear the loss of millions of pro-gun votes at the next election. This, I think is why AIPAC is so powerful. To be convincingly labeled an anti-Israel politician is the kiss of death almost everywhere in the United States — just as to be anti-gun is the kiss of death.
And finally, "Is This Lobby Different From All Others?":: What the Zionist movement asked from Americans at this time, and what it got, was pretty much what the other nationalities got: Sympathy and good offices before World War One, American support at Versailles. You could argue that this was exceptional treatment; unlike the other ethnic minorities, Jews did not have a large national terrain where they were in the majority. Persecuted almost everywhere, they needed a state more than anybody else, but scattered across Europe and the Middle East it was harder to find one for them.

"Masters of the possible, simply because they had to be."

2010-03-12T04:51:00.000-05:00

Richard Fernandez, formerly known as The Belmont Club, is depressed that the U.S. military may have gotten too good for its own good:

What America has gotten, Kaplan says, is a quasi-imperial corps. Ironically, what brought about the revival of the imperial capability was the disinterest of the intellectual elite, who were too good to devote much time to the problems of failed beyond uttering banal generalities. So they left it to the men on the spot and forgot about them. That cut-off may have been just as well because George Orwell claimed that the British Empire had been ‘killed by the telegraph’.

Obama’s neglect may have been a blessing... which brings its own dangers:

This show of organizational dynamism points to a ground truth: despite the awful toll of casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, American ground troops are emerging nearly a decade after 9/11 as a force that is even more organizationally and intellectually formidable than it was after the Berlin Wall collapsed, when the United States was the lone superpower. Army and Marine Corps company commanders, for example, can lead in a conventional fight and, as Kolenda’s experience showed, also bring order to chaotic tribal and ethnic messes, all while they communicate effectively up the bureaucratic chain (a skill they began to hone before 9/11, in the Balkans). And these officers have mastered what is, in fact, the colonial technique of partnering with indigenous forces molded in their own image. Rodriguez’s command is a culmination of this whole experience.

But the very dominance of the U.S. military can lead to a dangerous delusion.

Robert D. Kaplan also shares some of his memories of Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion:

Afghanistan is not some barbaric back-of-beyond, but the heart of a cultural continuum connecting the cosmopolitan centers of Persia and India. In fact, Afghanistan has been governed from the center since the 18th century: Kabul, if not always a point of authority, has been at least a point of arbitration. Especially between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, Afghanistan experienced moderate and constructive government under the constitutional monarchy of Zahir Shah. A highway system on which it was safe to travel united the major cities, while estimable health and development programs were on the verge of eradicating malaria. Toward the end of this period, I hitchhiked and rode buses across Afghanistan. I never felt threatened, and I was able to send books and clothes back home through functioning post offices.

There was, too, a strong Afghan national identity distinct from that of Iran or Pakistan or the Soviet Union. Pashtunistan might be a real enough geographic construct, but so, very definitely, is Afghanistan. As Ismail Akbar, a writer and analyst in Kabul, told me: “Thirty years of war and Pakistani interference have weakened Afghan national identity from the heights of the Zahir Shah period. But even the mujahideen civil war of the early 1990s, in which the groups were split along ethnic lines, could not break up Afghanistan. And if that couldn’t, nothing will.”

Afghans were so desperate for a reunited country after the internecine fighting of the mujahideen era that they welcomed the Taliban in Kandahar in 1994 and in Kabul in 1996, as a bulwark against anarchy and dissolution. Afghanistan, frail and battered over the years, is nevertheless surprisingly sturdy as a concept and as a cynosure of identity.

68% now oppose passing ObamaCare without Republican support

2010-03-11T04:21:00.000-05:00

Allahpundit, via Instapundit, notes:

More than four in five Americans say it’s important that any health care plan have support from both parties. And 68 percent say the president and congressional Democrats should keep trying to cut a deal with Republicans rather than pass a bill with no GOP support…

Have you bribed your doctor today?

2010-03-10T13:50:00.000-05:00

James Lewis of Pajamas Media, discusses the importance of socialized medicine to our new All-American nomenklatura.

Dafydd ab Hugh examined the corruption inherent in a system divorced from the idea of an honest price; quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, but in this article Japan.

National Journal's "The Health Care Whip Count"

2010-03-10T13:40:00.000-05:00

Oh, look! A list of people to call! By Reid Wilson! Let's just list the Michigan folks, 'kay?

Dem Targets: No On Reform, No On Stupak (15)
Member District Comments

Dem Long Shots: No On Reform, Yes On Stupak (21)

GOP Targets: Yes On Reform, Yes On Stupak (40)
Dale Kildee MI05
Bart Stupak MI01 Abortion concerns

GOP Long Shots: Dem Freshmen (16)
Gary Peters MI09
Mark Schauer MI07

The Economist, “The worldwide war on baby girls”

2010-03-08T16:51:00.000-05:00

A terrifying story, but one with a surprise twist.

The use of sex-selective abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most countries (though Sweden legalised the practice in 2009). But since it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection, the practice remains widespread. An ultrasound scan costs about $12, which is within the scope of many—perhaps most—Chinese and Indian families. In one hospital in Punjab, in northern India, the only girls born after a round of ultrasound scans had been mistakenly identified as boys, or else had a male twin.

Huh?

Instapundit quoted by Rush

2010-03-08T15:33:00.001-05:00

Not a few minutes ago, I was listening to my mom listening to Rush Limbaugh when he announced that Glenn Reynolds had written a great article and quoted it extensively.

But now things are looking a bit dicey. According to a recent Rasmussen Poll , only 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. On the other hand, Rasmussen notes, a full 63 percent of the "political class" believe that the government enjoys the consent of the governed.

Kudos to the mighty Instapundit, in whose beneficent shadow we serve. ;-)

Diana West: The heir of Pym Fortuyn at the House of Lords

2010-03-08T15:24:00.000-05:00

Overcoming the filthy Labour move to declare him persona non grata, Geert Wilders addresses the House of Lords:

Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t have a problem and my party does not have a problem with Muslims as such. There are many moderate Muslims. The majority of Muslims are law-abiding citizens and want to live a peaceful life as you and I do. I know that. That is why I always make a clear distinction between the people, the Muslims, and the ideology, between Islam and Muslims. There are many moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.

No wonder that Winston Churchill called Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf “the new Quran of faith and war, turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.” As you know, Churchill made this comparison, between the Koran and Mein Kampf, in his book ‘The Second World War’, a master piece, for which, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Churchill’s comparison of the Quran and Mein Kampf is absolutely spot on. The core of the Quran is the call to jihad. Jihad means a lot of things and is Arabic for battle. Kampf is German for battle. Jihad and kampf mean exactly the same.

I ♥ feminism…

2010-03-08T14:36:00.002-05:00

… I ♥ watching it burn.

Dr. Judy Kuriansky has a kindlier perspective on the emo boy. “This is the type of man that women have been screaming and begging for for years,” she said a bit reprovingly. “I’ve done innumerable research studies about this: after 20 years of asking what are the top three qualities that women want in a man, what comes out overwhelmingly from women is that they want the more communicative man, the sensitive and romantic man. That is overwhelming. They want the cluster of qualities that goes along with a more communicative man who speaks his feelings more, who is more intimate, more open.”

But Dr. Anna Fels comes down more on the ladies’ side. “I would say that historically, and right up through the present, one of the things that defined femininity — especially in the white, middle-class culture — is women listening to men and being their audience, their support system, and really asking for relatively little of that in return,” she said. “There’s been a really disproportionate share of attention of all kinds that men demand and assume as their due.”

“Stuff It, Emo Boy!” by Rachel Donadio, Sheelah Kolhatkar & Anna Schneider-Mayerson in July 2004.

By the way, I should be neglecting if I did not point to the website and gorgeous photographs by Ryan McGinley mentioned (negatively) in the story above.

Senatorial Budget Reconciliation is not “simple majority rule,” Obama

2010-03-08T14:08:00.001-05:00

National Review outdoes itself, again, with Myths about Reconciliation, using reconciliation to pass Obamacare would be inappropriate and unprecedented. Here’s why by Daniel Foster & Stephen Spruiell.

The truth is that every single piece of successful legislation to emerge from the Senate — via reconciliation or otherwise — has done so via a final, up-or-down vote with a 50-plus-one threshold. The debate about reconciliation is a debate about the path to that vote. It’s about whether the Senate is and ought to be something more than a slightly smaller, slightly crustier House of Representatives.

When Harry Reid took over the majority leadership of the Senate, he vowed that “as our founding fathers intended, the Senate will perform its role as the ‘cooling saucer’ where debate and amendments play a role in forging consensus and compromise.”

Would that he lived up to those words.

Drop the Hammer in 2012

2010-03-08T14:02:00.000-05:00

I'm posting this to remind myself to buy one once I have the spare dough:

Your taxes will go up: the trap has sprung

2010-03-05T13:50:00.000-05:00

The neo-fascist lie appears:

European governments have typically seen VAT hikes as an easy way to raise revenues [taxes] during a recession. In some countries, government spending is more than 50% of national income. The results have been fiscal stability, but lackluster growth and a dearth of dynamism and entrepreneurship.

Given the budget numbers, the United States has already chosen a path of far bigger government. The trap has been set. It's unlikely America can escape without a VAT.

Did you get your marching orders from Il Douche yet?

Roger L. Simon: Criminal Fortney “Pete” Stark to replace more corrupt Rangel

2010-03-04T05:47:00.001-05:00

Has the Universe gone insane? Roger L. Simon asks, “[D]id Nancy Pelosi’s plastic surgeon misfire and accidentally inject the Botox into her brain?”

In 1995, during a private meeting with Congresswoman Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, he called Johnson a “whore for the insurance industry” and suggested that her knowledge of health care came solely from “pillow talk” with her husband, a physician. His press secretary, Caleb Marshall, defended him in saying, “He didn’t call her a ‘whore,’ he called her a ‘whore of the insurance industry.’”

More Pete-foolery on Wikipedia. This must be Nancy Pelosi’s idea of feminism.

The meaning of the 9-11 trials, by STRATFOR

2009-11-23T05:50:00.003-05:00

The only work on the 9-11 trials you need to read is "Deciphering the Mohammed Trial" by George Friedman, 16 Nov 2009:

The real problem here is international law, which does not address acts of war committed by non-state actors out of uniform. Or more precisely, it does, but leaves them deliberately in a state of legal limbo, with captors left free to deal with them as they wish. If the international legal community does not like the latter, it is time they did the hard work of defining precisely how a nation deals with an act of war carried out under these circumstances.

So why the hell am I a Republican?

2009-11-21T23:21:00.001-05:00

Good question. Short answer: because it is a brick in the face to all those simpering little bitches (especially the guys) who insist that, as a bien pensant Good Bisexual, I should be a Democrat and a (little "s") socialist. I could call myself a Libertarian, but that doesn't carry the weight of calling myself a Republican. That offends them. (Hmm, this may be why I haven't had a date in ages. Also, I am not a libertarian, no matter how you capitalize it: I am a classical liberal.)

Long answer: look at the history of political parties in America: we see Jefferson's pro-slavery Republican Party split into the National Republicans and the Democratic Republicans. The latter became the Democratic-Republicans, then the Democrats (c. 1824) we know today. On the other side, the Federalist/Whig/Free Soil/Know Nothing (American) parties all imploded before the modern, anti-slavery Republican Party was formed in 1854. Its very name, and calling it the Grand Old Party, was a deliberate bit of spin doctoring to steal Jefferson's thunder from the Democrats; doubly ironic in that it was the ideological descendant of Jefferson's hated enemy, the Federalist Party.

The Democrats were pro-slavery, pro-French Revolution, pro-Jim Crow, pro-New Deal, pro-union (especially the racist ones, yum!), pro-détente, pro-Socialist, pro-Communism, pro-political correctness... I mean, my God, is there anything bad they have not championed?

Implementing racial segregation in the U.S. military? Democrats! The bankrupt, irreformable entitlements of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? Democrats! Employer-based healthcare (and its discrimination against gay couples and polygamists)? Democrats! Withholding tax? Democrats! George Wallace and poll taxes? Democrats!

The only freedom the Democrats offer, supposedly, is sex, and who runs the anti-porn and anti-sex campaigns today? Neo-Marxist feminism: by volume (much of it hot air), 70% of the feminism you see on the internet: are they whining about the patriarchy? Class? Race? Male privilege? False consciousness? Are they debating which women are not truly feminist? That's because they're neo-Marxist, who are always debating whose Marxism is purer! I used to think I hated feminism until I realized how the neo-Marxists permeated it; now, I am pro-feminist, but still violently anti-Marxist.

The gender theorists (when you see the dread word Theory, you're reading a neo-Marxist) who are desperately trying to de-privilege heterosexuality from its natural perch as the majority position, and the one that allows the continuation of the mankind? Neo-Marxists!

And they are all in the Democratic Party! They are trying to make common cause with Iran (who stone and hang homosexuals) and plea for understanding for the Taliban (who drop walls on gays) by building some kind of moral cloaking device between Islamist terrorists (a small proportion of Muslims who are trying by intimidation to rule the larger populations) and their own superficial beliefs. But in the Left's deeper beliefs, that we are all victims of Capitalism (a Marxist word), of Patriarchy (again), of False Consciousness (again); that our common values are traps designed by these hidden, privileged powers (Structuralism) (again); well, on that deeper level, their identfication with the religious paranoia ("Capitalism is a plot of the evil Jooooooooos!") of the Islamists is perfect and matched.

Why am I a Republican? Because they stand against all that! Because I am willing to stand as an enemy to those people. I am proud of it; these enemies reflect well on me. Because Mike Huckabee will never show up on my doorstep with a torch-bearing mob, while the Democrats prepare to seize control over 18% of the U.S. economy and my body. Because gay marriage is overrated and virtually unnecessary but for the Democrats' meddling! Because the Chinese and the Russians are running North Korea and Iran, and they need to be opposed. Because in the modern world of supersonic flight, our mighty ocean moats are nothing but puddles so our bases overseas reflect the military idea of "defense in depth." So I support them!

Does the Republican party require an ideological enema? You betcha. Do they need a kick in the ass? Oh, yes. Is the party superstructure corrupt? Yes. But the base... the base is worth saving. The base is worth destroying the Party and reconstituting it along better lines.

And that is why I am a Republican.

Iowahawk smacks down ACORN and the NEA

2009-09-25T09:05:00.002-04:00

How can the Federal Art Instruction Institute help me?

Unlike traditional art schools, the Federal Art Instruction Institute doesn't waste your time on boring Post-Modernist theory, messy bodily fluids, or painful self mutilation. With our easy-to-learn program you will quickly learn how to channel your natural artistic ability and suburban self-loathing at state enemies who, when you think about it, are a lot like your parents.

Don't wait, join the Federal Art Instruction Institute today!

David Brin: Loyal Democratic Ant

2009-06-21T12:38:00.003-04:00

Not unexpected, but...

I simply adore the worshipful singularity of the comments here; thank God you abjure the Kool-Aid lest your brains collapse into a hive mind.

Health care in the U.S. is a terrible mélange of New Deal dinosaurs that hide-bound Democrats refuse to kill and replace. They are determined to make it worse no matter what.

Being the land of filial piety, Japan has the world's worst social security net. Aflac, the supplemental insurance, is huge in Japan for a reason.

Canada is a nightmare. The UK is even worse. And don't cherry pick stories on how some cousin got a booboo stitched. The waiting lists are statistical evidence of rationing.

George Bush created an entire private, no "public-option" Medicare D. Surprise, surprise: it's more popular than expected and cheaper than anyone thought possible.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT! ONLY GOVERNMENT CAN SAVE YOU!

1. Outlaw employer-provided health insurance. It is insane. They insure neither my car nor apartment, it is ridiculous. Outlaw it and push the money they spent on health care to the individuals.

2. Create $2000 in matching funds for every person/dependent, and make it tax-deductible for the first $6000 or so.

Insurance pools risks for broken arms, cancer and heart attacks. Paying for runny noses is a check-splitting plan. The popularity of the latter is driving up our costs all across the board. Outlaw employer health care and poof! they disappear.

Now you may return to your regularly scheduled moonbattery. Perhaps some Holy Net Neutrality? "For he that charges by bandwidth, let him be blessed. But for he who charges for latency, let him be taken out and stoned to death." Yeah, it's in the Bible somewhere, Leviticus, I think.

Sure, go ahead, blame the government

2008-10-11T02:51:00.005-04:00

Over here, we see:

I think if one observes closely the the fact that the scale of the vertical axes are very different, one may very well have an altered perspective on the role of the GSE's in the mortgage crisis.

In other words, it was the private market's fault. Really?

First, bad English. Second, Fannie and Freddie had "reached more than 80% of market share" this year.

.01 x .80 = .008
.05 x .20 = .010

So: the Government Sponsored Enterprises broke 0.8% of the market, while private enterprise broke 1%. Clearly, a marvelous Victory for Socialism!

So, I take it the U.S. government will simply repudiate the debts of Fannie and Freddie without the embarrassment reserved to the peons in the private sector? And without the threat, needless to say, of jail time for those whose malfeasance crossed the line to outright fraud?

No one treated Lehman Bros paper (stock) as reserves nearly as credible as T-bills. The big investment houses have died from owning Fannie and Freddie paper: stock and the ubiquitous Mortgage Backed Securities.

In little words, Lehman Bros and Bear, Stearns owned Fannie and Freddie securities. Fannie and Freddie owned no paper from Lehman, Bear or other banks or investment houses. Both are now bankrupt. Do the math.

The best evidence of the coming recession.

“How does it feel?”

2008-10-11T02:02:00.001-04:00

Heh. This song means so much, but in some ways, it's merely a thing to throw in the hippie's faces: a wet blanket, lovingly wrapped around a brick.

“Dow Drops Nearly 700 In Opening Minutes”

2008-10-10T16:28:00.002-04:00

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.”

Jonah Goldberg at the Corner.

See also this.

Time out from politics

2008-10-09T18:03:00.003-04:00

The 1970 movie Equinox bears a ton of resemblances to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead and to his comedic reboot, The Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn. Four college students (four in the first Evil Dead, two in the second) go to a professor's cabin in the woods. The professor is not there, but they find his notes and an old book, described by the professor as the "bible of evil". Reading a few words from the book brings an evil out of hell, or the woods. Claymation is involved. A castle is seen, which turns out to be in Hell. College kid Frank Bonner ("WKRP in Cincinnati"'s Herb Tarlek) is possessed, acting like an evil twin.

Sam Raimi owes someone some royalties.

In quality, Equinox bears roughly the same resemblance to The Evil Dead as the latter bears to The Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, but it has an original creepiness. The (also-possessed) park ranger played by director/writer Jack Woods went on to edit sound for Naked Gun and Star Wars movies. The other writer, Mark Thomas McGee, wrote more horror flicks before moving into television acting.

“There’s really no market discipline on these two companies.”

2008-10-06T02:24:00.003-04:00

No shit, Sherlock.

The word on the center-right blogosphere is that the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight was kept on a short leash by the Democrats in the Senate. Unlike other regulatory agencies, OFHEO was not given a set yearly budget; instead, Congress approved its budget yearly, keeping OFHEO subject to Congressional pressure. Reading this November ’07 interview with Director James B. Lockhart III (late of the Social Security Administration), though, makes you wonder.

Did they really think the market was not overpriced? Was the Bush Administration “in on it,” being clueless or genuinely afraid of not appearing to support minority homeownership? Or are they just that stoic in taking all these hits to get the votes to keep taxes low and support the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The New York Times article indeed pegs quite a few Democrats, including our bête noir, Barney Frank, but the Administration seems almost complicit in supporting Fannie and Freddie in their mad rush to bankruptcy. Is it really all that sinister? Or did the Administration have its hands full enough staving off even more disasterous Democratic money-spooges to their favorite failure?

For some laughs, the titles of the “Most Emailed” columnists at the Times:

Maureen Dowd: Sarah’s Pompom Palaver
Frank Rich: Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain
Nicholas D. Kristof: Racism Without Racists (guess who Nicky’s writing about!)
Bob Herbert: Palin’s Alternate Universe

“Newspaper of Record,” indeed.

Also, read the first page of Thomas L. Friedman’s “Swedish Spoken Here.” How does someone who claims to be an internationalist get off invoking such xenophobic dread in his first two paragraphs? OMG, Swedes and Germans are buying things in America and sending them home!! AIIEEEEE!!

The only two articles that sound good are “Capitalism to the Rescue” and “Dick Cheney, Role Model,” but neither are what you would think. If Al Gore had used the Vice Presidency as Cheney has, Pinchloaf Sulzberger would have had to change his underwear.

Barney Frank is Elmer Fudd from the Universe where Spock has a beard.

The Big Lie: Social Security

2008-10-05T20:21:00.005-04:00

ETA: Almost as big a threat as Social Security are public and private pay-as-you-go pensions. See the terrible problems in: Illinois, Texas.

Social Security is the third rail of American politics. The Democrats want to make it Welfare 2.0. Republicans want to privatize it, as has been done in Sweden and Chile.

In fact, Social Security has run a 22-year “surplus” of over $2.1 trillion

Federal tax receipts are $2.5 trillion dollars out of a $14 trillion GDP. So let's not get all excited.

For example, as you can see above, in fiscal 2007, the government’s operational (”on-budget”) deficit was $343.4 billion; but after netting in the Social Security surplus and the Postal Service, it “officially” reported a deficit of $162 billion.

Funny, all the blogs I read say we have a $300-400 billion deficit. Not The New York Times, though. Funny.

No one, it seems, wants to privatize Social Security. The AARP said in 2005 of Sweden's private accounts, “The total return for the default fund was -10.6 percent in 2001 and -26.7 percent in 2002.” The Democratic Underground thinks it's all a clever ruse to commit theft.

The New York Times cries at the thought of private accounts. The Times also cries that Chile has trouble making private accounts work. Of course, if you read the article you discover that Chile requires neither the self-employed nor temporary contractors to pay into the system. The U.S. does.

Now follow this link to bankrate.com, if you please. You should be looking at a page ranking of 5-year CDs, from 5.25-3.75% interest.

Now ask yourself these simple questions:

Why am I unable to deposit my Social Security into CDs and keep rolling it over?

Why do we tax children and grandchildren to pay for their grandparents who, after all, worked all their lives and had 15% of their income taxed for Social Security? Were they really that incompetent at domestic finances?

Why is someone who dies childless prevented from paying their Social Security benefits to a niece or nephew?

Why has FICA gone up from 2% to 15%? (Don't forget your employer matches your payments exactly.)

Why do we think that forcing everyone in the country to learn the stock market by giving them 401(k)s is efficient?

Why do we regulate the entire stock market when we really only care about the life savings of little old widows?

Finally, let's talk about that “trust fund.” Social Security surpluses, by law, could not be invested in anything but U.S. Treasury bills. Treasury bills earn about 2.6% interest (half the return of banks). Finally, any money you get by cashing in a mature T-bill comes from the tax revenue of the U.S. government.

In other words, if we had kept the “trust fund,” we'd be paying off Social Security by — raising taxes. Without it, we will have to pay off Social Security by — raising taxes.

Again: with the fund, the SSA would cash T-bills, which the government would redeem by raising taxes. Without it, the government raises taxes and gives the money directly to SSA.

See the difference?

From Republic to Empire to Republic again

2008-10-04T17:13:00.003-04:00

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred links and copies Howard Zinn's al-Guardian op-ed. My thoughts below:

both major parties rushing to get an agreement to spend $700bn of taxpayers’ money to pour down the drain of huge financial institutions which are notable for two characteristics: incompetence and greed.

The only economist worth his salt in the Great Depression was Will Rogers: "Stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?"

And he was right. Loose money crashed the stock market: tight money and protectionism created the Depression. FDR's alphabet soup of TLAs maintained it until America loosened money and dropped trade barriers in celebration of WWII. ;-)

I know, throwing more money at the stupids who counted on an ever-rising market, or Fannie's guarantee to (maybe) bankrupt the US government to protect its risk-riddled portfolios, seems counter-intuitive. (And that's the polite phrase!) But the FDIC will be throwing nearly-dead banks at solvent ones while the Treasury makes up some of the loss sustained by the GSEs.

We will not make any money off this bail-out. We will merely maintain our honor and our economy.

Let’s face a historical truth: we have never had a “free market”, we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with “big government” when it served their needs.

Yes, and you may say the Mob never minded Prohibition. Your point? And how free was a market with Fannie and Freddie at large? (Loose?) It is precisely the lust of Big Business for Big Government that must be thwarted to save the little guy in his garage.

The first big bail-out was the decision of the new government to redeem for full value the almost worthless bonds held by speculators.

So, "the first big bail-out" was in fact the first time the U.S. government honored its debts? Sophistry.

Look, if the government wanted to help the people who sold those bonds in the long interval between purchase and redemption, then private citizens were perfectly capable of raising a subscription, or the Federal government could have voted a pension. Don't confuse charitable relief (honorable in itself) with honoring your obligations.

The rationale for taking $700bn from the taxpayers to subsidise huge financial institutions is that somehow that wealth will trickle down to the people who need it. This has never worked.

You're damn right. The system must be left open for little businesses to bloom and grow tall enough to reach the sunshine. It's not "trickle-down", it's "bubble-up".

The alternative is simple and powerful.

A perfect description of National Socialism.

Take that huge sum of money and give it directly to the people who need it. Let the government declare a moratorium on foreclosures and give aid to homeowners to help them pay off their mortgages. Create a federal jobs programme to guarantee work to people who want and need jobs and for whom “the free market” has not come through.

Yes, we did that, it was called "excess housing".

Stop foreclosures and you destroy any value in the property that the bank now owns: that means you destroy the bank. (Dems: that means you MAKE THE CRISIS WORSE.) Borrower and lender will have to agree that the illiquid asset is not worth the bank's time and that the would-be homeowner needs a place to live. To get their payments, the banks will have to negotiate. Some houses will be worth more resold, many will not.

Face it, we've all lost. The bubble price of the house is now a chimera. We have to work with the old price of the house, adjusted for inflation.

We have a historic and successful precedent. Roosevelt’s New Deal put millions of people to work, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, and, defying the cries of “socialism”, established social security. That can be carried further, with “health security” – free health care – for all.

Except that FDR did not fix the Depression, and now Social Security threatens to destroy us. What will HillaryCare do to us?

How about this: we create private funds out of Social Security (15% of our income, remember). We largely deregulate banks and investment houses, but we set up a special category of bank that will follow very tight investment rules and be certified by a Pension Board (like the Federal Reserve, beyond the direct reach of Congress).

That way, even people who rent (quelle horreur!) can accumulate for a retirement, and the U.S. government will no longer be required to police the entire investment world. No one will be forced to seek funds from these banks, though the attraction will be powerful enough that many will jump through the hoops to qualify.

In the $600bn for the military budget, once we decide we will no longer be a war-making nation.

No, we will merely be poor and bullied. Europe's defense budget will swell if America is no longer there: you'll be poorer, Mr Socialist. Japan and Australia will also swell their armament.

And in the swollen bank accounts of the super-rich, by taxing vigorously both their income and their wealth.

"Our" wealth, don't you mean, Mr Socialist? A few years of that and we shall have no wealth at all. Yes, since only people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, all too smart to invest in a bubble, have money, we must now punish them especially hard for, uh, being smart.

Only such a bold approach can save the nation – not as an empire, but as a democracy.

Again, National Socialism rears its ugly head. Once Wall Street is firmly ensconced in Washington, D.C.'s bed, we will never pry them apart except after a general war.

Look, folks: Yellowstone burned to the ground, okay? Quit crying. Out of the ash, beautiful things can grow.

Gahhh... Barney Frank has a fanny buddy at FANNIE MAE

2008-10-04T08:30:00.007-04:00

The inimitable, eponymous Ace of Spades HQ has the, uh, poop. Yes, Barney Frank, longtime ranking Democrat of the House Banking Committee, has a boyfriend, Herb Moses, assistant director for product initiatives from 1991 to 1998.

Frank takes pains to note how carefully they avoided conflicts of interest.

$700,000,000,000.00 worth.

As Ace so nicely points out:

Why is this just coming out now? At Fox F*cking News, of course.

Why?

Why is it I f*cking know the exact time Sarah Palin had amniotic fluid leakage and I'm just finding this out now?

Ace is referring to the Democratic blog talking point that Sarah Palin supposedly caused Trig's Down's Syndrome by not overnight mailing herself to the nearest hospital when her amniotic fluid leaked. She merely maintained contact with her doctor.

It should be noted that the main freak making these charges, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic, is a raging homo. Hey, aren't we all sometimes, but even I understand female anatomy and pregnancy, unlike Sullivan, whose insane rantings on Palin and Trig reveal him to be utterly, sickeningly obsessed.

Banned books

2008-09-22T09:15:00.015-04:00

The deal is to bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you've read in part (from consuming multiple chapters down to just skimming, I suppose), and ignore the rest.

The Bible
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Koran
The Arabian Nights
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Ulysses by James Joyce
Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Candide by Voltaire
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Analects by Confucius
Dubliners by James Joyce
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Das Kapital by Karl Marx
Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
A Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
The Talmud
The Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
Popol Vuh
The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
Satyricon by Petronius
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
Metaphysics by Aristotle
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
Sanctuary by William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Nana by Émile Zola
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Another Nail in the Coffin

2008-09-08T07:14:00.002-04:00

Mosey on over to the the Yahoo! Group called Clinton Dems Against Obama and take a gander at that message frequency. It can't all be sweetness and light.

I'm done

2007-01-31T15:25:00.000-05:00

All right. I give up. I can't do anything here. The phone cuts out on me whenever I try to check voice mail. After three tries, I was able to sign in to voice mail only to discover that they were all deleted. How? I have no idea.

I bought a 250-minute card and my phone says I have 500. Why? I have no idea. Adding the card was another exercise in pain.

Ugh.

2006-11-27T02:11:00.000-05:00

1 AM and I am back in Music City. 30 miles to I-69, 36 to Indiana, 170 to Indianapolis, 120 to Louisville, 136 to Tennessee, 50 more to Antioch equals 542 miles. According to the map, Kalamazoo, Indianapolis, Bowling Green and Nashville all draw to a single line. Marshall/Fort Wayne and Louisiana form two humps on that trip. Meh. On the other hand, the map says 10.83 hours to traverse, so I'm beating the odds at 8.75 anyway. All I need do is eliminate the need to pee and enlarge the gas tank by one-third and… I could shave off 20 minutes. Hmm. Radar detector? Stealth paint? FoP sticker?

A private pilot's license is beginning to look reasonable (for ludicrously high values of reasonable).

Gas signs from the past.

Propaganda

2006-08-18T04:39:00.000-04:00

I have met a lot of people here in Tennessee that I almost certainly would not have met in Michigan; partly because Tennessee is growing, partly because my social circle is necessarily rather ad hoc down here. Not that I did not know any religious people in Michigan, or drug dealers, but I certainly did not tend to live with them in rather close quarters.

One person I met was a young guy who had lived in Saudi Arabia with his father, who had some ongoing business in the KoSA. Some people think SA is terribly anti-American; while I agree that it is rather bigoted, certainly Western society, as a whole, presented a similarly depressing picture back in the day. And that is what I took from this young man. First, the Saudis are not under any illusions that the KoSA is rather unique: when you disembark you are required to sign a document that informs you, in stark language, that the penalty under sharia law for many minor offenses is either death or something close to it. We find this disturbing. I would find it far more disturbing if they tried to cover it up or claim it was normal, a la the Islamic Rebublic of Iran. KoSA is every bit as exceptionalist as the U.S. but in a different way: homeland of Mecca and Medina, SA is almost the Vatican, the Solomon's Temple, of the Islamic world and, indeed, as you might expect of the Papal States, the royal family is terribly weak unless, and only unless, their official acts are seen as completely orthodox and conservative; then they act from a position of strength. Note that bin Laden turned professionally anti-American when the King allowed American soldiers in the Kingdom only to repel Iraq from Kuwait. That act was a radical change and radical change is bad.

How old-fashioned is Saudi Arabia? This kid told me a story of tooling around the desert in a dune buggy until his old man cut it short. The father saw, on a far dune, horsemen: the bedou. In the old days, the bedou made pocket change by raiding and kidnapping. Since it is hard to tell if a man cares he is living in the 21st century by his distantly-viewed face, the father got his kid out of there in a hurry: they were known to hit isolated targets even today.

It is romantic, in a way, to think of the bedou, old even in the time of Christ, as a going concern. It is also a bit frightening, given that even the city Arabs and Turks found them troublesome and rebellious. It is a living reminder of the age of the world and the thin veneer of civilization papering over all that blood and strife, just as I feel when I read, pace some blogger, that the age of the iPod is in fact powered by electricity usually generated by coal.

My landlord is another type I had not met in Michigan; an ex-Colombian living in the U.S. College-educated, his first name is Adolfo. He was named after Adolf Hitler.

He was born in 1960.

As it turns out, his grandfather was severely burned in a barn fire as a boy. He ended up in Germany, which was the only country which could, more or less, repair burns of that extent. Apparently, in addition to the medical care, the young man was quite impressed by the Nazi response to the Depression. And thus "Adolfo".

The truly humorous part of all this is that the grandson is quite liberal. I mean, Socialist. Which means simply that he pursues the same old bad ends from an international, not chauvinist, perspective. One might be tempted to suggest different ends. One might also harbor fantasies of a Five Year Plan for peace in the Middle East. According to this guy:

- Vincente Fox is all for the rich. (Yeah, what did those lousy Morgans, Fords, Gates and Astors ever do for America?) The next Mexican President, of a different party, will also be for the rich.

- The U.S. government dictates currency devaluation in all of South America.

- South Americans are only allowed to buy Esso (you know, Exxon) oil while the Norte Americanos must share their home market with British Petroleum. The same goes for cars, soda, &c. This is the way the U.S. wants it and Europe and Japan meekly accept this.

- France is full of diplomatic geniuses thwarted by that cowboy in the White House.

- South American pharmaceutical companies produced "generic" anti-HIV drugs before the bad U.S. free-trade agreements. The term "pirate" never occurs to him, just as it never did to the Russians I met who thought Linux was a bad deal when you could "distribute" MS Windows for the cost of a CD-R.

- He has no idea why South American unemployment skyrocketed in the 1990s. Apparently, the thought that Malaysians, Taiwanese, Koreans, Chinese and Indians are now in the jobs market does not occur to him, nor that the Norte Americanos also suffered from this dislocation.

- The Chinese will soon overtake America as the great power. Their crippling bad debts and political rigidity does not occur to him, nor that they may suffer the fate of the Japanese. ("Our Economy Is Stuck On Suck.") Nor does he think that trade will tie their war hand.

This reminds me of the great blog post on the Arab Parallel Universe. In fact, I see one of the commenters spelled it out: "Man, I feel so related to this post: change Arab Parallel Universe for Latin American Parallel Universe, and you get almost the same. And I thought we were [the] land of Magical Realism!"

Apparently, our State Department sucks far more than I thought: these thoughts are the common currency of people who do not read hard news. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus indeed. What do we pay those goons in Foggy Bottom for, again? Are we no longer the land of Madison Avenue? Deep down I know that America was like this back in the day: Washington and Adams both risked ultimate defeat in negotiating peace treaties with England and France because the great mass of American opinion, among the low, in those days was virulently paranoid about aristocratic, monarchial, European influence on our way of life and our government. We were lucky to go through that then, before the age of nukes, before suicide bombers and sarin gas.

"I am not a Pillar, but a Buttress, of the Established Church. I support it from without."–Lord Melbourne

Where's somercet?

2006-08-03T04:35:00.000-04:00

I will get the address for everyone soon, which reminds me that I will have to take it to the bank to change the address there. The phone is cell only. I am writing this at work because the Internet connection at the new place is wireless and I have no Wifi adapter.

New landlord: nice guy. Stupidly liberal in that weird, So. American way. He does outreach for Latinos and the Catholic Church. If you think some Americans are paranoid about Wal-Mart, go talk to a Latino. You will get a whole new appreciation of living in a country that does not hate capitalism. Politics aside, he is pretty cool for a total neat freak. I did laundry all day today, and have a bunch of clothes in my closet with a floor fan blowing the air in on them. I am bunking on my camping pad and a blanket, using my sleeping bag for warmth. I am enjoying the wonderful, whole townhouse cleanliness while I can, before I am embittered by excessive housework.

Oh, and don't bother with the Fastmail address, either. That is unreachable as well. Please write me at Dell, although that means that any pictures you send me pretty much have to be pried out of email and sent along to my home (long story). In fact, if you have any pictures, please send them to Fastmail. I will get them eventually.

Oh, and I saw my first black widow spider last night, just outside my new place. Something new everyday, huh?

Clerks ii or, the reckoning

2006-08-03T04:31:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, one of the hardest things in life is to admit what you really want. Gay kids used to suffer from this a lot, of course, and now have champions who denounce all who might drag them back to the opposite sex, but in truth, most of this confusion is purely human.

Currently, we have a society with rankings, slowly and ever changing, that provide good enough lives for the majority and opportunities for the minorities to negotiate different lives. Our generalized others have priorities. Some people think it possible to eliminate this; I think any change will simply substitute one bigotry for another. Eliminate all social ranking and a few will be happy without oppression and the majority will flail about looking for guidance. (You may try to convince me this would be better; you may also teach a pig to sing, if you like. As I noted, a good society allows the dissatisfied to spend their time however they wish.)

Are you satisfied working a counter nights? Do you like "fat" chicks or "loser" guys? Do you think Hudson Hawk is sorely underrated? Is reality television the greatest thing ever? Do you really not want to get married? (Most twenty-somethings who denounce marriage and/or kids do so in the same way that eight year-olds pronounce sex "icky" and may safely be ignored in my little poll, or you may regard them, per my theory, as breeders unwilling to admit they do wish to hitch up and squeeze out a few puppies.)

Either way, how do you know what you really want? And if you figure it out, will you proclaim it proudly or skulk in the corners?

In 1994 Clerks. was a cornerstone film for me. Kevin Smith described my life perfectly: annoying customers, romantic failure and buddies driven by American pop culture and pr0n. Wanting a cinematographer and cash, Smith created a pure comedy of words not seen since the Marx Bros. were at the top of their game. I was dating Stacy at the time. I love her still but hindsight shows what I knew but did not want to know at the time: we were not working out and we never would. I was twenty-five years old and had worked at Majik Market, Gateway Shell and the Speedy Marathon across from the Kalamazoo Fisher Body plant (since closed). I could quote any Bob Dylan song you could name. Smith's world was mine.

Twelve years later, Smith gives us Clerks II. In purely cinematic terms, II is a little under-written. (I am almost aghast that Smith found no time to brutalize the Star Wars prequels, and am surprised that Smith seems unwilling to include politics, which is, in the 21st century, a kind of pop culture.) May I perish before including spoilers, but Randal's speech at the end was crunchy because Randal has to admit what he really wants... and it made me think.

I am living 531 miles from the place I called home before it drove me from its shores (bear with me, I am feeling poetical) with watered-down Socialism that the paranoid voice-in-my-head tells me is designed to "right-size" the native population for some purpose obviously nefarious because it is otherwise senseless. I have never been too fond of Michigan. A lot of people criticize it for being unfriendly, something I, in my perma-bubble, have never noticed. Some people in Michigan, though, were and are important to me. Some I loved are now dead. Two of them are not only alive but ready to kill me for leaving. I have known both for more than twenty years: unimaginable for a kid who moved around all his young life. The one I loved enough to marry. The other, again pace Kevin Smith, "Hello, I'm Jay and this is my hetero life-mate, Silent Bob." (Really, we even look like them!) And, of course, I have my own little rugrat who specializes in adorability and obstructionism.

Leaving was not easy. I am living farther from my family than anyone else I know. My brother was further when he left Allentown, PA for college in Wisconsin, if only by a couple hundred miles (and our extended family was there in Greater Cleveland for emergency outreach). But here I am. Why? My wife told me, some time before I left, that if I did not have a job it was because I was not looking hard enough. My reply now is, boy, were you right. I had to look a lot harder, and farther, to find one. Was it worth it?

A hard question, that. I think I still have not found my niche in life. I am good at computer support, but would rather work on the server side of things. I may never be qualified for that. On the other hand, maintaining this blog is reawakening my taste for writing. I know I have not written much lately, but if you only knew how much this job exhausts me. I am an unpeople person in a people job. But really, I have never known just what I would be best (or just really, really good) at. I read biographies where people meet a person who changes their track entirely or helps them on the right one and I almost explode with envy. I am, of course, thrilled to be making money. Everyone down here is pretty upbeat and friendly. Life is stressful but fairly rewarding.

I may never know what I want, but I know what I need right now and, apparently, TN and DOC are it. It sucks a bit that not everyone is completely supportive, but enough of the right people are and I can not ask for anything more.... Well, heh, who am I kidding?

Definition: the generalized other is not "what the people you know will think", it is "what the people the people you know will think." The people you know are significant others; we know this because you, uh, know them.

Moving day

2006-07-31T03:24:00.000-04:00

I found a new place today, the thirtieth. Move out day is tomorrow. I drove down ninety-five percent of my with-me possessions and am about to pack the car with the last of it.

Now this is God picking you up and setting you down where you need to be. My new landlord will probably drive me insane with cleaning but after this place, he is welcome to do so. A former Colombian, he works in Catholic and immigrant outreach. Sometime, I will write up our conversation with the one I had with an American kid who lived in Saudi Arabia and the one I had at KLUG with the Russian exchange um, students? Businessmen? Whichever, I will post it here; truly, we live in Fortress Disneyland and the world is much scarier than we thought.

A day of discovery:

I always surprise myself with how well I learned packing from Dad. I stuffed almost everything I brought down here into a single carload. I only have a chair, the computer, bedding and a few clothes left. When I crept out of the apartment complex, the speed bumps bottomed out my suspension.
How empty even carpeted rooms sound with nothing in them; surprising even after all these years and moves. A lonely sound.
I need furniture: a bed, especially, perhaps a dresser. I may make that an excuse to shift my days around and drive up to Kalamazoo, though really, I could not bring down a bed with my car. Maybe if I bought a supercheap ticket, I could fly? But what would I do if showed up and the rental truck was not available?
My new place, on Sunday afternoon at least, is nine minutes from work. Bliss. Happiness. A lot cheaper.

Time to pack the chair and computer. My landlord has Wifi (wireless) internet only so my computer will be disconnected until I get such a card and hook it up. So use work email only, and do not send to my Google Mail address because I can't access it from work.

Guh. Bed. Now. While I can enjoy it.

Wonky of sleep...

2006-07-25T01:30:00.000-04:00

Speaking of wonky, I was on the phone till a little after ten tonight. I can barely think straight. The woman and I were joking about each of us downing some Scotch after we hung up.

Two places, and a couple people who will hotel room with me if they fall through. Feeling a bit twitchy, here.

And another thing about the 30-day contract people... I am basically their slave until they get tired and release me from the phone. I feel like a genie, which reminds me:

A genie, imprisoned in a lamp, alone and desperate to escape, promised it would grant three wishes to whomever released it.

A thousand years later, the genie swore to bring untold riches and treasure to whomever would free it from its prison.

A thousand years after that the genie swore unending pain and torment on whichever luckless bastard finally set it free.

Genie, I so totally understand you.

Another lesson...

2006-07-24T03:50:00.000-04:00

Don't read H.P. Lovecraft just before going to bed... especially do not read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" because that one is the scariest of the bunch...

I am still looking for a new apartment. I have a number of good leads, though, including a couple very near where I work. For that matter, I have been looking through jobs ads as well, and found an opening in Ypsilanti which might be interesting, though it lists GM as one of its customers and I am not sure how much longer GM will be around.

I found one duplex which would be fantastic. It is in Inglewood, which is right across the Cumberland in a little neck of the river, with a fantastic, gorgeous park just down the street. Cross your fingers...

My current schedule is Mon-Tue-Fri-Sat, 9 am to 8 pm. Traffic is much lighter then, which is nice. My call volume is up and my refunds are down, which is also nice.

I lost some personal possessions when my group got moved while I was out for two days. The guy who took my desk threw out the notebook I kept during my training and my aspirin. I hope to get my headphones back, at least. Nice guy. I am currently sitting next to two guys who are pretty cool. The one is friendly, the other is post-modern cynical. Better than isolation, I guess.

I am not looking forward to moving, but I have little choice, as staying here with all new roommates does not attract me. Also, I do want to live closer to Nashville and a night life of some sort, even if it is only some cafés.

Yes, I should be sleeping. But that story...

"Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--"

*shivers*

QOTD: "In his house in Raleigh, dead Elvis lies dreaming."

Things I failed to mention, being wonky with lack of sleep

2006-07-12T14:23:00.000-04:00

I bought a watch, one of those hybrid pocket watches that hang, upside-down, from a belt loop. With my keys, key card and my new watch all hanging from my belt loops, I am starting to resemble Batman. With the key card on one of those retractable reels, I can swing across caverns created by the Building Densification project (I am not joking, that is the name) or, for stubborn problems, garrote people to death like a British commando.

This watch rocks. I used it to time my breaks. Two breaks of exactly 30 minutes total time. Heh. But I find myself wanting a watch fob for it. Also, I regret that I could choose the stopwatch OR the compass.

I bought an umbrella. I got to use it about twenty minutes later. Thunderstorms here hit like a wall; you drive along and suddenly, you can't see. The rain also comes in bands that you pass in and out of. Surprisingly, aside from the ant situation created by roommates too dumb to realize that ANTS LIVE ON SUGAR and that DRIED SODA POP on the counters is nothing more than DRIED SUGAR WITH FOOD COLORING, the bugs here are not too scary. Excepting, of course, the beetle I saw crawling along the parking lot next door which I saw while standing on a THIRD FLOOR BALCONY. I think it was a beetle, puppies do not glint in the sodium lights like that.

I have today and tomorrow off, therefore I will be apartment hunting for these two days. I have a bunch of numbers to call. Here's hoping.

Great, now I can't sleep

2006-07-10T03:27:00.000-04:00

Okay, my earlier post? The one that claimed I would be feeling better, and posting more?

Well, that was a load of happy horsesh… um, you know.

I apologize for not posting here since my job actually started. My energy is very low as this job is extremely stressful. I have three categories of customers:

Normals: these are the ones with the 30-day getting started contracts. They are not necessarily smarter nor better prepared than my other customers: they simply have not had their computers long enough to do any damage to them. Some normals are tricky, though. One guy, who sounded nice enough, wanted to “fix AOL”. Without reinstalling. Folks, AOL has released three different versions of AOL 9.0! They don't know how to fix it either! I was on the phone for two hours before I pounded that through his skull!

Okay, so maybe they are stressful, too.

Muggers: using threats and abuse, they try to get what I can not give them: free support and/or miracles. A decided minority, but more upsetting when they do show up.

Leapers: they have term papers, theses, and business reports they need to recover now, exactly in the form they were in before they messed up their M$ Office installation. Suicide is a definite undertone in these conversations; police negotiators should train with DOC to learn just how desperate the people standing on those building ledges are. Fortunately, I have an ace up my sleeve that many others do not: I know about OpenOffice.org, the free software M$ Office-compatible software suite. It works, it is easy, and installing it won't mess up their current Office installations any more or less than they were before.

Ten hour days are very exhausting. Gene, our trainer, advised us to keep our favorite analgesic pain relievers in our desk drawers; he was, of course, absolutely right.

I have slowly begun to beat myself into a proper tool for this job. I am too easily affected by other people's emotions and that is a critical failing in this job. Almost by definition, most of our customers are simply irrational.

I have been getting a lot of fan mail, though: I am a hit with some people. I had one woman at Boeing with a problem we were basically powerless to solve, but I managed to cheer her up by asking about the 787 versus the A380, comparing the latter to the Concorde: an impressive money hole. Government in civilian aviation: really, did the R101 teach us nothing??

Honestly, though, my calls are down and my refund rate is too high. I fear I will not make it at this rate. Which is a bit overblown: I am learning a lot about Windows (aside from learning that I will never, ever run Windows on my computer ever in my life). But it is obvious I need to learn faster, and more.

One spot of good news: my new schedule is nine AM to eight. Yay! No more rush hour traffic!

I also need an apartment, and have a few phone numbers to call. I also drove around looking at places listed in one of those free apartment guides (gaining familiarity with the local neighborhoods). Other than that, I have not moved forward on this, and I need to. I am just so drained that I am incapable of writing, or coding, or doing anything other than surfing the net (which is just watching TV, 21^st century-style). I sit in front of a computer all day, but web surfing is out: I am jumping almost every minute of the day.

So what have I learned?

Some good news on cystic fibrosis.

Reading this article gave me instant flashbacks, “Yeah, that is why I moved, too!” In Michigan, the lawmakers fund huge tax breaks for old industries that repay them by going out of business or moving out of state. They pay for these with high taxes; exactly like Europe, they cosy up to cartels, then tax the hell out of the little guy starting a business in his garage.

Socialism is for the people? Which ones?

In the New York Times, meanwhile, we discover that “the supply siders” are trying to paint the growth of America's economy as overly stellar: after all, revenues have not reached 2000 levels (they do not specify real dollars or not). Interesting, though, that they are so close with such a radically lowered tax base. The rest of the article is not worth the foolscap it is printed on, of course, for they cite no names for “revenues did not match expectations.” It is all spin.

[H]ow many big al Qaeda secret plans has the New York Times revealed?… A [British reporter] went undercover at some mosque at Brighton, in England, and came out with all kinds of material. How come nobody at the New York Times seems to be interested in devoting any editorial energy to exposing what the enemy's up to? That's an important question. —Mark Steyn

In other news, Ann Althouse is still cool. My favorite comment: “I would use a stronger example. Creationism is relatively benign. Why not allow Neo-nazi's to diverge from Western Civ to teach the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Or Ex-Keagles diverge from a biology or genetics class to teach race theory?” In the world of slippery slopes (a code word for “stop thinking here”), how shall we oppose teaching creationism in biology (as opposed to social or religious studies) unless we oppose Barrett teaching that CIA controlled demolitions destroyed the Towers?

The U-W is reconsidering their hiring policies since getting tarred-by-association with Barrett:

If my arguments that the “Islamic terrorist threat” is fabricated, that “al-Qaida” is really al-CIA-duh, that the “Bin Laden confession video” is ludicrously phony, and so on, were viewed as crazy, I would hardly have been chosen to teach the introductory courses on Islam at both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Edgewood College of Madison next fall.

Wait for it.

Ugh

2006-06-29T03:34:00.000-04:00

I am not feeling too up, lately. The first two weeks on the phones is up, and I have taken quite a beating. The most important thing is refund rate: Dell on Call is a satisfaction guaranteed service, and the goal is one or less refunds a week.

Well, Monday was a two-refund day. Basically, when someone has a disk drive with NO C:\ PARTITION left, we are in data recovery territory, and DR is a no-win situation. Basically, no one in the industry will guarantee your data can be recovered and I can say, with little fear of correction, that the chances of me pulling your data off a HDD with a messed up partition if YOU REFUSE to purchase Partition Doctor is about a million to one.

I know that I, in effect, have to sell this solution but I have a hard time in sales. I will blog more here but I am really just stressed out from my learning curve and wanting only to veg lately. I will be better in the future.

Gore Vidal was right

2006-06-13T18:29:00.000-04:00

WARNING: politics

“Thus the honest man has a reputation as a liar.”

I do not have Gore Vidal’s United States here with me, but I do remember something he wrote: the individual stories of history are largely an amalgam of facts accepted as genuine by a shifting majority. This was not some deconstructionist diatribe, rather Gore was resignedly accepting, among the controversies over his novel Lincoln, that his contemporaries’ self-serving gossip was being taken as fact. (Gore did not understand how Truman Capote, by far the worst offender, could never bring his astonishing gift of fabulism to his actual fiction.)

Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is dead, and Nick Berg's father says:

“Zarqawi felt my son’s breath on his hand as held the knife against his throat. Zarqawi had to look in his eyes when he did it,” Berg added, pausing to collect himself. “George Bush sits there glassy-eyed in his office with pieces of paper and condemns people to death. That to me is a real terrorist.”

In other news, the Donner family, late of the infamous Donner party, was stranded with a broken axle twenty-one miles behind the cannibals in the main party, munching on wildlife, roots and the family dog.

People do like to note that three-quarters of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi-born. No one likes to note that the Saudis had already exiled half of them from the kingdom. Zarqawi was Jordanian, as was Abu Nidal, and the kingdom of Jordan wanted them both dead, and performed valuable field assists to the American effort to bring a thousand pounds of high explosives to Zarqawi. Both countries are valuable American allies. Both have problems. Both are far less dysfunctional than, say, Egypt or Iran. Or, for that matter, Ba’athist Iraq or the Afghani Taliban.

Accepted facts. Handle with care.

All weakness tends to corrupt; impotence corrupts absolutely. — Spalding Gray

Hooray and ugh

2006-06-06T01:49:00.000-04:00

Today I learned that the people behind the lighttpd web server wrote the entire thing in K&R C, that is, they wrote without function prototypes so that the compiler has no idea where any given function should be found, nor what arguments it takes. Dennis Ritchie, though noting that ANSI-style declarations are a bit clumsy, approved of function protypes.

Some people are on crack.

In happier news, I scored a 92% on my final at Dell. For the rest of the week, I'll be on the phones from ten to seven p.m. The test took out four people from my class, and we are now down to seventeen.

Lord knows I should have recopied my notes in preparation for tomorrow, but I found Ian's copy of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and watched that instead. Existential tragedy makes me smile.

Our trainer, Gene, was really good. He is just a fun guy, and really good at teaching. We had a couple reps come in from the floor who really knew what they were talking about, but Gene really just got us moving. Someone once said that was Patton’s true talent: talented at tactics and strategy, but a genius for shoving the whole thing in motion. Gene did that well.

pantransit.reptiles.org: 16MB MP4 of Snow-bo

verabee.com: 5MB Quicktime of the same movie

Heh heh. I also got him to show the film linked to above (the latter has a bit about the film) today after the final. He thought it was funny, if a little twisted. Which, of course, it is, heh.

I got my oil changed. I also put in a new air filter. No news yet on any possible action by the apartments on my unauthorized sublet. We shall see.

“Time and love have branded me with their claws”

2006-06-04T15:28:00.000-04:00

This morning we had our first hailstorm since my arrival. The hail was small, about a quarter inch or so in size. I know a guy who does vinyl siding and he said all his work was repairing hail damage. Hmmm. I knew I needed an umbrella, but now I know I need one made with aluminum mesh rather than polyester.

Last night at midnight Baptist Keith turned twenty-one. He celebrated by going out and buying a single twenty-four ounce beer. The Captain and Tennille came out just to see him drink it. It was rather funny.

My car is halfway unpacked now. The interior is empty but I need to clean out the trunk, which can wait until everything I have dragged upstairs is put away.

I have been very busy with various things, some of them useful. First up, I now have a monitor for my computer. It is Dad's old Macintosh monitor. It used a cable with a DB-15 plug, which is to say it was a plug with fifteen pins in two rows of eight and seven. PCs use an HD-15, with three rows of five.

Why yes, getting them to talk to each other took a bit of persuading.

Running Gentoo Linux, as I do, I have had to run about two hundred package upgrades that have accumulated over the last two months.

The truly sad thing is that not buying a $30 used monitor may have cost me quite a bit more. I got nabbed by the police Thursday night.

As most of you know, I have been using the Activity Center computers to post to this blog, read and send email, what have you. I once saw a cop down there using the computer: badge, uniform, gun and all (everything but his hat). He never paid attention to me. Sadly, Thursday night he chased a bunch of non-residents out of the pool; not that I care, but I had just walked up with a cigarette and he asked me a few questions.

I was unaware that he was a resident of the complex, that he was, in effect, the "house cop". Mixing public law enforcement with private contracts is a bit of dirty pool, in my opinion. Had a manager grilled me, I would have cheerfully lied through my teeth but as it is, I try not to lie to cops.

So the policeman (who is not your friend) went and got a manager, who informed me that subletting was going to be expensive. I suppose that my sublessor and I shall split the cost, but it is going to be expensive.

Blast.

In other news, there is one heck of an ant infestation in the kitchen, because Certain People can not be convinced that ant colonies send out scouts who look for crumbs (or entire pizzas left on the counter) and that they invariably bring the whole worker colony along for the food.

Last week we had our first session on the phones. For my first call I got to help a guy take about twenty-five screws out of his laptop to yank the whole thing apart so the plug of the touchpad, the mouse-like apparatus, could be removed and reinserted. I was sweating the whole time, but it worked. Dell will be hiring up to a thousand people for our call center over the next year, so I am hoping for a permanent position here so long as I am not an outright danger to my callers.

Monday we take the final. Tuesday through Friday we take calls on the floor under the eyes of the trainers, then we get rotated out into our stations. I took the time to locate mine, it is right next to the windows. I am a bit scared but mostly looking forward to it. Today I will be typing my class notes into the computer, rearranging them into a far more coherent form, then I will be mailing them to myself at Dell. Wish me luck.

So tired

2006-05-30T01:40:00.000-04:00

I left Kalamazoo at about 3:30 PM CDT, and it is now 12:38 AM. This trip went a bit smoother, I think, simply because I have this down now. Also, I did not encounter the congestion I did when I drove north through Nashville Friday evening. Also, I am pleased to note that the A/C drops my mileage by less than one mile per gallon, which is good because I had it on "ARCTIC" until the sun went down.

$2.71 at Meijers on Westnedge
$2.61 at some gas station in old Louisville
$2.50 at Kangaroo gas station here in Murfreesboro

That Kangaroo station must purchase only gasoline that "fell off the truck".

The little bit of Louisville I saw is indeed pretty; aside from the rough neighborhoods I travelled through, I saw a lot of beautiful, older brick buildings. I sort of wish more of Nashville looked like that; of course, it's so big that I could have just missed those parts.

My spawn is obstreperous as usual. At least: one month's absence did not erase her memory of me. She has a summer cold, and the drugstore had no pseudoephedrine in syrup form, so I got to cajole two half-doses of Theraflu down her, one at eleven PM and one at two AM.

My car is stuffed with my junk. Sadly, some bits I could want are not in there, but overall it was a productive trip. In every other wise, Kalamazoo was rather completely stressful.

And HOT. It was hotter in Kalamazoo than in Nashville; what the heck...?

My Douglas MacArthur moment

2006-05-27T03:49:00.000-04:00

I have returned. I have been here one hour. It is now 3:54 AM EST.

Can I call 'em, or what?

Little Poopsie needs her sleep, so I will let her see me tomorrow. Besides, she is usually a little cranky at night.

On the way back, as on the way there (it seems ages ago) night fell just as I was exiting Louisville, Kentucky (which I still think is pretty, and the Ohio is a very large river). Frankly, driving through a dark Indiana is not that much different than driving through it in daylight.

Bringing it all back home

2006-05-25T19:18:00.000-04:00

Yes, I will be leaving work tomorrow and driving straight up to Kalamazoo to collect all my junk. Sharp kitchen knives, clothes, car title (I need it to register my car in Tennessee), plus, oh, I don't know, my COMPUTER MONITOR, KEYBOARD, MOUSE, you know: general stuff. If I leave Tennessee at 5:00 PM CST (6:00 PM EST), driving 531 miles to Kalamazoo (assuming nothing explodes this time) at an average of 60 m.p.h. is, uh, nine hours, so 3:00 AM.

Yeesh.

Yesterday the class had a gang shadow. This refers to doing one-on-one listening sessions with our future teammates while they take, and hopefully resolve, calls. Some people had horror stories about techs with attitude, chewing gum (loudly) or reading stories while talking to the customer. I had three good techs; one was from Minnesota and was happy to work our queue, because he had a chance to really talk to people and help them. One was a former hardware guy who was much less polished, but quite competent. One was a short-timer who had a bit of a wonky customer manner, but seemed okay. (He had all non-technical calls, so I was not able to really judge his technical savvy.) Again, I am a bit nervous, but I do feel pretty confident. My biggest worry is suffering from stage fright during my first calls under a supervisor's eyes.

I am almost at the end of the third week. When I started this I thought four weeks seemed so long, and I had no idea if I would make it to the end without the car blowing up, or starving, or what have you. I am pretty thrilled to have made it so far and only pray I continue to have the opportunity to see this through.

I got my new ATM card in the mail today, which is also thrilling. Now I must run back to the apartment to get the PIN to see if it works.

The Onion overtaken

2006-05-21T15:36:00.000-04:00

The Onion is being overtaken by the real news. Hardee's has introduced (this is its real name) the Monster Thickburger: two-thirds of a pound of beef, three slices of cheese, four of bacon, mayo and a buttered, toasted bun. 1,420 Calories.

I'm hungry.

The quote:

Health-safety activist Michael Jacobson denounced the new [burger].

"They would argue they are just giving people what they want. I would say this is beyond the pale," said Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "Probably no nutritionist ever imagined that a product like this would be marketed."

All we need are Tycho and Gabe arguing over the burger: "There's no way you can handle that much nougat, let alone the flowing caramel. Hand over that Snickers®!" "You'd have to kill me first."

Really, do all nutritionists lack imagination? I guess they do. Creme brulée, Babe Ruth, sausage gravy, Diamond Jim Brady and Gorgonzola-smothered chicken have left them completely unprepared for this fresh assault.

In other news, the Captain and Tennille are, I fervently hope, going to end up in jail. Probation violations are like that. And dealing out of the apartment to crowds of the young and stupid. Not to mention messing with the A/C controls. That right there will cost them heavily.

Tennessee v. Michigan

2006-05-21T12:55:00.000-04:00

Churches: Lots and lots. The little ones look like big churches. The big ones look like big cathedrals, warehouses or the Pentagon. Which reminds me, I wanted to look up exactly what a Primitive Baptist is after I saw one of their church signs.

Automotive: Nissan v. Ford/GMC. On the road, people use short beeps instead of long honks. Slow cars (like mine when my transmission acts up) are tolerated. Sometimes, I thought the police were preparing to pull me over when I was only trailing some private citizen who was simply following instead of zooming around me.

Weather: Well, Kalamazoo has a Patchy Frost weather advisory for Monday; Murfreesboro does not, heh heh. The sun down here is intense, though we have not seen much of it lately; the cloud cover and rain have been near constant for about two weeks. I thought I saw a lot of people carrying umbrellas when I came down here, and I note now that Nashville gets about fifty inches mean annual precipitation compared to Kalamazoo's thirty-five. Mean annual air temperature is fifty-seven here compared to thirty-seven back home.

Power: The microwave has the current time on it and had it when I moved in. I am pretty sure no one in the apartment besides myself could care or know about adjusting the time. Ergo, the power in Tennessee rarely browns out.

Let me state that again. The electricity in Tennessee has never browned out while I have been here. No dimmings as if the Atlas that holds up the grid just shifted the weight on his shoulders. No substation switchings that blank everything and cause thousands of generators to cough to life. None of that. Power generation and usage in Tennessee and Michigan are quite different. Through the 1990s, power useage in Michigan was steady at 98 Mwh (million watthours) while Tennessee's grew from 76 to 93 Mwh.

The most interesting thing about Tennessee is that nuclear power provides twice the watthours as in Michigan. 74.6% of power in Michigan is fossil fuel-based compared to only 60% in Tennessee. In fact, hydroelectric and nuclear showed growth in TN (after the nationwide post-Three Mile Island stagnation), while the only move in Michigan was to increase the capacity share of natural gas. Obviously, Michigan's hydro power potential is limited but that is all the more reason to strengthen the atomic sector.

Yes, the Tennessee Valley Authority is supposedly "Socialism done right." But note that TVA, though government-owned, has been self-financing since it expanded into non-hydro in 1959 and has several times heavily slashed its employment rolls to hold costs down, very unlike a government or union monopoly. Until Robert A. Heinlein's Shipstones (nearly perfect batteries, available in almost any size, in his sci-fi novel Friday) become a reality and you buy your power off a delivery truck that replaces the Shipstone in your basement just as the coal and fuel oil companies resupplied your coal and oil, power must always be distributed over wires: those wires are the prime sticking point between public and private.

Thus, some company will always have power access to your street and home. The only question is, how do we assign which territory to which power company? With TVA, the decision was made to assign territory using the "facts on the ground": the Appalachians and the Tennessee Valley were used to define a territory and a company was formed by government, rather than by private interests, to gain and apply the Federal power over navigable rivers. TVA pays tax equivalents and issues bonds instead of stock to finance new growth. The company may hire and fire as any private company might, protected by the Right to Work law in Tennessee. Interestingly, though the board of directors is listed at their website, how those directors are appointed is not.

I do not think these are the reasons for TVA's success: I have no doubt that it would be less profitable without atomic power and that a significant revenue decline would deteriorate the grid. If anything, TVA is successful because it is successful: its prestige as a well-run, public-spirited, nominally Socialist (but positively free enterprise) entity allows it to split the anti-nuke and anti-capitalist activists and install cheap, reliable atomic generators which feed its prestige even more.

Home repair

2006-05-21T01:19:00.000-04:00

Uh… Bob Dylan has an XM radio show, "Theme Time Radio Hour". Now, now I have a reason to subscribe to XM radio. Well, not really. Money is still tight. But I have to listen to Bob play "Momma Said Knock You Out" for Mother's Day:

Don't call it a comeback, he been here for years, rocking his peers, putting 'em in fear, making tears rain down like a monsoon, explosions overpowerin', over the competition LL Cool J is towering. LL Cool J — stands for Ladies Love Cool J.

But someday.

It just gets more and more exciting, no?

Still no ATM card, but I decided to celebrate my first paycheck by… cleaning the bathroom. Sponge, brush and Comet. I still think Comet is the cleaning product of the millennium. Everything else takes too long and leaves dirt behind. The bathroom was none too clean when I moved in, and I have not helped things, what with the ring I left in the tub when I took my first bath in weeks and the ring I left in the sink when I washed my hands after repairing my front brakes. The toilet is white again. I also had to remove a plug of… uh, something that clogged the throat of the drain, which was about as nasty as you are imagining, or remembering, right now. Perhaps the last occupant washed his or her hair in the sink.

And then I had to fix the drain plug lever, adjusting the ball and lever position and adding an O-ring to the screw cap so the threads would not bottom out before the ball was properly compressed.

And then I had to buy an aerator for the faucet. Why is it that about the first thing I do anywhere new is install or fix faucet aerators? I mean besides not wanting the faucet to splash water all over the crotch of my trousers, or waiting five minutes for a cup to fill so I can rinse and spit after brushing my teeth. What do people do with aerators? Are they unaware that they can be cleaned? Do they steal them for use in meth labs? Should aerators join pseudoephedrine behind the pharmacy counter at Wal-Mart, available only with picture ID, thumbprint and record checks?

One thing I have noticed about these kids (aside from the fact that the Captain and Tennille are definitely dealing) is that they know how to fix, clean or operate nothing more complex than a microwave. Setting the air conditioning at 60°, so constantly running, will freeze the heat exchanger and leave us to steam in an 80° apartment? You don't say! Putting a pan on the oven rack below a frozen pizza will keep the fire alarm from going off? You're kidding!

Baptist Keith believes in global warming. I know the leftists are promoting this pathetic "idea" (the successor plague to the population bomb, dioxin, DDT, tobacco, alcohol, nuclear winter, Alar and anti-communism) but this is actually encouraging. The far ends of the spectrum, left and right, even when advocating the same end, do so with such violently different motives that the meeting is usually utterly destructive. It will be tough to keep the anti-globalization jihad in formation when the first born-again Christian mounts the Earth First! podium and takes a sideswipe at homosexuality.

Oh, and the real reason not to see The Da Vinci Code.

While spinning around the Web, I noticed that two of the all-time great Star Trek episodes, "Shore Leave" and "Amok Time", were written by Theodore Sturgeon. One of the reasons that ST survived so long as it did in syndication purgatory was that "real" science fiction authors (i.e., writers of published short stories and novels) wrote many of the episodes. The most popular episode of the original series, "The City on the Edge of Forever", is a work by Harlan Ellison, right down to the style of the title. The Next Generation had greater budgets, quality control, and ensemble acting but the secret weapon for TOS was always the scripts.

Speakers

2006-05-20T12:11:00.000-04:00

Well, my ATM card still has not arrived, but it was not until I started going to the mail box to look for it that I saw the card in it that listed the last names of the current residents for the benefit of the mail carrier. So perhaps the card is back on its way to Kalamazoo, blast it. On the other hand, Pam sent me a can opener to see if they would actually leave anything for me, and they did; I just got it this morning. And I have actually been paid; I have no checks yet, but I have received my direct deposit.

I celebrated by stopping at Wal-Mart; I now have peanut butter and jam to complement the ham sandwiches.

The last couple days have been interesting. I got ten out of ten on my last three tests, and got to stand up and deliver a lecture on RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) to explain to the class why, exactly, it existed. RAID is a bit odd to explain to people without a background in, or familiar with, industrial-scale computing. RAID is neither data backup nor immune to damage; it can improve hard disk performance, reliability or both, but to most people it is expensive and useless: they would be better off with a DVD-RW making regular backups of important data.

Wednesday a quarterly meeting was held; we lowly trainees were allowed to attend. The best thing about these meetings is that, in exchange for looking attentive while someone recites a speech for the nth time, you get free food. I had a Coke, three corn dogs and two or three nacho servings. (You learn to take what you can get.) The speeches were actually not bad, fairly direct and usually humorous; awards were given; a raffle was held; they even had a pie-eating contest. That was when eight or ten people in my class managed to humiliate themselves by having a smoke break before the meeting was actually over and were brought back as a group in front of a woman who is about two or three spots below Michael Dell. That bought us a lecture on when exactly break is and that meetings were not exceptions.

Was I among them? Me? Wander off without permission or notification, on my own head?

Perish the thought.

Thursday morning, our chief trainer noted that Dell had always shipped Intel processors and chipsets (a chipset is the thing that supports the processor by providing the bus, the channels, to speak to the PCI expansion cards, USB, keyboards and mice, RAM memory, and often the integrated hard disk controller). My hand shot up because I had read the news last night that Dell, for the first time, would be offering AMD Opteron processors in the high-end servers. Our chief trainer read us an email by one of the CEOs of Dell, sent just that morning, noting this. The letter closed with a line, after listing all the changes that Dell would be making to restore growth and crush its rivals, that our trainer had forwarded to his colleagues: "Competition in the future will be much tougher—for them." Heh.

Wednesday and Thursday mornings were pretty rough, anyway. The alarm clock speaker sound was cutting in and out, which is usually a problem with the volume control dial, but this was different. (I am terrified of sleeping through the alarm.) Eventually, I took the lid off and discovered that the circuit board was screwed to the clock base and the speaker to the clock lid. Two pillars with springy ends rose up about two inches from the circuit board to carry the current to the speaker; I bent the ends up a bit to ensure a tight connection, which certainly would have worked had I been able to then reassemble it.

See, the buttons on top of the clock had their own pillars, growing down from the top, which were there to translate your finger presses to the switches on the circuit board. Well, it was impossible to do it; I could not get the two halves to mate at all. The first night I had to borrow Keith's phone as an alarm clock (I had lost mine), the second I was up until about quarter to two trying to fix it. (I had found my phone, but it had no alarm capability.)

And fix it I did. It took one stove burner on HIGH, one pair of Vise-Grips, a drywall nail, solder paste, and the disassembly of my one jumper wire for the two alligator clips on either end. (Had I had both jumper wires in my tool box, I could have gone to sleep at 11:30 PM.)

Yeah. Thursday morning I was pretty wrecked.

Accidentally

2006-05-17T20:08:00.000-04:00

Last night I made a point of hanging out in the Activity Center until a staff member ran the big popcorn machine. Which is where I am, right now. Heck, a lot of guys in that class are. (In financial straits, not in the apartment's AC.)

Fellow trainee David is a very cool guy. So laconic he speaks with a non-Southern drawl, he walks with a tremendous limp: his knee has lost most of its cartilage from a motorcycle racing accident. I had to go to the bank today during lunch and told him so, which led to a discussion on banks that revealed we customed the same bank. He very nicely agreed to drive me, which was nice because we had an interesting conversation and I did not have to risk running out of gas before I got cash to a gas station on my lunch hour.

His car is a white Grand Marquis. Having been in a couple car accidents (and having twice gone through a windshield), he prefers large cars. So, it was a bit like driving with Dad, except that Dad does not drive like a race car driver. I found it very unusual to be hanging on to the hand straps in a big, paternal car like that. We traded crash stories along the way. One of those times he went through the windshield, a Jeep slammed to a halt in front of his friend's pickup truck. Arm hanging out the passenger window, he bounced off the windshield (putting a hole in it), broke the backglass with his head when another car hit them from behind, then went through the windshield again when the front took another hit, ending up draped all over the Jeep's roll bars.

He has almost no facial scars, for all these accidents; probably the kind of guy who prefers full-face helmets. Obviously, he is my new role model.

David had his own business in St. Joseph, Michigan until Whirlpool let him go. We had a fascinating conversation about that, revealing that any cash transfer of more than $4,999.99 requires days to process. Also, even cashier's checks are subject to holds from certain banks. It must make business tremendously hard for small retailers.

Of course, the necessity of arming yourself to make a deposit at the bank in Benton Harbor/St. Joe probably didn't help. The riots there a couple years ago were sparked when a kid was killed by a policeman's accidental weapon discharge. (True? False? More on that later.) Another kid died while eluding police on a motorcycle. This led to the rule that motorcycle riders would not be chased through St. Joe. This led, in turn, to motorcyclists using St. Joe's Main Street to shake off police at 150 m.p.h.

Well. Bad laws are known as such when they reward criminal acts. Rumor has it that Murfreesboro sheriffs, even Tennessee state police, are corrupt. Confiscating marijuana to sell it in county jail, running over a wife's lover and planting drugs on him, various acts. The Tennessean paper ran a story on state police background checks: an allegedly tremendous number had various convictions for violent crime. One had been allegedly convicted of sex with a fourteen year-old girl. (No word if he was thirty-five or eighteen at the time.) On the other hand, with the law outlawing human judgment, anyone who wishes to use his or her judgment is an outlaw, and it's the criminals complaining loudest about those awful police. So file these under "possible BS people once told me".

I am again ducking the question of why I moved. I am just not up to it today, nor has part of that issue been laid to rest, which makes it impossible to write about unless I give myself hours in this blog to dissect my emotions and then bleed them until no color, no life is in them. I keep this blog to avoid having to maintain a mental mailing list, but it also serves a useful purpose: by grouping everyone I know, I just imagine speaking any given sentence in front of them all. It has a wonderfully concentrating effect on my mind and removes the impossible task of rereading every letter to see who should read that particular letter. Anything better said in private is said, later, in private email. This puts me in complete opposition to the general birth cycle of blogs where kids (and dumb adults):

start a blog,
invite a select circle,
insult and denigrate anyone outside of that circle,
get at loggerheads with a circle member,
get exposed by disgruntled ex-intimate,
close the blog.

In opposition, I am happiest.

Attrition warfare (update)

2006-05-15T20:58:00.000-04:00

I found a little more about the attrition rates at Dell's tech support. I spoke to one guy today who had twenty-nine people in his class (XPS Gold, a higher level of tech support than I am in). Five were hired in the first round, after about six months as temps. Two in the second, a couple months later. Two more were let go.

So, seven out of thirty are now "Dell-badged", which gives us 76.8% attrition. Sounds bad, yes?

No, it doesn't. What happened to the other twenty-one people? According the people I talked to, the biggest wasters of new employees are finding other jobs or poor attendance. In class every day, I observe: some of the most talented people are interviewing elsewhere. (Heck, Nissan is paying part-timers over $16 an hour.) Some of the least are just not the people who will make that boring commitment to be at work twenty minutes early every day.

Everyone is very friendly there; I've not seen a lot of cranky people about. (Just one, who is likely to be my boss. Argh.) I am sure it is a high-pressure environment. I am not sure how I feel about that: it will be either a great experience or a horrible one, I'm sure. And who cares? I will last at least six or eight months, and I will be saving a good part of my income, and time will tell after that.

ETA:

You know, I have no idea what "ETA" means, apart from Estimated Time of Arrival. But I see other bloggers use it, so...

Last night I checked the phone lines and found nothing that could be causing the problem. Either this apartment complex or the phone company has a wiring snafu, which creates a problem, as one roommate thinks he needs to call the apartment managers, and the others think they need to call the phone company. So, again, no phone for a while.

I went to an Episcopal church here in town yesterday. The contrast with Bethel Murfreesboro was pretty extreme. I would rather not badmouth a particular church or congregation in public (or as public as this gets) but I suppose I would rather have my quota of stiff formality in some place other than church. More looking is in order.

I am halfway through Tocqueville's Democracy in America and The Theban Plays of Sophocles.

Because someone asked: to post comments at this blog, just click on a post, go to the end, and click "Post Comment". You get a text editing box to write your comment, and a choice of how to identify yourself. Unless you have your own blog here at blogger.com, go ahead and click "Other". You have the option of entering your name and a personal Web page, but you can enter both, one or none. Click "Publish", and the page should then say, "Your comment is awaiting moderation." Eventually, I get around to approving the comments. This last step allows people to post without having to get their own blogs and keeps out comment spam.

Oh, and I have tried to be discreet in my use of names, so you should be, too. And if my discretion slips, if anyone asks, you never heard of this blog. ;-)

First week done

2006-05-12T20:41:00.000-04:00

It is Friday, and I have completed one of the four weeks of training. We had two assessments today: out of ten questions on each, I scored nine and seven. The latter was the Dellserv test, which is to say it is entirely about the Dell software which tracks customers, purchases, systems and incident calls. Much of it involved questions I will have little day-to-day dealings with, and I am practically guaranteed to become much more familiar with Dellserv since I will be using it on a daily basis.

At the end of the four weeks, the final will have fifty questions, and we will have two hours to complete it; I will need to score 70% or more to go on as tech support.

Coffee achiever

2006-05-10T23:13:00.000-04:00

I am back in the computer room again tonight to blog and to send my resumé to Nissan. One of the guys at Dell training has a lead on a job there. I admit my ambition had not sought so high when I arrived, but last night I spoke to a guy in the Activity Center who had a part-time job at Nissan (I never asked doing what) that paid $16.35 an hour.

Well. And the full timers make $23 plus. That is indeed tempting, and indeed worth sending in my resumé. Obviously, I would prefer to be IT, even in tech support (which is bottom of the food chain in IT), but I would feel I was spitting in the face of Providence not to at least apply online. (I will also be handing a printed resumé to that guy at work.)

I also told the woman who gave me my phone interview at Dell that I would try to put her in touch with Pfizer's soon-to-be-ex-IT staff. One hand washes the other's back....

Speaking of work, I spoke to one older man in training. He was able to give me the name of a computer shop that probably has used Wyse and DEC VT monitors. He guessed that they would sell one for $15.

Oh, yes.

In other news, I read a Rolling Stone issue at the library. It had a review of Liz Phair's newest, very commercial album, which noted, "Why would the greatest mumbler in recent memory choose to be a mediocre pop singer?" A good question. Tonight, though, I popped in a CD and was suddenly seized with a thought: Liz Phair's next great album would be a duet with The Magnetic Fields.

Think of it:

'Cause I always say I love you when I mean turn out the light,
And I say, let's run away, when I just mean stay the night.
But the words you long to hear, you will never hear from me,
I'll never say, happy anniversary,
Never stay to say, happy anniversary,
So I think I need a new hea-ea-art...

You said you were in love with me.
Both of us know that that's impossible.
And I could make you rue the day,
But I could never make you stay.

Not for all the tea in China,
Not if I could sing like a bird,
Not for all North Carolina,
Not for all my little words.

Oooohh, yessss... someday.

I went to Wal-Mart tonight for some groceries as I needed gas ($2.75 a gallon) and I would rather not go there some other time, wasting more gas. I have been living on ham sandwiches: wheat bread, mayonnaise, ham ($2.30 a pound or something, which, for real ham, is a good price), tomato, lettuce and a little onion. Aside from the mad craving for an odd snack just to shake things up, it seems to keep me going pretty well. Of course, my roommates have no pans or sharp knives (I should be glad they have silverware and plates) so I slice my veggies with my ancient Marine K-bar-style knife. (I had forgotten where it was, and am glad I have it now, as otherwise I would have to use a tiny Victorinox pen knife.) I also got more coffee. This was a bit more involved, as it required a hammer and a screwdriver.

A screwdriver; yes, the screwdriver is necessary because I have no cold chisels here for some damnable reason or other and dulling the K-bar would be disasterous. Yes, I have no can opener. Hold your laughter: the tin can was invented fifty years before the can opener so I am not so unusual. My roommates, I think, have never seen cooking that has not involved a microwave. I think they would be confused if they tried to eat anything out of a can without a pull top. (Even Campbell's soup has fallen prey to the new, godless, and opener-less ways.) I punch out three sides, then use channellock pliers to tear off the new flap and crimp down the rough edges.

coffee == creativity

The downstairs neighbors should be glad the floors are concrete and steel because it takes a while to punch a proper-size hole in a coffee can. With a screwdriver. And I had to do it tonight because I would rather not do it tomorrow morning, late for work, bleary-eyed, and terminally short of caffeine: I'm lucky enough to still have all my fingers as it is.

Car pool lane

2006-05-09T21:02:00.000-04:00

I have never understood car pool lanes. You trade lanes few can use for even more hectic lane changing by everyone else. Express lanes would be a better deal, I think, except for one thing: anywhere you put them creates traffic lanes cutting across each other, which is bad news forever. We simply must deal with the fact that cramming people into a city is inherently tougher and slower than letting them scramble back out.

Now that I have indeed woken for three days in a row (including church) using the new alarm clock I may be able to relax enough to go to sleep early enough. Also, I might be able to car pool with two guys from work, which would save us a tremendous amount of money over the next three and a half weeks. Yes, I made fun of car pool lanes just now. So? You speak of the environment. I speak of money.

First day at work

2006-05-08T22:11:00.000-04:00

I spent much of last night fretting over my new/used alarm clock. What was not spent worrying over that went into worrying about I-24 and traffic.

And indeed, I was right to have so worried. I made it in on time, of course, but the trip itself... well. I drive from exits 78 to 56; traffic stopped dead at about mile marker 65. The worst, of course, was the drifting, but not stopped, traffic: fast, slow, fast, slow. It is practically designed to trigger my transmission problem, and sure enough, it did. At one point, staying with traffic had me pushing 4500 r.p.m. in second gear (red lines at 6500).

That isn't very fun. I will simply have to leave about twenty minutes earlier, which should push me in front of the great mass of rush hour. (I hope.) The truly odd thing is that the transmission did not drop into limp mode the whole way home.

Work. Well, not work, training. We have three instructors. One is a guy about my age, ex-military, I think, who, if you close your eyes, sounds a lot like Wilford Brimley. Another is an older guy who is quite witty. The third is a younger guy, with Dell only two years, who just started training people a month ago. Which is why we have three instructors, I think: the younger trainer is being trained himself.

We started by talking about ourselves. Several people there were from Michigan. One guy worked for the Whirlpool IT department before being let go, and had 15 people at his own ISP. Now he's down here. I think that after Pfizer's IT department is let go, Dell may have majority ex-Michigan classes. One was downsized from AOL; a lot of the people there were downsized from somewhere, recently or not.

The premier jokester sat down next to me (I swear, not the other way around). We managed to crack each other up over our Coke bottle lids (they were white, black and red. He was black and had the black lid, as he pointed out. Another white guy had the white one. I exclaimed, quietly, "I must be part-Indian! Cool!"). We continued with "A Brief History of Troubleshooting" and finished up with a test. I finished first (way first) and got 103/125, or 85%. No, I couldn't have improved it: I have not been buying new computer equipment for some time and so some questions about WiFi, Bluetooth and Serial ATA are simply beyond me for now.

The Michigan guy was born in Findley, Ohio. We chatted a bit during lunch (I had a whole tiny bag of Doritos and coffee). He was not unhappy to leave Michigan. As he put it, he had to get used to a whole new speech down here: "Hello", "How are you?", "Thank you" and "Have a nice day". I had told everyone about sleeping in my car; he had done the same when he moved to Michigan ten years ago.

I find it hard to believe that this will take four weeks to complete. Of course, I say this now; time will show me how hard it really is, I suppose.

I have a few books I brought with me from Kalamazoo. A few nights ago I finished Conrad's Lord Jim and started on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, vol. 1. I have had this book for ages, and now I intend to finish it. Part of the reason it is so difficult is that so many of his points (news then, so explained slowly and at length) are old hat now. When he wanders into European government it actually gets much more interesting for me. The amusing thing about DiA is that half the Democrats in America now would choke and gag on de Tocqueville's admiration: the "sacred right of property", the importance of wide-spread democracy and individualism over central control or group or minority rights, the importance of an armed citizenry. He also made an important distinction between centralized government (a near absolute in the early U.S., when the state Legislatures reigned supreme) and centralized administration (practically non-existant). de Tocqueville's observation on how self-reliance is a greater good, and a greater public virtue, than perfect government service would gag and kill a post-Katrina Bush-hater today.

Or the French, for that matter.

Church in holey boots

2006-05-07T22:14:00.000-04:00

Luckily, I had black socks. This made the separation of upper and sole in my Doc Martens more or less unnoticeable; my black dress shoes, as so much else, are cooling their heels (heh heh heh) in Kalamazoo. I showered, shaved, dressed nicely, and accompanied Baptist Keith and his friend (in real life, they have the same given name) to the church.

Bethel Murfreesboro is an Every Nation church. EN is an offshoot of the defunct Maranatha Campus Ministries, which, indeed, was accused of cult-like behavior: most of these problems arose from abuse of an idea called discipleship, which is far too involved to explain here. Some interesting points are made at this discussion board. I can only note:

Religious fervor, or, even better, belief itself is often cult-like, as any number of quotes from the New Testament, if not of Christ Himself, may illustrate,
Religion without belief is hollow,
I agree with the poster on the board above who noted that EN is fulfilling a genuine need for fellowship and belief; society is better off reforming the denomination's dysfunction, and
If I want religious authority, I know where to find it.

I really enjoyed the service, actually, which is remarkable given my social discomfort with large groups of new people and my terminal embarrassment at finding my slacker butt in an Evangelical, born-again church. The music was pretty outstanding, and I thought one number was particularly moving. (Though a judicious selection from Bob Dylan's overt, evangelical albums might have added some kick.)

They had about six people doing vocals. You couldn't call it a choir. No, that word evokes Gregorian chant and Protestant hymns; these were modern vocalists, standing in front of a modern band, cordless mikes in hand, laying down modern vocals. It was very pretty, very moving, and the minister, or rather, pastor, made a good sermon.

After, the three of us repaired to a Chinese restaurant for the lunch buffet (they even had sushi). It was only $5.25, and I am very happy about that, as it will be my only restaurant meal from my second day in Nashville until at least the 19th of this month.

(At this point I must note that Internet Explorer crashed and killed a lot of this post, which is annoying, but, oh well.)

Braking training

2006-05-06T23:02:00.000-04:00

Today I fixed my brake pads. Being me, I am, of course, incapable of fixing them without in fact creating more worries about how I fixed them.

In this instance, I have these shims on my brake assemblies. The pads line up on each disk, one to a side. Each shim goes on the assembly mount (one at twelve o'clock, one at 8 o'clock) and the ends of the two brake pads ride on them, sliding into and away from the disk.

So. New pads. New shims? Or no shims? I had no shims on the rear pads and one rusted solid and gouged my disk into Replacementland.

I installed the shims. Tomorrow, I will look at them, and take them out, most likely. Then I will drive around a bit and see if I like them like that.

And the next day, I will probably put them back. I am someone's wife, always rearranging my furniture, only I do it with car parts.

I accepted an invitation to go to Baptist Keith's church. (I should note that he actually goes to an interdenominational church.) Actually, I should go home so we can talk about it. He was thinking about accepting the mailman's invitation to his church. Also, I need to impress upon him that my Church background is pretty much vanilla and non-Evangelical.

I used to think I was Congregationalist; this was based on rather hazy memories of the sign in front of the church my family attended. I was rather embarrassed to discover, from my mom, that I was in fact baptized in a Methodist church.

Me: "I'm an Anglophile."
Todd C.: "Please. You don't even belong to the right church!"

Amusing, that after repairing so many Episcopal church organs with Todd, it turns out I am indeed a member of the Anglican's sister church. (And, of course, the Congregationalist church is so English, though Independent, it bleeds pints of bitter. So, nyeh, Todd, wherever you are.)

Oh, and just in case, on the off chance, you understand, that the church Keith takes me to is actually a cult, and someday you see me handing out religious literature and pounding a tambourine in an airport....

Kill me.

Heigh ho, heigh ho...

2006-05-05T15:01:00.000-04:00

It's off to the auto parts store I go.

The other day, when I rotated my tires, I became a bit alarmed to see that the front driver's side brake pads were wonky. More exactly, it looks like a chunk of braking material came off the inside pad backing plate. Judging by the rust, this happened a while ago.

Bummer.

Needless to say, this freaks me out, but only a little. I mean, it isn't like the transmission, which has frustrated me thoroughly for two years and may require expensive repairs. Brake pads are easy. I did the rear pads a while ago, the front ones are sufficiently worn that they need to be replaced anyway, and new pads are $19.99 plus tax. Depending on the rest of my chores, I should get it replaced today or tomorrow. I have almost no doubt that car repair in the parking lot is not allowed but little more that I will be done before anyone notices. Hmm. Most of the staff here in this complex are residents. I think early morning would be the best time.

I do not want to drive on I-24 in rush hour with wonky pads. It would be like a death wish.

And if I don't get a phone book soon, I will tear someone's throat out. I mean, come on! A phone book! People pay phone companies to place ads in it! You would think trucks would drive around throwing them at pedestrians and into open car windows year-round!

How terribly apropos

2006-05-05T01:05:00.000-04:00

I’ve decided that the title of my blog could apply equally well to this student housing complex. It is like a playground for older teenagers. I've just sat down in the Activity Center, which is equipped with a pool, patio, two gas grills, a gym and this computer room. (Never mind the basketball, volleyball and tennis courts.) I have to enjoy it now, as I am sure that, come the end of July, when my sublet runs out, when everyone's lease runs out or gets renewed and the fresh crop enters, it will be uninhabitable: screaming, drinking, smoking, toking, puking teenyboppers everywhere.

“My gorge rises to think on’t,” said Hamlet.

It comes with everything a young college student needs; I’m sure they even have lawyers on call for the occasional misdemeanor possession charge.

I just did a Google search for “apropos” to see if it needed an acute or a grave, and in the helpful completion bar Internet Explorer throws up (so to speak) I see someone did a search for “collage grove appt”, which is, I think, undergrad for “college grove apt”.

Yes, I will need to thoroughly enjoy this place, this Activity Center, then escape, running and screaming, to Maturityland come August. Oh, and speaking of August...

I spoke to Captain Smack’s girlfriend today. She is nice, a little flighty, but she is only, I think, nineteen years old. She offered me a freezer McMuffin when I left this morning for my photo shoot, which was awful nice of her. I offered up, by way of conversation, that she didn't have to spend all day cooped up in the Captain’s room, as it must get claustrophobic in there after sixteen hours or so. She said she didn't mind, and besides, she had a room herself in the complex, but the girls she roomed with were constant partiers, cramming as many as one hundred people in their apartment and private rooms. And the Captain worked six days a week, I think in construction, she said (a little proud), and she herself was off to job interviews.

I had thought, as I explained to her, that she was in there all day, as I had no way of knowing if they were in or out and, wishing each other luck, I left.

I had spoken to the Captain (sum of conversation: “Hello.” “Hey.” Lucky I spoke first or I would have gotten no words from him at all) once, and had seen the girl more often, usually doing laundry or putting together food in the kitchen. But she, again, was flighty or shy, and, aside from her poking her head out the patio door while I was smoking, which apparently startled her into speaking, we didn't really talk.

After the shoot, I scoured a couple Goodwill stores looking for a single pot and pan. When I got home, the Captain led a party of four guys out of his room. I said I was sorry to have missed the conference, which got some laughs. Then when the girl (haven’t nicknamed her yet, oh wait, yes I have) when Tennille got home she found the room locked.

I had her. She had to talk to me.

As I noted a while ago on this blog, I am suffering from a deficit of human conversation. Lately, cashiers find me unusually chatty. Since most of you know me as a dedicated anchorite, a hermit, I should explain. A person not needing much human contact can miss what little he has more than you think. I have spent my life, all except for the year in my own apartment, cohabitating with family, then roommates. I find I need those other people. I don’t need much: perhaps relating some story or picture I saw on the web can do it, but I need it and miss it.

(Incidentally, no one can find the street address and apartment number I had when I was in that apartment. Even I have no record of it. Coincidence? I think not.)

So, anyway. She needs to speak me. Muahahaha. I have her now in my clutches. She calls the Captain, complains, hangs up. I ask her how her job interviews went. Well, she has a problem. Turns out she was in a car with several other students when it got pulled over and one ounce of marijuana was found. Everyone in the car got charged with felonies but she got a lawyer and had it reduced to misdemeanor possession; she is now serving out her probation. After she is done, the record will be sealed, but for now, “I hate telling them. They’re all happy until they get to that section, and then their faces change, and they talk different to me.”

I understand how she feels.

She can get a warehouse job, but with a misdemeanor she ends up on third shift, which she, like most people, cannot handle. She also ends up there with tweakers, meth or cocaine abusers. She joked to some guy that he looked like he had been up for days.

Turned out he had.

Being a partying, drinking, toking and thoroughly modern girl, tweakers creep Tennille out. Also, you can have any kind of misdemeanor (assault, DUI) and work at a gas station (Mapco is the chain all over Tennessee) unless that misdemeanor is narcotics-related.

Then you’re screwed.

We chatted a bit about the police stop. Aside from bloodshot eyes and speeding (with the accelerator), it was a knock-and-talk operation. She complained that other cops had used the line about going easy if you cooperate and had meant it, but this guy didn’t.

“Wait, how many times have you been pulled over with weed?”

“Oh, like nine times.”

“NINE?! And you got busted once?! As your amateur psychologist, my diagnosis is that you have burned up all your bleeping luck, young lady.”

She laughed and agreed. She admitted to using tears to get cops to let her go. I was very bitter at this, and wished loudly for more female cops. Her dad was upset, too. That she got caught: both her parents toke.

What’s the emoticon for “rolling my eyes”?

The cops turned out in force, bragging about this being the kids’ first arrest, “like a party” she said, with about ten cop cars, taking three and a half hours to interrogate them before placing them under arrest and taking them downtown. Cavity searches for all!

I’m serious. Dumb local kids get nabbed with one ounce of pot and get cavity searches. All of them. Everyone in the car, because they were in the car. Now, if that doesn’t scare kids off drugs, and away from drug users, I don’t know what will. It’s right up there with Chris Rock's Tossed Salad Man.

Oh, but she still smokes. Apparently some nationwide nutrition supplement chain sells a “blood purification product” that, oddly enough, purifies you enough to pass urine tests. She has two months to go. Finally, her boyfriend shows up. His two friends, teasing her, talk about the plain brown wrappers (unmarked cop cars) hovering in the parking lot when they drove up.

“Dude, if anyone knocks, you don't know me. ‘Tennille who?’”

And folks: I knew that guy was Captain Smack. I didn’t smell anything, he didn’t tell me nothing, but I knew. I rule!

Heh. Baptist Keith (no tobacco, no alcohol, no coffee) and Captain Smack (vodka in the fridge, pothead girlfriend if not him as well) each have the rooms farthest from each other. Go figure. Me, I just want company: I know no one here.

Suddenly, I find myself playing social director.

Gah. 1:14 AM. And so to bed.

Say cheese

2006-05-04T10:39:00.000-04:00

This morning I got my badge, or rather, I stood for the picture on my badge; I should get it the first day of training, Monday. About twelve people received more info and got their pictures taken. I hope, assuming, of course, that this job works out, to get my various certifications for IT: Microsoft Certified Engineer (MSCE), and perhaps others such as the RHCE, Linux+ and/or A+. Dell has other levels of tech support for people with certs and I hope to qualify for other jobs, as well.

Afterwards, a few of us were chatting in the lobby about the Dell On Call games room: a dark room filled with networked computers loaded with games, especially first-person shooters (Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, &c.). For my breaks, I can choose games or a cigarette.

I think I'll quit smoking.

Meanwhile, a young woman with short brunette hair walked in, wearing a white top and bell-bottoms. She was pretty, but perhaps the most noticeable thing about her was that the fabric was about one step removed from sheer, and, as far as we could tell, she was wearing only a thong. And yes, I looked (discreetly), but mostly I had fun teasing the Georgia boy who had some trouble with the "discreet" part. Honestly, I was wondering more about what her business was that this kind of outfit was considered a "good idea", or even "not remarkable".

I mean, really. It was almost sheer. Like the shirts female, bra-less celebrities wear in front of flash photographers to get their nipples in the tabloids.

I went to Goodwill in Smyrna yesterday and bought a phone, an alarm clock and a French press. The phone ($3) is useless: I thought one of the land lines in the apartment worked but I was wrong. The alarm clock ($4) works fine. The French press ($5) works great. It was so nice to hit the Murfreesboro roads (lots and lots of traffic) with a full dose of caffeine next to my blood cells.

I am lusting after monitors and keyboards, having left mine in Michigan. Nevertheless, I have held off purchasing any before I decided whether or not to come up to Michigan this weekend. Well, I have decided to hold off driving up until after the first few weeks of classes: if I am doing well, I will come up then. Meanwhile, I am looking for a used computer shop that has a DEC VT220 terminal for $5.

Yeah, cheap bastard, I know.

I missed 1 Dell Parkway when the plane roared down the bridge across Murfreesboro Pike and took off directly overhead. I had thought it was a taxiway, not a runway, heh.

ETA:

Baptist Keith thinks he needs to call the office to get the phone lines fixed. So maybe I will get to use the land line!

The French press (retail $29.95) is, I think, already saving me lots of money on gas station coffee. That's a good thing. Hey, I was down to one cup a day, which for me is almost nothing, but every large cup was $1.20 down the hole, plus tax and gas. I bought a small can of Wal-mart Columbian for $2.16 plus tax. After seven cups or so, I will have amortized the cost of the setup. Of course, having no pans, I microwave the water in my travel mug, then dump it in the press.

Tennessee taxes: the state has an 8.25% sales tax. Many municipalities charge another 1% or so. There is no income tax. Unprepared food is also taxed, but at a lower rate.

The radio today was complaining that Tennessee is facing a budget surplus.

My schedule as a future D.O.C. technician is fluid, but for the training it is strictly 8-5. That means four weeks of fighting traffic on I-24. I am in the wrong place for it: everyone commutes from Murfreesboro. If I was coming down from Nashville, it would be easier, so I think I will look for a place there, once my position is more secure.

Having discovered the "free" computers provided for residents, I have seriously downgraded the KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) search. It can wait, and I can post here. UPS deliveries to apartments are a pain in the butt. And I never thought I would say this, but I am heartily sick of the libraries—or rather, their computer time limits. And of not being able to check anything out.

All these computers have is Internet Explorer and Office 2003. But, that's all the library computers have. No, this will do fine.

Sundry others

2006-05-03T10:13:00.000-04:00

All right. Because I have a very tiny mind, I forgot that I turned comment verification on AND made it Blogger users only. I have turned those off and turned comment moderation on: from now on, you can post under any name you like, and then when I get on a computer, I will go through them, delete the comment spam and post the real comments. So, don't be surprised if it takes a few days to see your comments.

I paid my first month's rent. I am now down one mind- and spirit-crushing anxiety and only have one or two to go. One thing to worry about is this weekend. Hopefully, I could come up after I get my badge Thursday. On the other hand, I am loth to spend $100 on gas for the round trip before I know I am at this job. Randy, who rented me the room, seems to think on-call tech support is good and steady. He had thought I was in sales, where tenure is much more volatile.

Having had a few days at the new apartment, I've pretty much emptied my car into the room, leaving, of course, much more room in both room and car. I have food in the fridge and a bed with a sheet and my sleeping bag draped over it. I've already made myself useful by thawing the air conditioner and telling Keith Moon to not run the A/C with the door open. (I don't know if he did, actually, but the A/C seems to work fine otherwise.)

Also, I had to tell Keith Moon because I never see the other roommate. I think I'll call him Mr. Smack, because, though I know he has a girlfriend who is usually in there with him, he spends way too much time in there for anyone who isn't coding or doing heroin. I mean, I remember being twenty, but even I took the occasional walk, you know? So: Mr. Moon, Baptist, drummer, closet Donnie Darko fan, and Mr. Smack.

I am now on the lookout for a supercheap monitor and keyboard. Failing that, I will accept a VT220 or the like, heh. I still need a phone, the land-line phone number and sundry other things... oh, an alarm clock. I need to get an alarm clock. Yes.

Could you hold this cup?

2006-05-01T15:45:00.000-04:00

"Urine analysis complete," announced the shipboard computer.

Orientation done. Drug test passed. I go in for a badge Thursday. Monday begins a four week training course.

*plonk*

Sorry, that's just my Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, finally letting me go.

I can't believe they asked me about my GED: my non-high school high school diploma. They wanted to know when it was issued. I said, "1987 or 1988, probably."

It'll have to do.

The best part was out-professionalizing the recruiter. I showed up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at 10 AM today. I stopped and asked a woman where new hires went to report to security.

She was the recruiter, outside on a smoke break.

We had a laugh and I showed her my notes where I had written down "May 1 10 am". She noted that her usual times to run orientation were 9:30 or 1 PM. I said I had no idea how I had gotten it wrong, but agreed to return at one.

Fifteen minutes later, my cell phone buzzed. It was her, asking me to come back. Her usual scheduler was absent and she was working on half a brain that day (I know the feeling). We shared another laugh and I turned the nose around again.

Orientation was surprisingly painless. Many companies test your patience and boredom resistance at the orientation, with evil videos and paperwork. The video was short, filmed there at the Nashville call center, and the paperwork was only mildly evil. I was given to a support technician to watch him do his thing for 30 minutes. The customer service paperwork (all computerized, of course) was quite complex, but with four weeks of training, I should be okay.

I am so tweaked.

I celebrated with... more White Castle. Only five burgers this time. And it wasn't so much celebrating as trying desperately to stop my blood sugar from plummeting. I need to get that ATM card down here: I'm sick of starving myself every Sunday night after drastically underestimating my potential costs. Like Kinkos. I was rather surprised at how quickly twenty cents a minute adds up: all I needed to do was log onto my webmail, download a file and print it out. First I took a card and put two dollars on it. Then I logged into my email and saved the Word file. Then I had to get up and put more money on the card to print it out. There was a line.

Um, it cost more than I thought it would.

Also, I had no coffee this morning. The gas station's small size was $1.20 and I had $1.08 and no more time to search. I swear, by the time orientation and the drug test was done, and I had found a bank to make a withdrawal, I seriously thought I was getting the D.T.s. Either that or, again, the plummeting blood sugar.

Frankly, given all that, I am probably lucky I'm here posting this.

Oh, wait. I *am*. :-D

So, last night I slept on a bed, had a nice talk with Keith (Moon, the drumming Baptist roommate's nom de blog, who is a really nice guy: he's so nice, I feel seriously bad that he can't use my room for his drum kit), and... realized I forgot to pack the alarm clock. Gah. How did I forget that? I am convinced it is still in my car and I am just too dumb to find it. Fortunately, Keith had to pull an all-nighter (exam time) and he very kindly woke me at 8:30 AM.

*phew*

And when did I start liking pickles on hamburgers? I can narrow it down to two things: how hungry I am when I finally order food, or that Good Eats episode on homemade pickling.

Clean, glorious clean

2006-04-30T17:56:00.000-04:00

I took a bath today.

I had to, as I had no shower curtain.

I wish I had been bright enough to bring my brain, I mean, notebook into the library with me, but there you go. Rather than leave half the people I know with the wrong address, I will simply wait to post it. It has a land line. I will have to get a calling card to make outgoing long distance calls, but those are $5 at Wal-Mart.

Yeah, I don't know the phone's number, either. It's like you know me or something.

I think my sis, via mom, gave me a spare card. I have no idea where it is. And, anyway, I will probably use the entire thing to speak to Michela, whom I miss terribly.

One of my roommates has not been seen.

The other plays drums, and keeps his full kit in his room.

Charming. I mean, he's charming. A nice kid. I intend to fill his brain with King Crimson.

I see lots of little kids down here. My sub-lessor is father to a six year-old with way too much energy.

I pointed Gregg from Pfizer here via email. All my Pfizer buddies should be warned that I keep saying I will post about why I made this move (aside from the blatant, financial reasons) but I never do. I will. Someday. When I have the Internet access and the time. And a monitor. And a keyboard. And maybe a mouse. (Hey, I live in a building filled with parental wealth-burning, stupid college kids. I should go through the trash!)

My skin feels weird. Almost like air, and drafts, are getting to it or something. Almost like I'm... exposed.

I think I should retrieve my brain and eat, now. Oh, and I no longer look like General Longstreet. I was trying to trim around my goatee until I lost my mind to burning impatience to get in that tub and, hey—no more hair.

Okay, what's Latin for "fear of parking lots"?

2006-04-29T14:59:00.000-04:00

Spoke to the police today.

I've found an apartment to sublet; the lease expires July 31st. It is in Murfreesboro, which means I am getting farther and farther South. So last night I slept in the Murfreesboro (that's a lot harder to type than Nashville) Wal-Mart. I shared my corner of the lot with an RV and a couple SUVs and cars.

Last night, back in Madison, I shared it with one of those NASCAR RVs (with the mini-garage in the back over about eight wheels) and a delivery truck. And the Zamboni. How could I forget the Zamboni? Parking lot sweepers have haunted my dreams for a week. I'm surprised the Devil hasn't chased me with a Zamboni across the Abu Graib Skating Rink in my dreams yet.

*brrrrrrr-rrrrrr-rRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRr-rrrrrrrrrrrr-rrrr....*
*brrrrrrr-rrrrrr-rRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRr-rrrrrrrrrrrr-rrrr....*
*brrrrrrr-rrrrrr-rRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRr-rrrrrrrrrrrr-rrrr....*

But it was not sleeping in a parking lot that attracted official attention. I needed to go to the bank to check my available balance. Showing up before the employees did may not have been the wisest move, nor was kicking back in the car reading Borges for hours. My sister called about 10:30 am CDT and as I was talking to her the police showed up.

I have ended up in nice, polite conversations with many inquisitive policemen in the past. Being 20, long-haired and bearded in a leather jacket will attract far more attention than you think, a lot of it mistaken or unwanted. Especially if you're given to wandering around a city at night on foot, thinking poetic thoughts, as I was then.

So, the policeman and I had a nice conversation, revealing that I was in fact a customer of the bank, with an account, I had just made a handshake deal on a sublet and would be working for Dell Tech support soon. He noted that Nashville had suffered a rash of bank robberies (as has Michigan) and police all over Tennessee were keeping an eye on banks.

I suppose the fact that I look, now, like a Civil War general (Grant or Longstreet) does not help me much. If I don't shave soon, I'm afraid my beard will start consuming things independently.

Afterward, Sis called back, somewhat concerned and wishing to know if I was, in fact, on my way to the bank or the pokey.

I move in tomorrow.

Can a cop tell if you're thinking poetic thoughts?

What's the Latin for "fear of forms"?

2006-04-27T15:13:00.000-04:00

I have both an online application and a paper application to fill out. Both fill me with dread. Heck, I can't even remember when I moved into Dave E.'s place, and that was barely over a year ago. The address of the apartment I had in K'zoo has completely fled my tiny little mind. Apartment F, I think, occurs to me now, but who knows in what context?

The worst, undoubtedly, will be the online app. Forcing my weird, confused, complex life into tiny little boxes will, I'm sure, prove the end of me.

Time to make some calls on my housing possibilities. I saw one or two that would be ideal, assuming the people I'd be sharing those digs with wouldn't be serial killers or PETA fanatics.

In the continuing reports of Nashville roads, I woke early enough to see morning traffic in Nashville. Ouch. Saw more of the city, though, driving to avoid it. In other news, I discovered that, contrary to my previous post, I had only been on the third downtown bridge, the I-24/I-40 bridge. In fact, my map does not show the fourth bridge: I think it connects Shelby Avenue with Demonbreun Street (what a name, eh?). It is a wonderful bridge; I crossed it last night. Twice. Six glorious lanes landing just south of Downtown. I still feel shivers to think on't.

Of course, I drove past the bridge (on 2nd Avenue) about four hundred times this week before I noticed it last night, but I still have very positive feelings about the whole experience. ;-)

Oh... my... God...

2006-04-26T20:26:00.000-04:00

I have a job offer.

It was on the Tennessean's web page, I filled it out... boom. I don't believe it.

Spherion is a temp agency hiring for Dell Tech Support: the bottom of the IT food chain, for sure, but I don't care. I have six pages printed out, three to fill out, three to help me fill them out. May 1st is some training, I think, and it will start May 8th.

This... will be difficult. I will have to remember EVERYTHING I did, phone numbers to EVERYWHERE I worked... gah. And I'll have to do it mostly from Google over computers that allow you to work 60 minutes at a time. I don't think Spherion's on-line app, which I also have to fill out, saves info for later entry. Grrr.

This... would be a lot easier if I owned a laptop. I saw one at a used computer store here in town. P-90, $50.00. It didn't boot, but that may have been Windows. Sadly, it had no CD-ROM, which would have allowed me to run Linux in its tiny little mind. I believe if you have a laptop, public library network access is unlimited.

Must... beat... head... harder... will strong... wall is weak....

Something else happened today, but for the life of me, I can't remember what.

Jobs and homes

2006-04-25T18:31:00.000-04:00

I am considering how to resolve the "no job without permanent address" attitude with the "no address without a permanent job" attitude. Aside from a PO box, which I will certainly get, I have a few other options:

One job at an apartment building will include a room as compensation. The owner will be back at work Friday and will read my application then.

I talked to the guy, who's name is Logan, who runs the downtown cafe—which is far more like a bar with live music than a coffeehouse. Though he turned me down on my request to use his address ("Sorry, but no; I could get in trouble") he very kindly took my phone number to share with roommate-searchers. He also pointed me to Opryland Hotel, as they have a high turnover and also can provide bums like me with a room.

Sweet.

Called a couple employment agencies today. One said she didn't really do IT, but had occasional use for a person who knew HTML or could take a computer apart, and I agreed to mail her my resume. She was also kind enough to point me to an agency with one line in the yellow pages. It was very nice of her to point it out to me, as it was far down in the alphabet.

Several others have set times to come in and fill out an app or take tests; some take resumes over the net.

So. Onward and forward.

I am devoting equal time to jobs and a place to stay, as the two are related. I rather wish they weren't, but... oh, well.

I also found a bookstore called Books-a-Million, which is huge and has a cafe and one wall, approximately the length of a football field, with nothing but magazines. I have been making myself ubiquitous there in the evening hours when there is nothing else inexpensive to do but hang around the Parthenon. (Actually, I have been thinking about hanging out there and lecturing on it with a tin can for tips. Don't laugh, I can do chapter and verse on who built the original, why, how, when and who blew it up, and various details on the architecture: "Why are the columns striped? Why are they curved? Why does the plaque say the columns point in?" Obviously, my only fear is that that I would be elbowing out some other bum's job. Probably one with a city income.)

These library computers are very annoying. Inglewood has nicer, newer machines than Madison, but the crippled versions of Windows and Internet Explorer installed on these... hold on, I think I have a redundancy in this sentence somewhere....

By the way, if anyone leaves comments on this blog, I will not be displeased. :-D

South Nashville found

2006-04-24T11:24:00.000-04:00

It turns out that it is south (and east) of downtown. Clever. It's the rough neighborhood. Read, "that's where I'll be living in a few days." It is also where the mythical I-40/I-65 bridge across the Cumberland (for that is the name of what turns out to be a river) supposedly exists, though I still couldn't testify to that.

Opened a bank account at Fifth Third. I could have done it at First Tennessee, but that's too much typing. The woman who opened the account was from Petosky, Michigan. We joked a bit about moving here, and she assured me the summers would indeed get hot, and that a small flurry of snow would shut down all the schools. "In Michigan, you start your vehicle to warm it up," someone told her. "Here, we start it to cool it down."

*cries*

Oh, well.

Coffee.

New phone number: (615) 423-1554.

I saw my first vehicle, a pick-up, with a gay stripe on it: the stripe is a half-inch high, two or three foot-wide sticker with the rainbow colors on it. The truck had no dents or bulletholes.

That's a good sign.

I am indeed in Central Time Zone. At 8:48 am CDT the sun was astonishingly high in the sky.

ETA:

I have begun to master the I-40/I-24/I-65 loop. Today I even managed to cross the mythical Fourth Bridge across the Cumberland, only getting lost about three or four times.

I have applications for Warren Terrace Apts., which needs a maintenance guy, and the Starbucks just down the road. Wish me luck.

South Nashville Blues

2006-04-23T16:57:00.000-04:00

The title is a song by Steve Earle, an alt.country musician, about his self-destructive days. Don't ask me where South Nashville is, I'm new here myself.

Driving in Nashville

Saturday I got my first taste of Nashville roads. Only Dad could tell me otherwise, but I think this is what driving in Boston must be like. Not the drivers, no, everyone's pretty polite, but the roads... oh man, the roads.

Nothing, let me repeat, nothing here is laid out in a grid.

I think it must date back to pioneer days, when you were glad there was a road at all, regardless of how twisty it might be; nor did you care that the folks in the next town (two miles away) named that road Nashville Avenue whereas you called it Nashville Pike. It was under you, it led somewhere, that was enough.

I wish they had paid a little more attention.

There is a river—well, perhaps it is a lake, I can't tell—that meanders through Metro Nashville. At one point, three bridges cross it to link the old downtown with Madison, Inglewood and Gallatin. There is a fourth, mythical bridge, but I have never been on it. This is not because I have not tried. This is because I do not yet know the secret onramp (or handshake) that would get me to it. It would link me, hanging out as I do in Madison, with the towns south of Nashville. I have been in those towns. I have just never gotten there the direct way. Perhaps, in the future, I will construct a raft at a narrows and float my car across.

Saturday, I drove a lot.

Things I've learned

I also learned, here at the Madison Library (where I got a visitor's card) that if you set a copier at 73% reduction to legal-size paper, you can photocopy two facing pages in a phone book and save yourself a lot of transcribing. I copied the pages for employment agencies, computer-related items, and coffee shops. I was also looking for a Tennessee equivalent of MichiganWorks! down here, but I don't think there is one.

By the way, repeatedly typing "Tennessee" is more fatiguing than you might think.

Water is cheaper if you buy it in gallons from Wal-Mart.

Cash is still king. I have a cashier's check from my CharterOne account (they have no branches in TN; I made sure to ask). However, cashing one can require paying 5% or more as a fee. I wish I had thought of that Saturday morning, when I could have opened an account and deposited it for free. As it is, I will have to wait for Monday morning.

Things I've done

Looked for a replacement for 4th Coast Cafe. (A reason for much of the driving.) I am specifically looking for Internet access, as well as that half-emo/Goth, half-undergrad, half-biker bar atmosphere of the Coast. I didn't find it, but I could have entered one cafe that looks like a particularly scuzzy bar and watched A Flock of Seagulls last night.

Oddly, I turned it down.

Laundry. Especially the jeans I wore when changing my oil.

I finally retraced my steps to Gallatin today. Not quite intentionally: I was looking for a place to rotate my tires. The back ones are original and have much tread on them; of course, on a front-wheel drive car, they are only there to keep the gas tank off the macadam. My front tires, the second front set, are severely worn. I was thrilled to find a small store in a corner of a massive parking lot that was being heavily remodeled (thus, I would neither scare off nor displace any customers). I asked the construction workers for, and got, permission to change my tires there. Aside from numerous caterpillars, it went great, and I now have lots of tread on the front, where all the accelerating, braking and steering is done.

Did I mention that I was thrilled? Well, I am.

I read the Remo Williams book Ian lent me (whoops, it came with accidentally) and have read more essays by Jorge Luis Borges. Going between the two is a bit odd.

I have been thinking out getting one of those styrofoam coolers and keeping food in it, but I think, with no place to keep it but the car, that it would be a bit quixotic. The air is cool up here (I think my tires showed overinflation because they were at proper pressure in Kalamazoo, and I do think my elevation here is much higher) but the sun is Kalamazoo summer intense. I sincerely hope that, when summer really arrives, that I will have not only an apartment, or a room, but an air conditioner.

Darn, the library is closing. Well, I am off to that scuzzy coffee bar. Perhaps I can sweet-talk the barista into letting me use the address on applications. Perhaps I will simply do that anyway, heh. Dinner will be light tonight but I have gas and fresh tread. So: good enough.

I've become far too used to watching out for cops: driving with expired tags, as I was, sleeping in parking lots. It's not a huge deprivation, sleeping like that, nor is it that I have too much to do or too much time on my hands; it's the between times, times when you'd go downstairs and see who is on AIM or Yahoo chat, or write an email, or phone someone, or go visit that you really realize what you left behind.

(There are about twice the number of employment agencies in Nashville as Kalamazoo. Wish me luck. If you stop by Wal-Mart, look me up. Oh, and do consider frequenting their stores: they are, however unintentionally, sponsoring this move of mine, heh heh heh.)