Somewhere over the Rainbough

2009-04-21T23:37:00.001-05:00

Libertarian Bard

2008-02-03T04:43:00.000-06:00

So I finally made it back to Ruta Maya's this past tuesdays for the poetry night. I have been there a couple of times over the past year. I shared The NeverWar with them last spring when I first wrote it.

This time I decided to be real brave and share one I call "Fish for Sale." Keep in mind I do not claim to be that great of a poet but what I may lack in my wordsmithishness I make up for in passion. Which probably makes me a little shrill... oh well.

In any case I spent about an hour trying to decide whether to share my fish poem. I finally decided in favor of it. The reason it was a challenge was due to the fact that it is intentionally confrontational and critical of the left's take on sweat shops and human prosperity in general.

I'll give you an example. My favorite line from the poem is "We will think globally of your poor starving village, while we shop locally from our not-starving-american neighbors."

Ruta Maya's tends to be a hang out for very leftish persons. The "think globally, shop locally" bumper sticker is a pretty common sight in their parking lot. In any case my mind was contemplating the possibility of being booed off the stage and thus my reluctance.

What got me up was the fact that the host said that their was only one poet left. So we were about to stop like an hour early. I hate it when they do that. I am their to hear poetry and when they end at 8pm well it kinda sucks I think. So I ran up and put my name on the list.

My thought was this: maybe their will be one libertarian in the audience, and maybe that one guy will appreciate my poem and know that he ain't the only non-lefty in the house. So I went for it.

Afterwards I got quite a bit of cheering from the audience including some from a few persons I know to be left-leaning. I also had one libertarian guy come up and tell me that it took a lot of nerve to say "bring on the wal-mart" to that audience. That was really cool.

On top of that once I signed up another handful of people were inspired to sign up including one guy who had never been behind a mic before, and one guy who apparently felt the need to clear out my libertarian mojo with a anti-development "do we really need another stripmall" poem of his own.

So poetry night got filled up all the way to 9pm and there was a lot of good stuff that came later. So it was really cool.

Now I have in my brain plans for a "yes we really do need another stripmall poem." An "anti-global warming poem." A poem inspired by a certain famous document... and last but not least an Iran poem.

Yeah happy fun.

Me... On the Radio?

2008-01-29T05:42:00.000-06:00

Probably not. So I listen to the JB and Sandy show occasionally. It is a local morning talk show in austin. Its generally pretty fun, optimistic, upbeat etc. Well the sole female on the show decided to resign this past december.

I should mention first that this is an unfortunate loss as I think she really made the show. But aside from that one of my first thoughts when I heard this was "I wish I knew how to get a job in radio... That would be such a cool job."

I have thought about it for a while really. It has to do with my personality. Face to face I am often somewhat stultified when it comes to expressing myself, but put me behind a mic or on a speaker and this whole different person often comes out (not always but often).

It has occasionally been a part of me that I didn't realize was there. Frankly that was really cool. I've found myself able to be someone I didn't know I could be. Strong, passionate, happy, sad, elated, all for the listening and occaionally viewing pleasure of others (I was in a couple of plays at my non-x-tian church).

So a few weeks ago I caught the tail-end of that same radio show when the hosts were mentioning that they were accepting submissions from listeners. Basically we could send in a video audition to be on the show. So I imediately went to their site read the directions and created my own entry with the only camera available to me.

It happened to be my cell phone. I was really passionate, way over enthusiastic, I stuttered a bit which doesn't usually happen but then I don't generally speak extemporaneously on camera, oh yeah and the video was really low quality.

Anyhow I mainly got negative comments regarding the video when it was uploaded to their blog and it occurred to me that I probably should have put a little more thought and/or effort into the process.

Not that I didn't put plenty thought and effort into the process its just that I may have taken the directions too literally and it occurred to me too late that it probably would have been worthwhile to invest in a cheap web cam for the project.

See they said just to be creative, i.e. get their attention, and show your personality... so I did. I started with a stanza fron a longfellow poem that I happen to love. Of course this inspired people to comment that they do not read poetry on the air oh yeah and my personality/exuberance on camera comes off as being under the influence of illegal substances.

Anyhow the poem was to get their attention/be creative. And I suppose it got their attention but it seems not in the way I wanted. So since my first attempt seemed to have fallen flat. I decided I would try to demonstrate my wit by making a video doing a humorous take on the news. Unfortunately this didn't work out so great.

Yeah it turns out the few people I showed it to thought it was funny but most of the commenters stopped the moment I said the word "news." I should mention that before I made this one I actually made a couple of videos that I had not finished editing and was intending on submitting as my second video. It was a fake radio show I created by filming my car radio and driving around in my car while basically conversing with myself.

Anyhow I had put both of them up and was still messing around with them, trying out various editting software when another co-applicant submitted a second video of herself talking while filming her car radio. Of course my thoughts were what are the odds of her coming up with the same thing but that took the spark out of my idea because I really didn't want to look like a copy cat.

So I did fake news instead and mainly got more negative comments. Honestly I can handle negative stuff its the quanity that bugged me. I found myself thinking "did nobody make it to the funny..." and "can I not deliver a punchline?"

Anyhow one commenter just thought most of the jokes would have been lost on the average listener. Meanwhile the show's hosts have been putting up posts about how great a job it will be, how hard you have to work, how much radio will mean to you if you get into it, and most recently that they want someone who will really "upgrade" the show. Every time they put up something like that I think.... "hey yes... I want to do that..."

But alas, the truth is even I doubt that I would fit in with those guys. They spend a portion of every show dicussing the latest celebrity news and gossip... ::yawn::.

Meanwhile if you look at my blog posts you'll see my thoughts and interest revolve around politics, science, sci-fi, writing, economics etc... and this is where the audience ie. listeners get to go :::yawn::: "Who is this weirdo yapping in my ear about the ethical implications and limitations of atheism..."

So it really is a pipe dream, and not an especially realistic one at that. Yet it still pulls at me like there is this part of my brain saying... "hell yeah... you could do this... you should do this."

But then I know I am not ready to give up massage therapy regardless so I have been kind of hoping that in the incredibly unlikely event of being offered such a job that I wouldn't have to. But if I did have too.. I don't know what I would do. Massage is a part of me now. I can't unlearn what I know. I just know there is a limit to how long I can do it.

It is physically taking its toll already, but I got a lot of years left in me and I am no where near quits. Still radio is this whole other universe and maybe just maybe they would like a weirdo like me to occasionally comment on the deep philosophical implications of slaying vampires, and traveling at warp 9.9. Or on why dark matter is the modern day equivalent of ether... maybe... what my favorite prime number is... lol or not?!

Updates about me

2008-01-28T05:32:00.000-06:00

I am now a married woman. Woo Hoo! if you search my name "rainbough" at photobucket.com you will find my wedding albums, and can see pics of me getting married in a cave in my red dress.

Also I am back at massage heights although a different location, and I am shocked to discover I actually enjoy working there. Given how vehmently I hated the last massage heights this has come as a pleasant surprise. Of course the money isn't great but the tips are good.

BilLee has left home depot and as a result is currently in the process of fielding calls from many prospective employers. He really wants something that will be a great fit for him. That he will enjoy, will be good pay, and that he can stick with for a long time.

The down side of this is that our house hunt is on hold once again and there are an awful lot of prospective employers knocking at the door (i.e. phone). Its been frustrating when we finally find one we think will be great, go through the interview process, and then discover that he didn't get the job. This has happened twice now.

In other news we recently got a DBA in williamson county for our massage/yoga business. BilLee is continuing his training to become a yoga instructor and soon we hope to combine our talents in our own yoga and massage studio.

I am nervous about starting out on my own. It can be rough to put yourself out there and actually ask people for business. I am not sure how well I will fare at it, but I think it is very worthwhile to gain the experience of doing so even if it turns out I am not especially good at it.

I am going to break up my updates into multiple posts. Part 2 coming soon.

The Great Moronic RIAA

2008-01-03T02:54:00.000-06:00

Recording industry goes after personal use:

The Howell case was not the first time the industry has argued that making a personal copy from a legally purchased CD is illegal. At the Thomas trial in Minnesota, Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,' " she said.

My opinion of the RIAA: HA HA HA HA....

New Hampshire Civil Unions

2008-01-02T02:44:00.000-06:00

New Hampshire Legalizes same sex marriages.

New Hampshire is the fourth state to permit civil unions, but the first to do it without a court decision or the threat of one. New Hampshire Governor John Lynch signed the law on May, which grants same-sex couples the same rights, responsibilities and obligations as married male-female couples, but it does not call the union a marriage.

Yea New Hampshire! But on a more serious note why does it matter so much what we do and do not call a gay marriage?

Happy '08

2008-01-01T11:00:00.000-06:00

In celebration of the new year I had to be the geek that called my siblings on the east coast to ask them what year it was at 11:45pm central time. When I told my twin that I was calling from last year he says, "you can't call from last year... you can only call from now." Or something to that effect I don't remember the exact wording.

Expensive Unfinished Roads

2007-07-27T10:30:00.000-05:00

Austin now has toll roads, and they are horrible. I hate them.

I do not have a problem with the idea of paying a toll to use a road. It actually makes pretty good financial sense if it is taking you to a job and can get you there significantly quicker, well why not?

Oh yeah one other problem -I do not think the government has any business making people pay tolls who paid for the roads to begin with. In Austin the big complaint was the idea of people getting "double taxed."

Basically we are paying for the construction and maintenance of these roads with gasoline taxes, but then to use the road you have to give them additional money. What this does in effect is, it keeps most of the people off the toll roads who actually paid for them to be built.

Meanwhile we are not really being "double taxed" actually we are at the very least being "triple taxed," and very likely quadruple taxed or more. That is because the toll road builders are getting their money from multiple sources including state level funds (this is presumably from the gasoline taxes), and county level funds (these would come from sales tax's funding bonds on the county level).

Now its also possible they are getting funds county level from ad valorem and property taxes. I doubt at least the property taxes part given how highly contested school money is these days, but I know at least the money is coming from multiple places in the county budgets which likely means multiple sources of funding.

What that means for us is that we pay for these roads every time we pay that extra 3 percent of sales tax. So if you buy gas anywhere in Texas you are paying for roads that the state will not let you drive on without you forking out additional funds, meanwhile if you buy any product in travis or williamson county Texas you are helping to pay for roads that the state will not let you drive on without demanding additional funds from you.

All of this would be actually tolerable if the roads were well designed and/or well priced. They are not. You might be thinking well if I need to get somewhere I will just stay on the frontage road, that way I won't have to pay the toll I will just have to put up with all the stop lights.

To combat this problem the frontage roads of the toll roads were designed to end at fairly random places, and then immediately start again. In application that means you are driving along and you have the option of either getting on the toll road or turning down a nearby road that will take you in different direction from where you were traveling.

Last night I found myself accidentally on the frontage of a toll road -it shunted me down a neighborhood road that was in the opposite direction of the direction I had been trying to travel to begin with. Meanwhile the roads have already opened in spite of the fact that they are unfinished. So if you actually get on them you find yourself forking out a 1.50 to stay on a road that ends a mile down the road.

Austin's toll roads have intentionally confusing signs, and intentionally confusing frontage roads. One day I was driving home from my fiance's sister's house. She lives off of the same road that we do. But a section of that road has been turned into a toll road, then the toll road splits from it and goes off in a different direction.

So I am trying to get home which used to be just a straight drive down 620 from her road to mine. Not today, I attempt to go home down 620 and I get to these signs that say toll45 with a right arrow. Well I do not want to get on the toll road so I try to turn the other way thinking I will find some part of the frontage road to get on that will skirt the toll section.

That isn't what happened, turning the other way put me on the same toll road going the opposite direction of my home with no option of getting back off. The frontage actually forced you onto the toll road. Well luckily this part of the toll road wasn't charging this particular night so I didn't have to pay anything but I am trying to find an exit so I can turn around.

The next exit I come across is the mopac exit. Once again all I want to do is exit so I can loop around and come back the other direction. So I get off on the next exit. What happens? The next exit is another toll road or rather a section of a road that was extended and then tolled. The rest of mopac is not a toll road.

So does getting on mopac give me any option of exiting the toll system? No. It immediately puts me on the toll part of mopac and then brings me to a toll plaza where they demand money from me. The whole mile or so I am on this road I am looking for a way to exit or turn around but there is none.

All you can do is go to the toll plaza where an actual person is waiting this time wanting 75 cents. Immediately afterward there is an exit (surprise!). So I get off on that exit. Then I notice a sign saying parmer lane next exit. Well I live near parmer lane so I figured I should drive down the frontage to parmer and then head back to my neck of the woods.

Does this happen? Sort of. It turns out completely unbeknownst to me that the left two lanes of the frontage shunted you back onto toll road. Well I didn't know this probably on account of the fact that it was dark and there were no signs to be seen indicating such. At least not in the little stretch of frontage I was on.

So by the time I realize I am headed back to a toll station wanting my money there is once again no way to turn around. There goes another 75 cents. So finally I get to parmer and start my 20 minute drive home. Oh and by the way my fiance's sister lives all of about 10 minutes away from us. In fact it used to be about a 5 minute drive before they stuck in the toll road. Now we have to get on a narrow one-lane frontage road, and sit at a long stop light we did not used to have to sit at. Why?

Oh thats because otherwise we would have to get on the toll road and pay 75 cents to get off on the very next exit which is maybe a mile from the entrance of the toll road. In other words they converted a section of 620 into toll road. In order to use that very short section of road that would bypass the one-lane high traffic frontage (that also did not used to be that narrow) we have to pay 75 cents. Oh and by the way before it was voted to turn this into a toll road, and before the rest of the toll road was built this section of 620 had already been improved to bypass that stop light and there was no additional fee for using it.

So now instead of decreasing the time of our trip it has effectively doubled it.

As it turns out the sign that had said "toll road this way" that had originally caused the confusion failed to mention that you also had to turn that way to keep going down 620 in that direction.

So $1.50 and about 45 minutes of my life were wasted because of the intentional shittiness of the toll road signs and frontage roads. But of course they have every reason to make the roads confusing and force people to get on them who innocently turned the wrong way or missed the exit they were supposed to get off on, or perhaps who are just confused about how the frontage roads were designed and what lane they were supposed to be in.

That way they can make money off of people who get lost or confused by their signage. Meanwhile this particular toll system is designed to charge you according to how many miles you use. What does that mean in application? Well unlike traditional toll roads that charge you at your entrance to the road this one charges you at multiple points.

They have "toll plazas" placed every few miles down the road. Then they have tolls at some entrances and some exits. What this means in application is that to drive down the toll road without their little textag you have to stop and pay the toll to get on, stop and dig out change to pay the toll when you come across a toll plaza, and then stop and pay a toll when you get off. Of course approaching toll plazas, frontage roads and exits tend to disappear so that you cannot avoid having to stop at the plaza.

Part of why this is so ridiculous is because most of these toll roads aren't but about 4 to 5 miles long. In theory you are supposed to get charged something like 18 cents per mile, but the toll plaza's charge people the same amount regardless of where they got on.

I have personally been charged $1.50 to drive approximately two miles of toll road. Why? Because I got on where the frontage road ended, and the frontage road ended about a half mile before the toll plaza. Meanwhile the toll road ended about a mile beyond the plaza. So including the ramp I might have gone two miles on that road. 75 cents per mile.

Also there are little segments of the toll road that only allow people to use them who have a textag. The txtag though free right now is going to start carrying a charge. A 9.95 activation fee or some nonsense. So to use the exclusive txtag sections of road its going to cost you ten bucks plus the toll.

With a txtag they set up an account and then charge you every time you pass through one of their toll stations. The toll stations are all designed to be incredibly inconvenient unless you have a txtag. In fact that is the point of having the exclusive areas. The exclusive areas force all the other motorists off the road, or risk getting ticketed and fined.

They take a picture of your license plate when you pass through one of the toll stations that way they can send you your fine in the mail.

So there is this pristine section of mopac expressway now that is brand new and tolled. Because of this hardly anyone uses it. At least not when compared with the rest of mopac. The rest of mopac has heavy traffic most of the time.

The rest of mopac is falling apart. Not only that, it very badly needs more lanes given how many people use it all the time. This is basically a major north/south expressway in austin. Its most congested area is not in the northeast where it has been extended and improved but the northwest segment, central and south.

There are areas of mopac, areas where it has its highest congestion that drop down to only one lane. Meanwhile most of the congested section is riddled with pot holes, filled-in cracks, and precariously narrow ramps and exits.

Unfortunately its hard to get adequate money to fix these kinds of problems because the state explicitly favors improvement projects that use tolls.

The NeverWar

2007-07-23T15:55:00.000-05:00

So once there was this war.
It wasn't our war,
It was never a war
but we had a treaty
So when the invasion started
it became our war.

But not a war, NeverWar

It became our friends,
our neighbors, our blood.
It ended they said.
But not really.
Wars don't end that neverWere.

In reality it stopped being
our blood and became our bombs
bombs dropped from the sky-
on farmers, on children,
on targets of strategic importance.

It became an embargo
a little myth we called "containment"
where we tried to starve out the people,
deny their basic needs,
to poke at their leader

Obviously this was violent
but it was neverWar
Wars don't end that neverWere.

Then one day someone poked back
someone from the same hemisphere
so we escalated our NeverWar.
We sent our blood back.

Thus the Antiwar folk got to protest
the new NotaWar. but to protest
they had to pretend the
NeverWar never happened
Wars don't happen that neverWere.

They had to suppose
dropping bombs on civilians
was not a state like the NotaWar
but a state of "containment"

a state more desirable
than the new NotaWar.
either option involved
the secret of collateral
damage

Of untold thousands,
civilians, dying,
dying to be liberated
eaten up in the dust

Of our NeverWar.
Wars don't end that neverWere.

We pay for it still.
Confusion is all we have left.
Do we owe them?

The people we bombed for so long
Do we owe them protection?
Should we rebuild what we destroyed?

Are we still an occupying army?
are we at war, were we ever?
The NeverWar never ended.

We escalate, we invade,
we step back, we bomb
we starve, we kill
We escalate, we stabilize

We'll never end the NeverWar
Wars don't end that neverWere.

(Poem) Among Friends

2007-07-22T17:01:00.000-05:00

If I cannot stand among friends.
If I cannot stand up for what I feel is right
who am I?
If I cannot challenge my family
for a wrong for fear of division
and distress,
How can I stand among anyone to do the same.

Shall I speak among strangers
who know not me
who have no means of
truly hurting me
to whom I have no alliance
no bonds, nothing to lose.

Shall I speak among them
in whom I have staked nothing
to whom I owe nothing.

Shall I stand up for truth
among those who care not that I exist,
but not among those who matter to me most.
Then am I not a coward.

Do I not sell these strangers
false pretenses, false passion.
Am I not a hypocrite.

If I cannot among my friends,
risk every relationship I have
every friend, every solace,
every social bond and value,

If I cannot stand among them
to advocate a new world.
How dare I stand among strangers,
in hopes of changing their's?

More Sci-Fi Meta-Posting

2007-07-13T16:21:00.000-05:00

I know I said narrative and point of view were next, but I find myself randomly inspired to discuss some other issues instead. I came across an old issue of Reason from last year the other day and got to reading about Octavia Butler. She died about a year ago after falling and hitting her head.

She was a very talented science fiction writer or so I am told. I was familiar with her due to many references I had seen to her books, and because I had seen her interviews at least once on TV. I never read her stuff because the themes struck me as pessimistic.

It seemed as though she often created worst-possible-scenarios that arose out of the present state of things. However after reading more about her I sort of wished i had. This is because I realized after reading the article that she wrote on many similar themes to what I have written about. I found myself relating her in a sort of obscure way.

Her work reminded you that you can be very sci-fi without having a focus on either science or technology. Sometimes explorations of future societies are more about social ideas, and how social structures can conflict, and evolve.

As I am a fan of character-driven fiction the social themes strike me as being an important realm of science fiction that I certainly do not intend to neglect.

The Trouble with Atheism

2007-07-12T19:14:00.000-05:00

So I am investigating this college the other day, due to the fact that it is relocating near me. It turns out to be a very explicitly and intentionally christian university and thus one I would likely be uncomfortable attending due to my own atheistic beliefs.

But it got me to thinking. The school has services every weekday morning. Services where students can join their friends and colleagues in prayer and "worship" (that generally means highly affected singing).

Then I remember this documentary I saw a few years back which basically argued that religion was a way of binding communities together. It created not only common beliefs, but a common identity, and a common experience of the spiritual. Which arguably was a mass hallucination but if you can have a deeply moving experience as a community wouldn't that bind you closer together even if it was a completely invented experience.

So I got to thinking imagine how closely knit a college community would likely become if most of the students regularly attended some of these services rather than just going their own way as they might at a standard secular school.

Atheism while it can bring people together to a degree has no real means of offering that sort of experience and community bonding. This may or may not be a good thing, however I find myself wondering if popular religions did sink into obscurity would we find ourselves needing some sort of cultural replacement?

Secular mass, group chanting, yoga (lol)? The other question that bugs me is would it be better to create a secular religion that incorporated atheism as a core belief or given the problems so inherent with religions would it be better to discover a means to disconnect our social bonding and social rituals from religion entirely, and let it fall by the wayside as a relic of our past?

Why I Hate The Global Warming Debate

2007-07-12T10:34:00.000-05:00

I am not a republican, I am not in favor of pollution, I am not a christian, I do not believe in any supernatural phenomenon, I am not on the payroll of any international corporation, I am not especially fond of the activities of many large businesses, and I am vehemently opposed to mixing government and business matters.

Furthermore I have always been interested and a student of various sciences at least since I was about 8 years old. While I do not claim to be an expert on any of them I very strongly believe in the scientific method, in the importance of science to further our knowledge and understanding of the universe, and I try to keep up to date on what is going on in the science world. I love reading science magazines (SEED is my current favorite). I have also always been a math geek so I also occasionally find myself exploring issues in theoretical math, and following the stories of newly solved problems/conjectures with interest.

I say all this because those who are now termed "global warming skeptics," people such as myself are almost always characterized as ignorant, conservative, part of some industry lobby, paid off by some large company, Christian, mysticist, and or irrational.

I consider myself to be a very scientifically-minded person. I am that guy (okay girl in my case) who likes to point out to people that string theory is not really a "theory" in the scientific sense, and explains to my co-workers and friends the newest developments in gene therapy. I was the one in high school fervently defending evolution, and on occasion the big bang theory. I even spent some time in college debunking some of the more spurious internet sites claiming firm proof against evolution.

I say all this because at one time I believed in anthropogenic global warming. I took at face value the idea that what we were being told was being supported by scientists, and was clearly the truth. This was when I was approximately in middle school. When I got to high school I started noticing a bit of inconsistency in the whole issue. That is when I began to question. I did not doubt it as of yet I just began to point out to people certain obvious flaws in the argumentation we were being presented.

Now I am not talking about flaws in the straight scientific reasoning. What we encounter at school was many steps removed from scientific reasoning. We were subjected to long assemblies, videos, slide shows, articles, reading material etc. that were usually dooms day scenarios promoting some activity that sounded fairly benign like recycling.

What I noticed was that some of the material was trying to scare us on the basis that if nothing was done we would end up with a world-wide desert planet, a very hot desert planet. Some of the presentations told us we would end up with hot jungle planet, some said the global warming would initiate the return of the ice age giving us ice planet, and finally of course there was water world. While water world was the least likely scenario this is the one we encountered most often, because back in the early 90's for some mysterious reason people actually believed that the likely result of global warming would be water covering everything but the highest mountain ranges.

So this is what I began pointing out to people: Have you noticed that if the climate gets warmer in the future it will be attributed to global warming (in this context I do mean anthropogenic global warming). If it gets cooler it will be attributed to global warming. If it gets rainier it will be attributed to global warming. If it gets drier it will be attributed to global warming. Or to put it simply if our climate changes in the slightest in the next century that change will be considered proof of human-caused global warming regardless of what that change is.

When I got to college my I started framing my concerns in a much more scientific way: If our planet is considered to have a dynamic climate, that is it is not considered static or it is normal for changes to occur over time, and any change in the future will be considered to be a result of human-caused global warming how could this "theory" possibly be considered falsifiable.

This is important in science. If a hypothesis is not falsifiable it cannot be proven wrong (nor right) and is considered to be a non-scientific concept. For example all psychic and supernatural phenomenon is considered to be non-falsifiable.

Now I am not arguing that the actual scientific evidence out there supporting global warming is non-falsifiable. I am still at the point of relaying what was mainly laymen argumentation and debates. Basically the kind of thing you encounter in mainstream media and around college campuses.

This issue made me start investigating the issue more, and focusing on actual scientific magazines. I was told by a British graduate student who was convinced that the U.S. was going to cause the UK to be under an ice sheet by 2050 due to our carbon emissions that scientific American had definitively proved global warming in a recent article.

I found this article at the library, I found other SA articles about global warming online, and I could not find one at that time that definitively "proved" global warming. I was only looking back within the span of about 5 years so its likely I did not go back far enough, however even the article he referenced was actually about potential effects of global warming.

All the ones I could find were about the effects of global warming. All of these articles presumed that anthropogenic global warming was not only true, but went so far as to state that there was a well established consensus on the matter. Usually they did so by starting the article with "In this day and age few scientists would disagree that anthropogenic global warming is a big problem..."

My initial investigation spread out to other magazines, and other media sources. I searched for articles on the internet, I checked out many articles in Discover, I watched many documentaries, both of the scientific and not-so-scientific variety on the topic, and I even perused a few scientific journals I was able to get access to at school.

What did I discover? First of all the documentaries and articles that were skeptical never had trouble finding and presenting respectable scientists who were experts in the field they were commenting on, who disputed the current "evidence" and interpretation of said evidence on global warming. Now I have no doubt that these scientists are likely a minority given the current atmosphere surrounding the issue (no pun intended), but they are not quacks, nor industry hacks, nor republican lackeys. Credible dissent exists, and those credible dissenters all believed that there were many more dissenters out there who were afraid to speak up because of how badly dissenters got defamed (as hack, quacks, and lackeys)(also dissenters tend to lose their research grants or are not likely to be given them in the first place).

I also found that about 90 percent (obviously I am making an estimate here) of the material I encountered supporting global warming had obvious, glaring errors in it. The reason I say 90 percent rather than 100 is because I do not pretend to have the capacity to adequately determine whether certain data figures in articles in certain journals were accurate or not. I just know I always encountered written results that in my brain did not always match what the rest of the article seemed to be saying.

My point is just that I encounter this so often it is almost a running joke with me. I am honestly not looking at this material with an eye for mistakes. The mistakes are much more obvious in media productions that did not arise out of the scientific community however they are still there in Scientific American and everywhere else.

For example a recent article I was reading in a science magazine which shall remain nameless (though I can certainly point you to it if you are interested) suggested that carbon dioxide from china would cause acid rain in the U.S. I was baffled by this. I had never heard of CO2 causing acid rain, how could that be possible?

After a little investigation online I discovered that there was research indicating that it was normal for CO2 molecules to be separated within the atmosphere and fall to earth as very slightly acidic rain. However the acidity was not greater than the average acidity of regular rainwater, and it was possible the carbon-laced water was beneficial to the soil.

In other words it was not what is meant by the term "acid rain." In fact acid rain was originally defined as rain with a lower pH than that created by this exact CO2 process.

Anyhow the errors are more obvious in media productions. Watch 20/20's next global warming piece and you are sure to notice a few. Usually it is rife with statements about how the earth will have more storms with heavy rainfall, more clouds, and yet be a drier, hotter climate.

The PBS series "Voyage to Planet Earth" attributed deterioration of the Louisiana coastline to rising sea levels. They even went so far as to suggest that some of the trees sticking up out of the water must have been on land once. You want to know why this is absurd? It is absurd because long before the global warming debate ever even began the Army core of engineers visited Louisiana and basically "fixed the Mississippi." That is, rivers tend to meander and flood. Thanks to systems of dams and levees put in by the Army Core of Engineers, the Mississippi no longer floods annually, and no longer meanders.

This is great news for nearby towns that could be very quickly taken out by a river changing its course. However it was very quickly discovered that it was bad news for the coastline which was replenished via silt washed downstream during floods. With the inability to get new silt deposits on to the wetlands of the Mississippi delta, and the continuing flow of water through this area the coastline started getting washed away.

This effect was discovered and explained a long time ago. Its cause is known. Meanwhile it is also fairly well known in Louisiana that trees do in fact grow in water. Louisiana's Bayous are full of trees.

Meanwhile the news specials definitely proving that human caused global warming have caused the number intense hurricanes to increase almost always lack that crucial bit of argumentations that actually link the humans to the phenomenon. I saw a whole special once that claimed to "definitively prove global warming" and even had supposed former skeptics renouncing their skepticism with the new findings. The show was based on research that showed a correlation between increased sea-water temperatures and an increase in the intensity and frequency of hurricanes. Where was the crucial link that proved humans made the water warmer? The issue was not even discussed. It was taken as a fact.

Meanwhile credible climatologists will tell you that it takes many hundreds of years for a known climate change to impact oceanic temperature by just a couple of degrees. This data actually comes from ice coring among other places. They can show how a huge volcanic eruption changed the average global temperature, dropping it by 10 degrees or something of that sort. Meanwhile a few centuries later the ocean water temp also lowered a couple degrees.

I could go on all day. Honestly. I can email anyone who is interested articles in scientific American that present evidence that clearly indicates x, which could dispute the notion of global warming, that are concluded with paragraphs that literally state the exact opposite.

Imagine summing up an article for a well respected magazine with statements to the exact contrary of all the evidence and interpretations you have just presented.

Okay, there is more but I need to break this up a bit so that will be all for now.

Blog Goin-on's

2007-07-12T09:38:00.000-05:00

So I spent many hours yesterday trying to fix the blogroll. You may have noticed. You one or two frequent visitors. Unfortunately I have in the neighborhood of 500 links. I am testing each one. Googling the blog if nothing comes up to see if maybe they have moved elsewhere. Updating any links that list a new site for their blog etc. Also I came up with categories so that the links would be more navigable.

So if you visit to discover your blog is in a category you do not really care for let me know. I may be kind enough to move it. It is hard to determine on some of the blogs with an obvious political slant whether to list those as political blogs or as culture blogs. I hate to call something "libertaria" just because a libertarian wrote it when it is actually more of a culture blog.

Not that "libertaria" is bad I just know some people are not aiming for a political affiliation/label so I hate to stick them in one if I do not have to. Anyhow I am willing to cooperate in most such link moving requests, however, keep in mind if you do not link to me and I link to you your opinion on where that link "should be" may not carry an especially large amount of weight around here.

That being said it really is not a big deal. It is worth noting however that I do consider objectivists to be a part of libertaria and I know they often object. Let me reassure them that I am familiar with the objections and I will only move your blog if you really do blog more about culture than politics and libertarian related themes.

Anyhow this is all still a work in progress that I anticipate will take many weeks to finish. In the meantime blogs have already occasionally been moved to the wrong category by accident so keep in mind that the fluctuations have not yet finished and what you see now may or may not be the final categorization etc.

Also the side bar is getting adjusted quite a bit. Stuff moving up and down, back and forth. I just want to see how I like stuff.

Narrative Vs Dialog

2007-07-10T11:30:00.000-05:00

Lets talk a little about narrative and dialog. Dialog is just what it sounds like. Characters talking to each other (though in theory you can also have a monologue or a dialog in which a character is mainly just thinking to himself).

Narrative is that part of the story in which the narrator/writer tells you what is going on. Both of these elements can be over used, underused, and misused. I mention this because I have found myself over the years developing odd rules for when to use narrative vs dialog that when actually used did not make a whole lot of sense.

There is a time and a place for both and not really a great deal of hard and fast rules for when you use whichever one you use. There are really just people like me who go about saying stuff like "I cannot believe they used narrative there."

Let me give you an example of this. In high school, I had to read Pride and Prejudice. If you like reading other people's conversations that do not really go anywhere and take their precious time advancing the plot then this is absolutely the book for you. It takes place in the English countryside (19th century) among a society of people too rich to be laboring in the fields and too poor to be aristocrats.

Most of the plot is conveyed in very long-winded conversations. Though in fact it seems that the women of this time and place had little else. ::Spoiler Warning - Not that I recommend this book to anyone ever....::: So you follow the main character from dinner to dinner to ball, to writing letters to her friends, to visiting relatives and conversing over dinner, to chatting over brunch, to reading a letter from a lord who has fallen in love with her, to a few more letters and conversations, and finally to her deciding she loves him too and telling him as much.

The trouble is that while all the other major events of the story are conveyed in dialog the climatic moment when the heroine tells her chosen that she loves him is conveyed in narrative. So instead of hearing the finer details of this epic conversation, which you work through a very long-winded book to get to, you get something along the lines of:

They decided to take a walk together. After they had made it a little ways down the garden path she looked at the lord and told him that she really did love him....

This is not verbatim, just roughly what I remember. Anyhow, it was a let down to say the least. So if there was a rule to be taken from this it would be something along the lines of "If dialog is a crucial part of the style and character of your story and the climax happens in conversation, please, for the love of god, share that conversation with your audience."

Still I found myself with one story trying to convey everything in dialog. The setting, the conflicts, and even the physical details of the characters. This basically amounts to having some character at some point comment on everything that you have decided is pertinent to share with the audience.

"Wow! Look at that sunset. Isn't it beautiful? The way the orange sinks into the yellow which blends into pink. And the thin silvery clouds reflecting the pink and gold on the bottom side while maintaining the same silvery gray on their topside as the calm ocean beneath them."

"Yes it is lovely but not as lovely as your startlingly brilliant long red hair, deep green eyes, and delicate white skin. Which of course perfectly compliments your long legs, slender waist and ample breasts..."

This rather odd reaction was due to the fact that I had read some sci-fi stories at that particular time in which the author spent pages and pages setting up his story. He told you not only every little detail of the environment and what his characters looked like but explained the arising conflict in detail, perhaps went into the finer points of the local galactic politics or even detailed the characters genealogy.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. There have been plenty of really great novels that have done this (lord of the rings comes to mind), and it actually makes it easier to jump right into the action if your audience gets a primer of what is going on and why you are calling your evil guys the "DORtinan" instead of the big bad evil guys etc. In fact if a story takes place in a disparate enough culture from our own some of that is likely to be necessary.

It is far less acceptable a device in short fiction than it is in longer works. In a short story you are likely to lose your audience if they have to read page after page of exposition detailing names and places that they have no way yet to actually connect with.

Believe me I have put down many books that did exactly that. So trying to establish a middle ground can be a tall order. You have to figure out what is and is not appropriate to be conveyed in narrative. What would better be revealed in character dialog, or perhaps in a letter or newspaper article they read that day.

How you determine that is dependent not only on the style of your work, but also on the point of view. Which will be coming very soon.

The Great Meta Sci-fi Adventure

2007-07-09T19:42:00.000-05:00

This is a new project of mine. I am trying to put together a broad set of instructions for writing sci-fi, and other fiction. I am doing it for myself more than for anyone else as a means of trying to focus my thought process.

Here is what I know about sci-fi/speculative fiction. There are different levels classified from "hard" to "soft," or visa versa. An example of soft sf is star wars. We call it this because the star wars trilogy is effectively a fantasy set in space. The technology, gadgets, guns, etc. have no real basis in science nor is an attempt made to scientifically explain any of them.

To be hard sci-fi a story must involve science. Though not everything has to have a scientific explanation there is a definite limit to what you can get away with, with a hard sf audience. IMO a good example of hard sf is the thirteenth floor. Though many hard sci-fi-ers would likely not consider anything that made it to the screen to be "hard" by comparison to their written counterparts.

To me the best sci-fi is that has a scientific concept, idea, or technology at the center of its conflict. For example in the thirteenth floor the conflict involved the necessity and lack of an ethical framework for dealing with simulated persons in simulated realities.

In other words when I write I do not want the science to be a backdrop or merely something encountered along the way. It should play some role in the conflict. Though there are also great psychological and speculative fiction that arises through the use of a more philosophic concept at the core of a story's conflict. These can be great tales as well. I am not opposed to that. In fact I do hope to create this sort of work one day as well.

The next issue to contemplate for me is adventure. It is not necessary to have adventure in a good scifi tale however I feel a certain nostalgia for the authors who once intentionally incorporated adventure into their work. Jules Verne and Michael Crichton come to mind. But alas adventure is not always going to be called for.

Thats all for now more on the great meta sci-fi adventure later.

Hello 2007

2007-07-09T19:22:00.000-05:00

Yea! Blog redo...

Sometimes I think I am dirty. Not like in some sort of sexual way, I mean like I feel like I am tainted. I feel like my past defines me so much that I cannot escape from it. I look at myself and my siblings and I think can't I do better than this? Shouldn't I be doing better than this.

I feel underutilized. Like I am somehow this big underachiever. I left uga because I realized that the only reason I was in college was because I was afraid of what I would be if I did not get a college degree. Meanwhile I knew plenty of people who had gotten there 4 year graduated and worked in pizza delivery or magazine sales or something that really did not require a degree to get into.

It all started seeming like a big scam. Still I realize that I want greater things for my life than just massage therapy and mother (eventually). Yet I am having trouble really nailing down what those things are much less how I am supposed to achieve them.

I am frustrated with my own level of patience. I have been exploring writing sci-fi for several years now and I feel as though I have made considerable progress in that realm. However I have finished very few stories.

I start. I stop. I don't generally get to an end before losing patience with the idea. I feel like I have the discipline of a gnat. That is partially where the "dirty" comes in.

A part of my brain still functions with the skills and habits I learned growing up in a very dysfunctional home. These skills include a certain amount of escapism, a short attention span, little patience, limited awareness of my environment, and once again a lack of discipline.

When I run into that frustration I feel like some kind of inbred mongrel. This is where I ask myself pointedly do I accept and embrace what I am or do I try and change. Do I attempt to become something better. Or am I in fact being too hard on myself.

My Atheism

2006-11-26T00:11:00.000-06:00

I've been blogging more on myspace mainly because its more convenient and I know a lot of people there. That being said it is not my intention to let this blog die, thus we will say that SotR is on hiatus. Or more precisely on extreme slow down. Also I'm working 2 jobs and going to school. I still post at catallarchy when I get a chance and actually think of something I want to say, though not as often as I would like. Anyhow I am hoping that after mid january I'll be back down to 1 job and the blogging, writing, and internet surfing/prowling can begin again.

That being said I am actually here cause I got a lot of thoughts about atheism rushing through my brain. I find it kind of frustrating that many of the world's prominent atheists seem more focused on arguments against the existence of god instead of positive and important reasons to be atheist. Other than THE END IS NIGH reasons. I mean the x-tians got us way beat on end-of-the-world scenarios and apocalyptic visions, though the environmentalists generally do well in that department as well.

Here is what I think:

If there were a theistic God (or gods) it would

1. see a necessity in the existence of atheists and/or non-believers.

2. not condemn such necessary beings to an eternity of torment for not believing in it/them.

Its not that I have any desire to be an accepted and necessary part of some cultural deity's master plan. Mainly I want to give a theistic perspective to my own moral imperative to atheism/non-mysticism.

You see I've noticed that us humans have an amazing capacity for inventing, and imagining non-existent things. We dream of things, write about things, and fantasize about things that do not exist. We draw them, paint them, sculpt them, pretend to be them on certain holidays, and even present them as actual things on television and in theater. Now some of these things are not impossible and the very act of imagining them is the first step in bringing them to existence. Flying machines start as dreams, then drawings, sculptures, contraptions, and eventually become helicopters, planes, and even ornithopters.

Some of these things cannot really exist. Such as horses that dance across rainbows (I'm leaving implicit the idea that this is accomplished without any technology - sure we might could invent come kind of nanotech someday that will turn a rainbow into solid matter, and we could subsequently watch a real horse prance up it but thats really besides the point), old brooms that hover in the air can transport us across the sky, and individuals who can walk through solid bricks without the use of an opening (hole, doorway, window, etc.) of any kind.

You get the idea. The problem is sometimes we see things that our brains are telling us are there that cannot really exist, or that can exist but are in fact not really there. You wouldn't believe how many monsters I saw under my sister's bed as a child. Of course it wasn't only monsters. There were ghosts banging on drums, lions, bears, leopards, a gorrilla once right outside my window, witches, aliens squatting in the corner, and bugs many, many, nonexistent (and sometimes existent bugs) invaded my bedroom at night. Or so my brain would tell me.

I had a particular fear of ants. One night I woke up in the wee hours of the morning and turned around to my pillow after having a particularly bad dream about ants and was horrified to discover that my pillow was in fact an anthill. It had a checkered pillowcase which had become a little twisted from where my head had been. In the dark it looked as though there were small dark bugs wondering up the sides of my pillow, following the spiral up to the top and entering right where my head had been.

It took me what felt like hours to convince myself that what I thought I was seeing could not in fact exist. I knew in my brain that my pillow could not have been transformed into an anthill while I was sleeping on it. I knew that what I was seeing was likely an optical illusion from the checkered pillow case in the dark. I knew that ants would have no reason to turn a pillow into their nest in the context of an inhabitted bedroom. Yet for me at that age it felt like a risky venture to allow rational thought to defeat the credibility of what my eyes were telling me was there. Eventually tugged at the pillow, the illusion vanished, and my fear subsided enough for me to put my head back on it and go to sleep.

The point is that as humans it is very easy to fool ourselves. It is easy for millions or even billions of people to believe in nonexistant things. In fact I suspect its easier to do it in large groups because we reinforce one another's beliefs. That is the point of the scientific method. To make sure that what we think we are observing we really are observing. The interpretation of a perceived pheonomenon is still up for debate, but we can know that something was observed even if its not what we think it is.

This brings me to the big "What if?" Imagine 5 people are stranded in the jungle they all get bitten by the same mosquitoes and all of them get sick, and 4 out of 5 die. What if you concluded that the survival of the 5th person was a miracle from god. Sure there are plenty of religious folk out there that would not stop with "it's God's will" or "it's a miracle," but at one time thats exactly what they would have done. And there are those that would stop there even today, and would not question a declared miracle of God.

Now suppose that that 5th person had eaten some berries and that those berries turned out to be a natural antibiotic to the bacteria in the mosquitos. If the investigations stops at the religious explanation, you never discover the cure that could save and protect others.

Thus the question goes, if I believe in things that I have no evidence for the existence of, will I miss what is really there, could I miss or fail to investigate a mystery, will I stop the search at an easy declaration of the will of an omnipotent benefactor? For if it is the will of God, am I not "explaining away" the miracle by finding a natural, physical, scientifically provable explanation?

My definition for supernatural is summed up in 1 word: "nonexistent." I have a moral imperative to not believe in supernatural things, in mystic and magical things, because it is important that I not be deluded into believing in something that isn't really there and thus missing what is.

That being said just because there is no hard evidence for the esistence of a thing does not mean that it doesn't exist. To believe in the existence of any one thing requires first and foremost that it be something that can be proved to exist or not exist if evidence were attained. For example I believe that extraterrestrial life exists even though we do not yet have evidence of such. That life could be some algae on a rock a billion light years away.

Though it is not scientific to declare that such algae/life exists it would be equally unscientific to declare it non-existent due to a lack of evidence. Put simply we can't speak to that which we don't know.

So finally I get back to my original statement. I think that if a theistic god existed it would want and see a necessity non-believers and/or atheists to exist, and seeing the necessity of their existence would not punish them for their beliefs.

This is presuming a god that created human beings, and is benevolent to some degree (i.e. wants them to thrive and prosper). The advance of human society and technology requires that somebody investigate that which we cannot explain. The miracles, the ghosts in the attic, why some things burn one color and others burn another color, why the wind blows (at some point someone had to doubt that this was merely the breath of god). At some point someone has to challenge the mysteries, and the miracles, and that takes people who aren't satisfied with the explanation "it was the will of God."

That person doesn't have to be an atheist, there are many shade of gray between doubting a popular explanation of a phenomenon and declaring the nonexistence of a theistic being. But to me the one leads easily to the other and thus atheism can be seen as a natural extension of that societal doubt. For what is an atheist if not someone who doubts and/or disbelieves the popular explanation of how and why we and all that exists exists.

Atheists do not doubt God, there is no God, they doubt their fellow humans, though more specifically they doubt the non-scientific explanations that their fellow humans often devise to explain things they don't understand, like how we came to exist.

Thus if there is a God (and there isn't lol), and if said God gives a rats ass about humanity, and those humans which it presumably made and gives a rats ass about, are fallible then it needs us - the skeptics, the non-believers, the atheists.

Seeing V

2006-03-19T22:45:00.000-06:00

I saw V for Vendetta last night and it was a really awesome movie. I highly recommend it. Its full of potent symbolism, literary allusions, rife with anarchic and libertarian content and... well its just a really good movie. The hero of the movie, "V" is a combination of heroic genius and insane terrorist.

If you've seen the trailer you know that it takes place in a future UK where the government has become super powerful and oppressive. Interrestingly enough though it is being haled as a "uncompromising vision of the future" there was very little gadgetry in it. There were no flying cars and the highest tech devices seemed to be the plasma screen televisions everyone had, and the sweeping listening devices. To put it simply it wasn't so much a possible future as it was a possible now. Though they did place it twenty to 30 years into the future.

In any case it was a great movie, and it makes you think. It was nice to see the wachowski brothers back to focusing on strong plots instead of super special effects. Not that it didn't have any.

Anyhow it got me to thinking, without telling you too much of what happened in the story I will say that it takes place within the context of a society in utter fear of their government. That government got its power by playing on people's fears after a major war followed by a bad terrorist attack.

This parrallels some of the things that happened in wake of 9/11 in the U.S. Mainly people's willingness to give up liberties in return for greater security. AKA the PATRIOT act. What I'm wondering is how far we are from stumbling down a similar path?

My whole life I've heard people talking about how everything is going to hell in a handbasket. First there were the protestants grandparents and their peers who believed every major tornado and/or disaster to be a sign of the "end of days" and of God's wrath upon the sinful.

When I got to elementary school there were the assemblies, plays, and speakers all telling us about how greenhouse gasses were destroying the world. There were cartoons that depicted a world underwater by the year 2000 if we failed to "reduce, reuse, and recycle."

And in the last 7 years since I was originally introduced to libertarianism and objectivism I've heard all manner of end of the world tales. Sometimes they are of government and the economy collapsing in on themselves, and sometimes they are of an extreme rise in government power that causes civil society to collapse.

Since the reelection of the Bush Administration its the left thats been crying fascism, and talking about oppression and the evils of a big powerful government. Many of them envision a future in which we have no freedom of religion, speech, or of person, and that the Bush Administration is going to take us there.

Now that I've said all that I would like to point out that things are getting better and have gotten significantly better in my lifetime. College campuses have admittedly gotten worse, becoming bastions of censorship instead of free speech, but culturally we are more accepting of diversity, we can afford more, technology has gotten better, healthcare has even gotten better. Imagine getting knee replacement surgery in 1980 and being out of the hospital on the same day, being able to put weight on it within 24 hours.

Access and dissemination of information is better and quicker than its ever been. More people are surving illness that were considered terminal just a decade ago.

Compare now with McCarthyism and the red decade. Compare now with how people lived during the nixon administration, and its hard to see a hell-in-a-handbasket scenario(That is unless you are one of those people who thinks the world is going to implode upon itself the moment we "run out of oil.")

Now back to the PATRIOT Act, and the current Bush Administration. Here we have an administration that has decided its okay to spy on Americans in America. They have been caught listening in on us, and apparently that's only a small fraction of the illegal intelligence-related activities they have been up to.

It is now okay for the government to search homes without warrants, detain individuals declared as "enemy combatants," they may demand and acquire personal records about you (including financial, library, and religious records) without a warrant or without telling you - oh yeah and you cannot contest them doing so, they can listen in on your phone conversations by getting a warrang from a secret court without proof that you are connected to terrorist activites... and well it goes on. President Bush just made 14 of the provisions of the Patriot Act permanent, 2 more were extended.

So maybe the Bush Administration isn't after absolute power, maybe they just want to secure their political position by making it easier to catch the bad guys. You catch a big bad terrorist on American soil, and it looks good. It looks like you are doing your job. So lets pretend for the sake of argument that no one in the massive enterprise that is the bush administration, nor any of their collegues or cronies are power-hungry madmen. Let's suppose their purpose is more benign, and perhaps more short-sighted. Maybe they believe this will make america safer, maybe they just want to leave a strong legacy for the next republican contender for the white house.

My question is what doors might this administration be leaving open for others to walk through? Maybe the Bush administration has no desire or intention to curb dissent, or persecute religious and sexual minorities, but what if someone else does?

Could a future attack or disaster give an ambitious individual the perfect opportunity to do just that? If the doors are open, and the tools are there, how far are we really from an oppressive dictatorship?

The fact is I don't know the answer. I'd like to think that it couldn't happen. That there are enough groups out there like the ACLU, and the Institute for Justice who would see it coming. I'd like to think that information is open enough now, and that we are tolerant enough, brave enough, diverse enough, and smart enough that it could never happen. But I really don't know.

I think that it would take more to achieve that sort of end than it ever has before, but that is far from saying it is impossible. I think it would take more than a charismatic politician, but perhaps far less than another 9/11.

This is actually so sad its funny.

2006-01-28T17:28:00.000-06:00

Yeah its about my dad again. But its actually humorous this time.

He put up this long comment on my last post trying to explain me into his neurotic worldview in which he thinks I am obsessed with him, and defined by my anger toward him. Most of its fairly inane bullshit. Its him pretending to be a psychologist. I could pick it apart but I wouldn't convince him anyhow and its not interesting enough to demonstrate for anybody else.

The funny part was when he said this: "I am guessing that my apologetic tones in my recent response to you were somewhat of a disappointment. After all, if I don’t respond in some think-headed, self-absorbed manner, then I am failing to live up to the image of me that you have managed to share with the entire world. "

He's referring to the response he put up on my father's day post. That was the post where I decide to let all my emotions go onto the page. I went on and on about how I felt and exactly precisely why I did not think my father deserved any respect from me. It was a very heartfelt post that I ended by talking about my own desire to have a father in my life.

He responded basically by saying "I demanded the respect that I knew I deserved," and then going off on a rant about how we wouldn't give it to him, and how we only wanted what he couldn't give. He finished with a little addendum on which he decided to comment on what I like to refer to as the "meanest thing anyone has ever said to me." Which I only happen to remember because he put it in writing and printed me a copy which I read many times over when I was a teenager. His comment was basically blaming my mother for his act of name calling.

Now let me explain something about my worldview. In my world if you had an estranged daughter who posted her feelings openly on the internet, and went into detail about how she felt and why she felt that way, and even mentioned a sincere desire for a father in her life, and you happened to stumble upon it - you would be fortunate.

Here would be an obvious inroad back into her life if you wanted to take it, however you would not be successful by ignoring everything she had to say and asserting the exact opposite. Even if you disagreed with her reasons for why she thought you didn't deserve her respect, if you ignored her reasons and feelings on the subject and just insisted that you did deserve it, and that you appropriately demanded it. That would come off as kind of... what's the term I'm looking for... Oh I know "Thick headed and self-absorbed."

In my world "apologetic" usually involves an apology of some sort. Now if she happened to mention something you said that hurt her feelings in the past, right then in there, if you remember saying it you could easily take responsibility for that and apologize. Something: like "you know what, I'm sorry. it was wrong of me to say that," or "I didn't mean that," or "calling you an infestation in my castly might have been a little extreme. I'm sorry," would have been apologetic. On the other hand if you decided to blame your ex-wife and mother of that child, whom was not around at the time, for giving you the idea, for the name that was called... I wouldn't call that apologetic.

I would say you had an inability to take responsibility for your own words, and decided to evade that responsibility in a very mean-spirited and tactless way. If I didn't know the person I would have to assume that upon saying that they had no interest in mending fences with that daughter, if they did I would say that they were stupid... of course thick-headed and self-absorbed works too.

Now I realize his most recent response was just an attempt to prove that he really isn't as simplistic and stupid as I made him out to be, and as is typical claims he's doing it because I would be "hurt" if he didn't respond. Given how much I've written about him on this blog long before he happened to discover it this is kind of ironic. I never could have been as open in my writing about my relationship with him as I have been if I had thought he was waiting around to say stupid defensive bullshit in response to my feelings.

But alas I've come to realize that I've shed way too many tears over someone who was never worth it. Complete strangers have been able to see and feel the genuine sadness and frustration I've expressed in my posts about my father, but all he can see in them is unwarranted anger that obviously has nothing to do with him, and that he can't be blamed for. There is nothing left between us. No way to build bridges, no place to start mending anything. Yet I count myself fortunate. I can honestly say that I don't need a father anymore, and I am content to live without one.

Where the sidewalk ends

2005-12-11T23:58:00.000-06:00

I've finally figured out something about complicated people, we have a hard time understanding people that are simpler than ourselves. And I don't necessarily mean stupider or less intelligent when I say "simpler." What I really mean is less complicated. I've never been able to introduce someone to one of my parents without divulging have of my life story... why? because my life is complicated. The relationships in my life have always been at least a little more complicated than those of my peers. When I called my grandmother "mom" friends would want to know why she was so old... and occasionally why she was so fat. When I called my dad "dave" friends wanted to know why I called my parents by their first names. When they asked my how I got the name "rainbough" that launched into another slew of stories. References to siblings, and even cousins could end up being a half hour conversation in and of themselves to explain how the sister was a cousin, or the cousin was a niece but really a cousin, and the aunt was a sister but really an aunt, and my mom's oldest daughter was neither mother or aunt, but later was mother, and finally simply Diane.

Fastforward to 8th grade and I end up living with a parent without the capacity to understand me, nor the desire to try. Likewise I did not have the ability to understand him, because strangely enough he simply wasn't complicated enough.

I was so long infuriated in past emails and letters with my father's tendency to not only ignore whole paragraphs of my feelings that I had carefully and clearly written out but then to even to repeat things I said as if I hadn't said them. For example in one letter I recall saying "I realize that we grew up in a very different environment than you did..." His response started like this "first of all I grew up in a very different environment than you did..." He then went on to imply that I couldn't possibly understand what he was saying because I didn't take into consideration this fact even though it was me who had introduced it.

Not responding to or commenting on my feelings was one thing, the real problem I had was that he acted as if they didn't exist. He would respond as if they hadn't been written... as if they weren't there on the paper/screen before him. For example I might thoroughly refute a belief of his and have him respond by simply reasserting it. No response to my arguments, no recognition that they even ever existed just a reassertion of his belief without any argument to back it up. It was baffling. Had he not read it? How for example could he repeat a sentence almost in its entirety to the word that I had written and imply that he was introducing new and unconsidered data. Yet he would respond to selective parts of our exchanges ignoring 95 percent of what I said.

It finally occurred to me after all these years that he wasn't ignoring my thoughts, feelings, and arguments in all those letters, he simply could not understand them. He may understand the words on the page, but he can't understand the broader abstractions. He doesn't get implications, and he has no way of recognizing when his own arguments have been fully refuted. I don't have to even worry about him reading this.

Yes my much posted on wayward father aka sperm donor, has finally found my blog. I always got a kick out of hiding my feelings in the open, and being so easily found on the internet that my grandmother has even attempted to send me emails regarding my relationship with my dad (and you know I didn't tell her about my blog). But alas he won't understand the words I'm writing right now. If he says anything it will be a meaningless assertion that will have little to do with this post. Its actually kind of disappointing.

Where am I supposed to go with that?

My first hate mail

2005-11-20T17:57:00.000-06:00

I received this in my email recently:

keep telling yourself that you sickening, disgusting
faggot.

face it, you animals lost by a large margin. You are
no different from other perverts and are not worthy of
marriage. now ooze your fat ass back to your trailer
park before you miss you faggot boyfriend on springer

Apparently this guy has a real problem with females marrying males. He seems to think the traditional male/female pair-bond is something disgusting and perverted. I've never encountered such a militant homosexual. Being female I have actually never been called a faggot before. I'm going to have to tell my fiance that there is some strange fellow out there that thinks we should not only be on jerry springer but would more appropriately be overweight given the male-on-female acts of perversion (i.e. sexual intercourse) that we often perform.

I wonder how he preposes that humanity continue to reproduce. I guess thats not really important. What's important is not being perverted. I guess I'm going to have to become a lesbian and marry a woman so that I don't mess up the natural order of things. My fiance is going to be awfully disappointed.

Or to put the previous paragraphs another way I would like to quote the now immortal words of Beavis and Butt-Head:

"Heh heh heh... What a dumbass."

Gay marriage in Texas - a future headline

2005-10-17T20:31:00.000-05:00

The State of Texas Recognizes that Gay Marriage is “similar” to Heterosexual Marriage.

In a bizarre twist the state of Texas in its earnestness to ban gay unions, and annihilate the possibility of civil unions from other states being recognized as marriage within its borders has now enshrined the idea into its constitution that gay marriages are not only meaningful unions but also are in fact similar to more traditional forms of marriage. The wording of the constitutional ammendment went something like this:
“The constitutional amendment providing that marriage in this state consists only of the union of one man and one woman and prohibiting this state or a political subdivision of this state from creating or recognizing any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

While the wording is fairly broad, its intention matters to its ultimate interpretation in the courts. The state can’t outlaw legal statuses “similar to marriage” without looking at the underlying relationships that are protected by that status unless they want to outlaw every legal partnership in existence in the state. Thus, in order to enforce their own constitution, the state has had to make it clear just what makes a gay contractual union “similar to marriage” but a power of attorney relationship within a non-homosexual household not “similar to marriage.”

Though the legislature is still struggling with the issue the argument has already been made by gay rights advocates that contractual unions between gay couples designed to protect the legal rights of their romantic partners cannot be considered marriage or even “similar to marriage” because the constitution has already defined marriage as being between one man and one woman.

Last week the legislature attempted to remedy this problem by proposing that contractual relationships in which the signers of the contract are having an “intimate relationship” would be considered “similar to marriage” while those who entered contracts who had no such relationship would be considered “not similar to marriage.” However this idea was reconsidered when 3 wives of state senators sued the state for an official annulment of their marital status arguing that their licenses should not constitute legal marriages due to a lack of intimacy in their relationships.

The legislature quickly dropped the “intimacy” approach and is now struggling to create a legal definition for sex that includes typical homosexual romantic behavior. Unfortunately, they have hit a roadblock in that the Texas legislators are not entirely sure how gay sex works, and are currently searching for a non-gay expert on the subject.

Apparently fucking up..

2005-09-12T17:39:00.000-05:00

I just had a WTF is wrong with everyone and everything day.
Started out good... ended with a big WTF!!!

looking over my should wondering what is wrong with me.

I feel shafted, I feel worse than shafted, I feel set-up sabotaged, and yet I know it was probably all a misunderstanding. Sure it was. Thats all it ever is. No one is ever bad except for me. No one fucks up except for me. No one lies except for me, and I'm a fucking honest person.

I left work today angry and confused and wondering (and not for the first time either) if my hr is a liar. Why? Is something wrong with the world that I look at it and see liars where kind generous people used to be. Is something wrong with me?

Apparently I fucked up. I lost the opportunity for a promotion because when my h.r. asked me if I was interested in a job that would mean a promotion and a raise and I told her that yes I was interested I wasn't clear. She told me to let her know my decision even though I was saying to her right then that I wanted the job. The problem was she wanted to know if I would be going back to school, because that would effect my availability. She also mentioned that she needed to know soon because she would be starting interviews in the next couple of weeks. I told her I hadn't decided and needed to figure out if I could afford november classes. That night I figured out that I couldn't afford to take november classes and decided to tell her that I would have a completely open availability starting in November.

The next day I talked to her for a few minutes but she wandered off and I didn't really want to talk to her about the position while I was out on the sales floor (afterall that sort of thing is supposed to be a private matter and not discussed in front of other cashiers/employees). I decided to talk to her later, but I was not able to get a break and by the time I was off she was long gone. So I figured I'd talk to her the next day I worked which was about two days later.

That day I once again couldn't get her in private, so I figured I would wait until lunch. During lunch she wasn't around, so I planned to talk to her at the end of my shift. Unfortunately I got off late because of a fellow employee arriving late, and I missed her entirely because she got off at the same time. Thus I figured I would catch her the next day before my shift (this was yesterday). So of course she was not there at all yesterday. Finally during lunch today I find her in her office (and keep in mind this is about 5 days after the initial inquiry) and tell her I will not be taking classes and ask about the position.

What do I get? "I'm sorry Rainbough but when you didn't tell me you were interested the next day I assumed you had decided to do something else and went ahead and filled the position."

This is from someone who said she'd be starting interviews in the "next couple of weeks." She just filled the position. If I had thought for a moment she needed to know the next day I would have gladly left her a note, or told her in the few minutes I got to talk to her out on the floor (though I still wonder if that would have been appropriate given the lack of privacy).

To say the least I really wanted the position, and I didn't even get a shot at it because even though I clearly stated I was interested, and indicated in our computer system that I was interested, the time to say I was interested was in a narrow window of time the day after she asked, and I had no clue.

I was even thinking at the time after I couldn't find her at the end of my shift that she probably wasn't expecting an answer that quick anyway. Now I wonder if someone is lying to me. I wonder if it was all just a ploy to make it look like she was offering me a chance at a promotion that in reality was never going to happen.

I feel stupid and humiliated because I was there that day knowing my answer and just looking for an appropriate moment, and somehow my own sense of proper time and action shot myself in the foot. And thats that. I can only presume my H.R. was lying about starting interviews in a few weeks or that she's really impulsive and when she decided I didn't want the job she immediately gave it to perhaps the only other candidate.

Well fuck me. I don't even know if I would have gotten the job, and now I doubt I will ever know. I don't even want this job anymore. I've had enough. If I didn't need it I'd be gone right here and now, but WTF difference does that make. I can't afford shit. This job is the only thing paying my bills, barely. I couldn't leave it if I wanted to and hence the WTF state I'm in.

Apparently even kind generous people can be a little WTF sometimes. My H.R. is definitely no exception.

Things I'm dying to say at home depot

2005-08-06T20:37:00.000-05:00

Customer: Are you open?
Me: No I just turn on the light to confuse people.

Customer: Can I check out hear?
Me: No you can only look at home depot, we are morally opposed to selling products.

Me: Did you find everything you needed?
Customer: No I didn't find the winning lottery ticket... bag of money... money tree...
Me: Home Depot doesn't sell cheap fantasies, Have you tried lowes?

Customer: Can I check out here at returns?
Me: Only if I get to keep everything you buy.

Customer: I couldn't find anyone to help me so I'm just going to go to lowes.
Me: Does that line ever actually work.... Do you use that line at lowes too but with home depot inserted instead of lowes?

Customer: Can I check out here so that I don't have to walk to the other end of the store?
Me: Can I walk to the other end of the store so that I don't have to check you out?

Customer: Why do you have all of your registers at the other end and all of your parking at this end?
Me: It was so customers would ask us that question over and over.

Customer: I have a complaint. Why do I have to walk all the way to the other end to check out when I need something on this end?
Me: Its because you're not supposed to need anything on this end.

Customer: I don't think I should have to walk all the way down there to check out when I parked on this end.
Me: If you give me a second I'll remodel the store for you. It should only take a few minutes.

Customer: No I don't have a receipt or the orginal box.
Me: How long have you had the product?
Customer: I don't know 6 or 7 months?
Me: I'm sorry sir we can't take that back.
Customer: You've got to be kidding?!?
Me: No I'm not. But if we ever institute the keep a product as long as you like and then return it for a full refund policy you'll be the first to know.

Customer: I can't believe you won't take this tree back without a receipt or proof or purchase! I've spent thousands of dollars at home depot over the past year and you won't take back a simple plant.
Me: If we tailored our return policy to high dollar customers, the couple thousand a year customers would be shit-out-of-luck returning anything.

Customer: I bought these zinnia's here. No I don't have a receipt or the original container. It was a dollar something... What do you mean you can't take it back?!?
Me: Yeah given that every grocery store, hardware store, and big box retail store in town sells flowers, we usually like to have some proof that you did at some point buy a flower at our store before we fork out money for a pile of dirt with a daisy sticking out of it.

Customer: When I bought these bulbs the associate in electrical tole me I could just use what I needed and bring back the rest of the box.
Me: Actually you can do that with everything in our store. Use only half of your 2 by 4 then bring it back for a 50% refund. Drink half a coke we'll give you half your money back. Use half a box of nails we'll refund the other half. Use half a gallon of paint, or half a tank of propane we'll gladly refund the other half. We call it our half-witted return policy. Just kidding.

In the service of my dreams

2005-07-11T14:21:00.000-05:00

A deep dark flame sits inside me
relentless. A keeper of death
It knows deceit, and strangeness
It sees the dying children
of social experimentation
the long trail of repression
leading to the money made by me
It asks if I should make something
for evil. To avoid the monsters that
knock on my door, that audit my soul
to save my family
to serve my dreams
what price would I pay.
A thousand dollars here,
some portion of my life.
Some set of hours every year
to assure I go so far.
To protect my future from the creditors
who won't trust a non-payer
or the officers, the judges who doubt the
credibility of one that doesn't pay their salary.
If I do this I ensure tomorrow for me
I'll ignore those who die in poverty
struggling on economies broken, manipulated
torn, by our meddling, and my money.
Funding the weapons, the interests, the goons
pointing the guns at you today.
For a small price I am assured protection,
no one knocking down my door, no one taking my future.
From the ashes, and the blood of a lesser world
I purchased my dreams. For the interest and illusion
of democracy I am secure from the taxman.
The flame burns to keep my silent
remember the rule
remember social reponsibility
remember your dreams it says.
Its a small price to pay, from a paycheck
here or there. Its for safety, security, our military
our country. A little each day I keep the world
safe for democracy, by buying your grave.

Rainbough's Parent Issues Redux

2005-06-21T18:30:00.000-05:00

So father's day has now come and gone. As some of you may remember it was around father's day last year that I had the big fall out with my dad. Of course it wasn't really a big "fall out," since I was in the process of dropping/cutting off the relationship anyway. But it was painful and poorly managed anyhow. I decided to mention it at church last sunday in the joy's and concerns part of the service. I lit a candle for him. It was kind of surreal, because on the one hand I do have this genuine feeling of loss of not having him (or some father figure) in my life, but on the other hand it is me that requested and has effectively maintained the separation. I feel like he should not be in my life for a lot of reasons, but at the same time I still felt like I should honor him as a person and as a father even if perhaps a poor one.

I'm sure he tried his best... but fuck that! What does that even mean?!? What difference does it make if someone tried their best if they failed, it might make them feel better that they believe they have done all in their power/ability to achieve their goal. But when that goal was to be a desent parent to a bunch of very disturbed traumatized teenagers what does it even mean to have "done your best" if you did so very badly that your kids felt like they didn't have a parent even when you were there?

I thought I had moved passed the infamous "infestations" letter before last year's incident, but last year's email refreshed it all in my mind and memory. Strangely now I feel as if I can forgive him for the stupid email he sent me last year, but I cannot forgive him for responding to the desperate attempt of a depressed 15 year old to reach out to and understand her father by with a letter that likened me and my siblings to "infestations in his castle." I had low enough self esteem as it was. It was like he was kicking me when I was down in the worst way he could have contrived to do so.

On a lighter note I was hanging out with a few of my co-workers one night in a pool hall/bar and one of my supervisors said "well my dad says I'm worthless," another co-worker said "my dad said I'll never amount to anything," and then I said "my dad called me an infestation in his castle." It was actually kind of funny. Anyhow so I figured out that I still haven't forgiven my dad for a stupid letter he wrote me 8 or 9 years ago that was in response to a letter I wrote in an attempt to reach out to him. There is more to it than that. All the issues I was going through at the time are wrapped up in it. The fact that I badly needed a father and a parent and I didn't have one. The fact that I needed someone to talk to, and the only person I had the nerve to reach out to (my dad) smacked me down (verbally) on every attempt.

The fact that his entire concern over us following his rules revolved around his fear that we were not respecting him as an authority figure. If for a moment I thought that any of his rules were there to protect us or keep us safe I could have seen him as an authority, but that wasn't the case. They were there to make him feel like a parent, and like he was in control of his own house and children.

If he had been concerned for my well-being, or feared I was in danger or trouble when I forgot to call home when I was going to be late I would have respected his rules. But his ultimate concerns were always, constantly his needs, and his authority. He seemed to have this all-encompassing fear that we were not respecting him in the way that he thought we should.

When I came home from college the first time and he said we needed him for more than someone to keep the lights on and rent paid, I was incredibly offended. Not because we didn't need him, but because we did, and he wasn't there for us. We couldn't talk to him without him acting like we were wasting his time and pulling him away from something he would rather be doing. When I was able to talk to him he always made me feel stupid, especially if my issues were with him. He made us feel stupid for having the emotions we had, irrational for not being able to convince him that we should feel the way that we did feel, and pathetic for requesting that he show up to events that were important to us.

He decided wholly of his own brilliant mind that we did not need any psychological help or counseling in spite of the fact that we had just spent 13 years in what he knew well was a psychologically abusive environment. He ignored everything I said was important to me to continue doing when I moved in with him (such as going to church) and later claimed I hadn't told him about any of those things when he simply hadn't listened when I did. We ultimately ended up having to spend huge amounts of money on food because he would not buy any because he was supposedly trying to teach us to "plan ahead" by not buying any groceries unless we gave him a grocery list on the specific weekend that he had gotten his paycheck.

Not only would he not contribute to our school expenses such as band camp, and field trips he actively encouraged us from being involved in extracurricular educational activities because he didn't want to have to drive us to and from the activity, and on top of that getting him to give us driving lessons was like pulling teeth. I think he gave me two or three lessons over 2 or 3 years.

When my world was falling apart, when I was turning into myself, isolating myself, crying alone at night for months on end, you were to busy escaping from the catastrophe that you saw me and my siblings to be to be there for me or my siblings. Forget about talking about the pain I felt being away from my mom and younger siblings, the extreme disappointment I felt at all the things and people I had left behind at my old school/life, the self-hatred and loathing I was going through as a result of issues with my grandmother, the pain I felt at being rejected by my grandfather, the deep seeded fear I had regarding even the possibility of an intimate relationship, the crazy religious roller coaster I was on, or the thousand and one nightmares and issues I was having over the experiences I had had at my grandparent's house.

Even if I couldn't had talked to you, if you had at least given me the impression that you gave a damn about my well-being, I could have considered you a parent. But you never paced the floor over worry or concern for us (you concern was always frustration at the knowledge that your rules weren't being abided) when we didn't show up where we were supposed to. You weren't the least bit concerned when you found out we had witnessed a bad accident. You weren't ever concerned about any of our issues. You joked around about how much money you were saving because we were spending our own on food instead of saving it up for college which you knew well you weren't going to contribute a dime to. When one of us was injured you were more concerned over the medical bill and the expense we were causing. You never took us to a doctor or a dentist. If you had been strapped for cash I would have understood, but you were meanwhile taking yourself to the dentist at every minor ache, and got yourself prescribed prozac for "depression" because your girlfriend broke up with you.

Parent?!? You were a estranged uncle who accidentally got stuck with some kids he didn't know and didn't give a damn about. To you it was an ordeal that you just wanted to get through. Only 4 more years, only 3, only two, one more till I get my home and money back from these bratty teenagers. And then there was my grandparents constantly showing up to our concerts and reminding us that they'll be our parents, and they'll be there for us after all they terrible things they had done. It was appalling, and humiliating to have that disgusting woman follow me around claiming she was my mother, talking to my friends parents like everything was normal, and all I wanted was for the beast to go away. But there was no one there to correct her, or to stand up for us. No one to say these are my kids and that that woman hurt them and is using you (my friend's parents) to try and weasel her way back into their life.

In the end it wasn't fair for me to expect you to be a parent when you weren't psychologically equipped to be one, but it was equally unfair that you pretended to be one, and that you took in kids that deep down you didn't even value as human beings. I guess beggars can't be choosers, and I was more than willing to accept that you weren't going to be there for me or be a parent for us if you had just let go of the title instead of clawing to it indignantly like you fucking deserved it -I probably wouldn't even have much emotion attached to the ordeal now. But there it is. Happy father's day. If I had thought choosing between you and the grandfather who had nearly killed my siblings on so many occasions as the person to call "father," was a choice then I wouldn't have picked you, but I did. If I hadn't not a bit of this crap would have really mattered in the long run. But that role meant something to me, and it still does. I still look for my dad, and I still miss having one.

Interesting studies of female brains

2005-06-20T16:06:00.000-05:00

Brain Areas Shut Off During Female Orgasm

In the first study to map brain function during orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain that governs emotional control is also heavily deactivated.

"The fact that there is no deactivation in faked orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain," said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings Monday at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

That explains so much.

A long long weekend

2005-06-05T22:33:00.000-05:00

I just got back from BilLee's sister's wedding, and it has left me thinking that maybe I should just skip the "wedding" part of the ordeal. We could skip straight to the honeymoon, and have way more time for ourselves!

Also Billee and I just applied for an apartment a few miles from where we are now so pending approval we will likely start the process of moving from a house into a third floor apartment sometime this week. This should prove interesting. I am also trying to talk BilLee into giving up one of our cats so that we can save 300 dollars on the pet fee. Thus far he has been fairly resistant to the idea.

In truth I'd like to get rid of both of them. Though I am fond of them I also have a massage table to worry about, not to mention the people I hope to practice on -some of whom will likely be allergic to cats. In short they are cute and affectionate and we can live without them.

Also I'm left after my 4 day vacation of feeling like I need a vacation. This trip was too much stress, too much money, too much driving, and all around too much work. I missed two classes at school, 4 days of work, and I was left wishing that I could go on a "honeymoon" of my own.

And still I'm waiting for that memorial day cookout that I wanted to have last weekend. Now its back to school, back to work, and back to the daily grind, plus I'll have to fit in a few make up days for the classes I missed... can't wait. I'm enjoying school, but at the same time I really miss that long ago time, back before I turned 15 and started working, when I did nothing during the summer.

Massaging, and more massaging

2005-05-22T23:47:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I've got my first in-home massage of someone who is not in my immediate family. Its gotten me a little nervous. I think I'm going to mess something up, expose something I'm not supposed too. Things will look to dirty, I won't look professional enough, I won't be adequately prepared. Somehow the "take a deep breath and recognize you can do this" approach seems inadequate. What will that be worth if my sheets are dirty. What will that be worth if I flub up something? I want to be as professional as I can be, but still the nagging question in my brain... "but who am I, and do I belong here." Its a weird thought that pops in and out. I don't doubt my capacity to massage. I doubt my capacity to look, act, feel, and be perceived as professional by someone who knows very well how to be professional. Its messing with my brain, it really is. Some part of me thinks my teeth are too crooked to be seen as professional. My body is shaped wrong, my manner of speech perhaps too informal. It seems that their are things about me I cannot change or do not know how to that must be changed to be truly "professional." Or maybe I've created a mountain out of a mole hill. Maybe being confident that I can give a good massage is all I really need. I guess I'll find out soon enough.

My blogging brain

2005-05-09T12:56:00.000-05:00

My brain is in strange places these days. I spent a long time talking to my little sister last night, and was left with the overpowering thought of "wow she's so teenager-y." She's 17 and mostly she reminded me of how much I am glad that those days are over. For me anyway they are over. Life is a little slower now, a little calmer, and strangely busier.

I've also been thinking a lot about my church. I have lots of ideas of things I could do there, but many of them do not seem like they are worth doing. They seem like they would take many more hours of my time, most of which would likely be spent on convincing people of the value of doing said activity. My problem is that I just do not get anything out of it anymore. Its turned into a glorified social occasion. I don't get anything intellectually from the sermons. They don't get me thinking, most of the songs leave me annoyed, and half the time I'm frustrated or irritated by the short-sightedness of the sermon.

Still there does not seem to be anyone there that I can explain this to. For most of them the sermons are great, the songs are fine, and there are plenty of people to talk to that understand their universe. For me thats just not the case. When I realized that our ministers were unlikely to ever understand me it was all down hill from there. Not because I had any particular need for them specifically to understand me, but because that lead me to thinking about whether or not there were others there that could.

Church is not just about finding some guidance, but in my mind its a very weak place if I cannot at least find that. I'm not looking for a "Hey go this way instead" kind of guidance, more of a "well maybe you are missing the bigger picture here, or maybe you are overlooking this." You know an outsider to look in occasionally. Someone you can talk to when you are a little confused. But my world is too different from theirs.

I don't even know how much I can do for them in this way. Diverse viewpoints are a good thing, but when you are the extreme minority and no one even realizes how different you are you begin to wonder if perhaps you are in the wrong place.

I find myself when talking to others at church, often adjusting my viewpoint so that I can better relate to them. Giving advice as if I were a perfectly normal person. Kind of a, "well I'm not a heterosexual monagamist that agrees with the mainstream view of the world but if I were here is what my advice would be."

See, clearly the problem is me, but what am I supposed to do about it. Maybe I'm not rising to the challenge as I could and should be. Learn to communicate, learn to be honest about how different I am, learn to reach out a little more, organize my time a little better...

It would be easier if I could just get Sundays off from work. Right now I barely have time to even talk to people after the service. Half the time I do not go because it does not seem worth it to go there just for two hours for a service I am unlikely to even get anything out of.

And I've found myself a lot doubting people's authenticity. Sometimes I feel like "yeah you would be nice to me no matter what kind of person I am, and no matter what kind of bullshit came out of my mouth." "So how do I know you are really a friend?"

Thats the trouble with a church that sees all humans as valuable, and I do to, but people often misunderstand the difference between tolerance and acceptance. I'll tolerate quite a bit, but that doesn't mean I am going to find every view point, and idea acceptable. I run into so many people that go out of their way to "accept me for who I am," but do not have a clue who I am. And how do I have a clue who they are beyond the "everything's acceptable facade?" How do I have a clue who they are when half the time they do not have a clue themself?

I want more than this. The question is do I want more than they can give, perhaps more than I could reasonably give in return, and is it time to move on?

Death and Taxes and this movie I saw Part 2

2005-04-18T12:40:00.000-05:00

So what I saw in this movie was something I already knew, that the U.S. government has in the past (and possibly the present) funded terrorist organizations such as the Khmer Rouge of cambodia. I've spent a long time over the years contemplating taxation and whether or not one should attempt to fight against the taking of your money by force especially when you object to what it is funding.

According to Thoreau we should be sitting in prison if we object to funding a war, or known criminals who have committed acts of genocide. I certainly don't want to go to prison, but what about people who are being killed with weapons bought from tax money taken from me?

If you knew that a criminal upon robbing you of your money would use that money to fund a killing spree in your neighborhood I bet you would fight pretty hard to keep him from having it. Maybe you would be willing to trade your life to stop him from taking others.

The question of responsibility is a strange one here. The death of my neighbors in that case would not be my fault, but if there is a chance I could prevent it don't I have to take that chance? Its not a new question. Many people are debating it online and in other places even as I write this. It was one of the core questions in Atlas Shrugged.

Do you continue to make possible the value necessary for others to do evil in the world? Its not your evil, you can't keep them from taking the money once its made, you didn't have a choice, you don't have a say in how they use it, but if you don't create the wealth to begin with? If you hide it? Refuse to pay it?

Now that I am contemplating starting my own business in massage therapy these are ideas I feel I must tackle. However the repercussions are also dim.

Currently I would have to quit my job to not pay taxes since they are deducted automatically. If I make money and don't pay taxes I could go to prison, have my credit rating ruined, have liens put on any property I may have, have my children taken away (after I have kids of course). It could literal tear apart my family, and leave me with no way of making a living. It could take away options, and liberties.

If I know what evil in the world my money was funding right now, would any of these setbacks even be relevant? Could I really weigh my life and family against the scope of the evil perpetrated by the drug war, or by immigration laws, or by the CIA in its perverted notion of what constitutes "National Security?"

If I decide to continue my life as usual, pay my taxes like a good little citizen, raise my family as I want, what will it mean? Will I be complicit in that evil?

I created the value that bought the bullet,
that was shot into your brain.
I made the money,
do I bare the blame?

I didn't ask for it to be taken,
I didn't know where it would go,
but what difference does that make
to those who take the blows?

Will I make it possible,
for evil to fight another day?
Will I make it easier,
for a tyrant to torture and slay?

Did I buy the casings,
or maybe I just bought the beer,
for the victory celebration
of those that conquered here.

Would it make a difference
If I refused to give them that aid,
Would anyone follow suit,
Would the evil start to fade?

Do I have a choice,
will the evil come unfurled?
If I don't fund my government,
what will happen to my world?

Death and Taxes and this movie I saw Part 1.

2005-04-18T00:58:00.000-05:00

Last night I watched Beyond Borders, a movie with Angelina Jolie. Its about a woman who is inspired to become an aid worker for refugees by a very passionate doctor who is working on the frontlines of famine and war-torn countries. So the movie kind of sucked. Mainly because the plot didn't exactly exist. There was a sequence of events that didn't happen in any meaningful order. For the most part the movie seemed to be about us getting to see Angelina Jolie in many different cool looking outfits. It was like she was a really hot barbie doll that producers couldn't get enough of dressing up.

This is the Chechnyian Angelina, this is the Cambodian Angelina, this is the Ethiopian variety, and don't forget British Angelina. Too bad I don't have pictures, you would see what I mean. In there defense all of Angelina Jolie's movies mysteriously turn out that way (except for girl-interrupted its hard to make a mental patient look like a barbie-doll).

In any case I didn't actually expect the movie to be that good. I was actually watching it in the hopes of getting a portrayal of how bad it can be out there in those war-torn countries. We got a little of that... the movie could of honestly used a lot more of it. The problem was that the main character (Angelina Jolie's character) was only in third world countries for maybe 3 months of a time period spanning 11 years.

I thought it was going to be about someone who was inspired to become an aid-worker, and follow this crazy doctor all over the world. Technically thats correct, she got herself an office at the U.N. (and thus she was an aid-worker) and at one point ended up chasing the doctor into Chechnya.

It was disappointing but it still had the desired effect of getting me to think about those countries and the people in them. I would have liked to see a story about a woman who rarely leaves those war-torn countries, and what she learns about herself in the process. How her views change etc. and they could even throw the love story in if they wanted.

Instead we get a few months in ethiopia, 5 year hiatus in london, a few weeks in cambodia, 5 year hiatus in london, a few days in chechnya, the end.

I'm going to separate this into parts because I wanted to rant about the thoughts this movie inspired regarding taxation, and the funding of terror in other countries through U.S. taxes but its getting kind of late. So there is part 1. The movie that sucked inspires interesting thoughts in my brain.

Terri's dead... finally

2005-04-01T14:30:00.000-06:00

CNN.com - Schiavo kin remain divided after her death - Apr 1, 2005

I don't mean to be callous but it seems to me that the person who cared the least about the outcome of the Terri Shiavo case was Terri herself.Though I do not know whether to believe the family's claims that she was responsive and capable of recovery or the husband and doctors claims that she was not, it does seem clear that who ever Terri was in 1990 is now long.

Brain damage can turn you into a different person, and the real question in my mind was whether or not there was a person left in Terri that had some rights that should be respected. If there was than the previous wishes of Terri Shiavo may have been irrelevant. For example if I decided when I was a teenager that I did not want to live past 23, and then suffered some major traumatic event that made me physically or mentally a different person the previous person's wishes would not get higher claim than the current person.

The teenage me could not order the death of the current "now" me. But it is not clear if there was anything of Terri to save much less a coherent and different personality from the original. As for the "Dying with Dignity" issue I agree with the statements of the fictional Dr. House from the Fox network:

"There's no such thing. Our bodies break down, sometimes when we're 90, sometimes before we're even born -- but it always happens and there's never any dignity in it. I don't care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass -- it's always ugly, always. You can live dignity, but you can't die with it."

- House, M.D.

Fossil hunting at Home Depot

2005-03-31T22:06:00.000-06:00

I've got a job at Home Depot bringing in carts, loading people's cars with bags of mulch, and helping people find plants that butterflies like while deer don't. Anyway, it's part-time so I should have more time to do whatever. The other day I arrived at work early a day or so after a big storm and decided to smoke a cigarette before work. It then occurred to me that the rock face next to a parking lot in the Texas Hill Country was precisely the kind of striated rock that I've seen paleontologists find fossils in on TV. I also remembered that after a storm was supposed to be the best time to find fossils so I decided I would look for a fossil. Within five minutes, I found one. It's not a very impressive fossil. It's just almost half a clam shell, but I found it neat.

Blog-iversary

2005-03-13T23:13:00.000-06:00

A few weeks back I passed SotR's 1 year anniversary. Feb 24th to be exact. I've been so busy I never got around to putting anything up about it. Nevertheless now that I'm about a week away from my own 24th B-day I thought I might mention something. Its weird being away from my twin on a birthday, and I know that it will be really weird this year celebrating in Texas.

As for the blog I'm keeping it alive... if barely. I think I have time to post more, its remembering to post that's a challenge with all the other stuff occupying my mind. I want to talk about my massage school and how fascinating it is to explore the muscles and how they work together. How pain and tension in one can effect a whole chain of them. But I'm still working on the concepts myself, and I'm not sure I could do them justice at this point.

Also I'm a cashier at Home Depot now part time. Its a fairly easy job most of the time, but occasionally I wonder if I'm not being diligent enough in my reponsibilities. Sometimes you work with other people and you notice things they do that perhaps you could do better.

And another thing... its strangely difficult to get myself talking or thinking politics in a non-election year. I guess I've finally reached that point in my life when its not even remotely a fascinating subject anymore. I think what I really liked was the debate and discourse over issues. Now what I saw as debate before seems like just so many people talking out of their ass. Politicians selling us a line, editors selling us a story, and pundits selling us opinionated hollering over substance. Even science news fails to spark my interest these days. It seems like most of it is just some pencil pusher or another trying to spark interest by making over exaggerated claims, and thereby drum up some extra research dollars.

I'm becoming more apathetic to it all. Its not that I don't care, its just starting to seem more and more like a diversion from my "real" life and the things that are really important to me. I Know... I know... "he who refuses to participate in politics ends up being ruled by his inferiors..." But lets face it most of us have been "ruled by our inferiors" since before we were born. Politicians aren't typically known for their intelligence.

The only difference between a politician and your average criminal is that the politician had the opportunity, and perhaps the direction (whether from external sources or from themselves) to be able to figure out how to do the same stuff legally.

Oh yeah... I got my massage table... WOO HOO!!!!

And for now...

2005-03-09T14:50:00.000-06:00

Right now most of my time is getting eaten up between work and massage school. I had my first "practical" class yesterday and found myself completely exhausted afterward. Now I've spent the last few hours researching massage tables. I've been trying to figure out what is the best price/package to get for what I need. There are so many options though, and its such a huge chunk of money that its hard to figure out. Plus there is the question of tax, shipping etc.

My school offers a discount on a specific line of massage tables from a company called "custom craftworks." The catch it that the discount almost completely disappears between the cost of tax and shipping. There is actually a place in town that I can buy the same tables without the shipping cost that also have a discount on the manufaturers suggested retail price. I have also found several websites that offer free-shipping (paid for by custom craftworks) of the same tables.

All this makes me wonder why CC doesn't offer free shipping to my school, and why everyone else seems to get the same (or better) discount than my school. Perhaps the MSRP is just inordinately high. Though I'm not sure what some of the local places are offering in their "packages." Presumable the websites that ship from other states would not require me to pay tax (or so I'm hoping) which would mean if there is also no shipping charge potentially a $90 discount. But who knows how long it will take to get the table (urrrrrrrrrgggh).

They won't tell me before I fill out their little forms telling them where I live, and where to send their junk mail too etc. Maybe I should try ebay...

Supreme Court to consider eminent domain

2005-02-22T13:08:00.000-06:00

Well it took them long enough didn't it.

KRT Wire | 02/21/2005 | Supreme Court to consider eminent domain: "Berliner, with the Institute for Justice, said Kelo isn't asking the court to overturn its 1954 ruling or even diminish eminent domain in a way that will affect private development.
She said that because even New London agrees that Kelo's neighborhood isn't a blighted slum, it's an extreme case.
'We're just trying to have the standards enforced properly,' she said. 'It's one thing to take (property) for private development of a blighted area, it's another to take it to simply raise tax dollars or create jobs."

So apparently the argument is that if the neighborhood is poor -er "blighted" then it is okay to seize their property by force to develop the area for people with more money. If they are middle class then its not okay.

I like to think of this as the long struggle of local governments to keep class warfare alive and well.

The more things change...

2005-02-07T01:51:00.000-06:00

Khaleej Times Online

NEW DELHI - Three days after Nepal’s King Gyanendra assumed direct powers in the Himalayan kingdom, reports trickled in Friday of a severe clampdown on all voices of dissent.

India’s Hindustan Times quoted sources in Kathmandu as saying that helicopters from the Royal Nepal Army (RNA) had fired on student protesters in the town of Pokhra soon after King Gyanendra dismissed the government of Sher Bahadur Deuba on Tuesday.

The newspaper said the reports were confirmed by a spokesperson for Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). “We have information that there was such an incident from very reliable sources,” Kedar Prasad Poudyal, acting secretary of the NHRC, was quoted as saying.

At least 15 students were hurt in the incident at Prithvi Narayan College, which RNA troops also raided, with the injured shifted to army barracks, the report said. There were reports of continued arrests of politicians in Nepal in the Indian media, most of which had correspondents filing stories from Nepal over satellite telephones.

Some of the politicians had approached the local office of the United Nations for protection and officials were now in the process of prioritizing which ones to help, the Hindustan Times reported.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Maybe this guy should call himself "caesar" while hes at it. Its so stereotypical of tyrant activity it reminds me of several episodes of Babylon 5 in which the exact same thing happened only it was all of earth instead of one country.

When will our world get past the petty dictator motif. The dismiss government, crush dissent, kill the oppositon, and reign with military force motif. When is that going to end. Will we hear about these every year till the end of time? Or will we reach a point where its completely out of our system? Or perhaps as predicted on Babylon 5 we'll just learn to do it on a larger scale.

The Logic Of Vulcan

2005-01-25T16:53:00.000-06:00

This is my most recent post on Catallarchy: Catallarchy: The Logic Of Vulcan

I'm cross posting it because I am particularly fond of it. Click on the link if you want to see the pretty pictures that go along with it.

The Logic of Vulcan

As an avid fan and regular viewer of Star Trek (in its many iterations) I often find myself contemplating the reasoning underlying the different premises, cultures, and characters we are presented with in the Star Trek universe. I once gave a speech, for example, on why the Federation was socialist. My reasoning being the strange lack of currency and major business interests (that weren’t tied to the federation in some way) on Earth.

Recently I have been watching new episodes of Enterprise, the Star Trek prequel series that is now in its 4th season. This year the writers have apparently decided to better fill out the history, religion, and character of Vulcan society. The theme that arises again and again is that “logic” is not only at the core of Vulcan spirituality but defines on the deepest level what it means to be Vulcan (whether these are two distinct ideas or one in the same is a matter of opinion).

Right now on Enterprise, Vulcan society is rediscovering the teachings of their most revered spiritual leader, Surak. Yet in spite of having lost the knowledge of these teachings for many centuries They obviously did not lose their beliefs regarding the way Vulcan’s should and should not behave. Basically they believe that to be Vulcan is to be a stoic being that holds logic above all else, and that any display or experience of emotion is a weakness that will ultimately hinder them in the execution of their duties and obligations.

In the Star Trek universe, and indeed on Vulcan, logic and emotion are opposites. One is a strength, and the other a diametrically opposed weakness. The problem with this view however is revealed when examining the broader academic categories under which these two terms fall. Logic is philosophically an aspect of epistemology (the study of knowledge i.e. how we know what we know). Emotion falls within psychology (a science studying the cognitive and physiological causes of behavior).*

The point is that making the two opposites combines philosophy and psychology in a manner that they do not combine. Logic is a system designed to analyze identity. It gives us a means of checking to see if our premises are consistent with or contradictory to each other (it will not necessarily tell us if they are true), and for identifying conclusions that result from a set of premises etc. Emotion to be the opposite, and in the Vulcan view a necessary underminer of logic, it would have to be a process unto itself that always inhibited the recognition of contradictions, inconsistencies, and consistencies within one’s own reasoning. Yet even strong emotions do not necessarily inhibit the ability to use logic for those that know how to use it.

Personally I have known many individuals who could come up with extremely tight logical reasoning while experiencing an extreme emotional state. In these cases it was their premises and not their reasoning that ended up being off. Consider for example the logical implications of the premise that the entire world is “out to get you.”

The flaw in the Vulcan worldview is not however the depiction of emotion as a set of states that can inhibit one’s logic (as this is not inaccurate), but rather the presentation of logic (an epistemological system) as their psychological core. Logic simply cannot be one’s psyche. Strangely enough (or perhaps its not strange at all) there is a strong correlation between the logic/emotion dichotomy of Vulcan, and the objective/subjective dichotomy of objectivism.

While objectivism does not discount the value of emotions as a source of information, and as a meaningful part of human experience, it does define subjective to mean, in application, acting on emotion-inspired whims. Thus most emotion-inspired action would lack the necessary consideration of context to be objective. The necessary implication of this is that emotion can hinder objective reasoning.

In fact I think the Vulcan’s may be objectivists (though not necessarily in the Randian sense of the term) at heart. What they are ultimately trying to accomplish with their suppression of emotion, and strong adherence to logic is objectivity. They believe emotion hinders sound reasoning and judgment (in this context “sound” means to be both true and logically valid). In the Star Trek universe this typically works for them, and technically there is little reason that it shouldn’t.

Vulcans get into trouble, however, when they choose to disregard the emotions of more emotional (and perhaps less logical) beings than themselves. In a classic episode of Star Trek, the original series for example, Spock (the Vulcan science officer of the star ship Enterprise) finds himself leading his first away mission on an alien planet. On that planet they enconter giant, wooly, spear throwing aliens who manage to kill several of the crew members.

When the rest of the team returns to the shuttle craft the human crew decides that they wants to retrieve and bury the bodies of their fallen comrades. Spock however considers this to be an illogical and dangerous waste of time and resources. The result is a near mutiny. Effectively the episode is a morality play. It depicts Spock’s attempts to lead his crew without respect for the inherent emotional nature of humans as being naive and dangerous, and indeed it was. (In Spock’s defense, the humans in Star Trek the original series were far more hot-headed, reationary, and downright “emotional” than they are in later series.) But the problem in this episode was cultural not philosophical. It was the cultural mores and beliefs of the humans that inspired their emotional response and that ultimately came into conflict with Spock’s cultural mores and beliefs (which happened to specifically inhibit an emotional response in him).

This is typically how Vulcan/human conflicts, whether small or large, play out. They typically end up being cultural issues and not philosophical differences. In fact it is the relative valuation of risk of both humans and Vulcans that typically ends up creating the conflict. When risk seems disproportionate to the value or likelihood of a gain Vulcans consider a given action illogical. However Vulcans typically end up taking the biggest risks of all when they are convinced that the action it entails is supported by sound logical reasoning. Thus in spite of the many attempts within the Star Trek universe to depict it as such, humans are not superior to Vulcans due to their emotional nature, nor are Vulcans philosophically inferior to humans due to their categorical suppression of emotion. Likewise emotion is not a weakness, and a lack of it is not a strength - at least not in the Star Trek universe. Your own mileage may vary.

*"Emotion” also potentially falls within cognitive science -I say “potentially” because I do not believe there is a consensus on the matter.

Me linking to me... Cause I'm that good!!!

2005-01-22T18:45:00.000-06:00

So I wasn't trying to turn SotR into a "bitch-fest" it just kind of randomly happened what with all the craziness in my life, and this big outlet that just said "rant Rainbough you know you want to... its even part of your header."

Add to that the fact that most of my "good posts" have ended up at catallarchy and thus SotR seems to have become my outlet for bitching about the world... But then what are most blogs. Anyhow without BilLee posting anymore its hard to find the positive and interesting things to put up especially when I'm trying to regularly post on two blogs.

Thus I have actually been posting quite a bit on Catallarchy lately and only sharing a weekly "here's what's wrong with the universe" post here... and I know that kind of sucks. So for now I'm going to link to all the great stuff I've been putting up at catallarchy.

Since American Idol has started again I have started putting up reviews/recaps of the episodes. Thus far I have put up 3 posts:

American Idol Revamped - a preseason post about the changes in this year's program and how those changes may impact the show for the better.

American Idol Season 4 - my recap of the first episode of the season, and my review of the contestants we were presented with.

American Idol St. Louis - A short review of the St. Louis episode which was unfortunatey very disappointing.

There will be more of these to come in the future. I'll be putting them up every week at catallarchy. I prefer to have them up the evening or the morning after they have aired.

This is because last year when I missed an episode (and I missed quite a few while I was moving) I had a hell of a time finding a recap of the show for the next two to three days following the broadcast. The website provides a recap but can take anywhere from 2 days to a week getting it up, and to be perfectly honest I think their recaps suck!

So usually to find out what happened on a show I would find myself on an obscure message board where people were bitching that x candidate got cut, y candidate sucks, and z candidate is obviously a prostitute.

So this year I'm doing it every week at Catallarchy. You can find me rambling on about how good certain people were, how good or bad the show was presented, how terrible or on the mark the judges critiques were, and why I think x guest judge is hot!

Oh yeah and the best part of all is that you can find me harrassing other fans that stumble across my posts via google and manage to say something really stupid.

And the world keeps turning...

2005-01-16T03:22:00.000-06:00

So I go into work today with every intention of turning in my two weeks notice, but discover that it is unneccesary because my boss had decided to lay off all of the night-shift operators. Of course it would be crying over spilt milk to mourn the loss of that particular job since I was leaving anyway and could not have reasonably expected to stay there for any long term anyhow given the many hazards of the environment. I'm still a little annoyed that I was working day in and day out with nickel, and nickel dust and was never informed that it was a carcinogen known to cause lung cancer if inhaled. I discovered this only about a month ago after working with the stuff for two months and happening across a package that contained a carcinogen warning.

To get to the point though, I still feel strangely as if I had "lost" my job. Mainly its because I was counting on the additional funds that would come from 3 weeks of working two jobs. It would have been an additional 5-6 hundred dollars which would have been nice after they had given me so few hours over the past month. So instead of moving into my new job and getting ready for school in a month with an at least comfortable financial position (if not rock solid) I'm starting my part time job and wondering how long I'm going to be able to afford to work there. I'm also wondering if I'll be able to afford massage school. Its a wonder how much of a difference $500 dollars can make for someone with as limited funds as myself.

So I spent most of my last shift contemplating whether or not I would have to give up my cats, put off going to school, getting an apartment, forget about getting a car anytime soon, and cut back the time and money spent at my church. It was all rather depressing.

Oh yeah and my wedding is likely going to have to wait for another year, and having kids will have to wait even longer. I guess there's no rush, but it was nice to be really planning those things.

Brain Freeze

2005-01-09T17:30:00.000-06:00

There's a reason I haven't been blogging much lately. Its what I like to call "brain freeze." Thats basically just writers block for overly opinionated persons such as myself. Only its more of an "opinion-block." I think it comes from having too much going on in my life, or perhaps just my brain to formulate many thoughts on the world around me.

I actually read earlier today that Newt Gingrich was considering a bid for the white house in 2008 and all I could muster was "well isn't that nice." I actually have some particularly mixed feelings about Newt having spent the first 16 or so years of my life in his "district." Meanwhile my thoughts about the tsunami have been running every-which-way from "that sucks" to I wish I spoke hindi or some other useful language and could go over there and help out. Nothing precise, no specific opinion for the most part even about the most innane political stunts and craziness going on and here's why:

I applied to massage-school, I applied for a loan to go to the massage school, I got conditionally approved for said loan, I got accepted to said school, I now have to prove I have the income I said I did (which I do but its hard to prove cause I've only been working for 3 months) to actually get the money, I just got offered a job at home depot that is higher paying but offers less hours, BilLee wants me to take a sex-ed class at church that runs every sunday for 14 weeks, but home depot wants me to work sundays, I've been told by multiple people that they believe they could get me better jobs elsewhere that would give me sunday off, I'm leaving my current job because of the health issues I've been having, my current employer is having difficulty funding our paychecks, and I've been trying to figure out how feasible it is to plan a (very likely) large wedding and honeymoon for this fall. Meanwhile BilLee's income is still barely breaking even with the money he spends on gas and lunch, and he may have to find a new job in about a month because of the looming threat that they may close his office if they do not meet certain sales goals. Oh yeah and I still have 3 cats and am trying to find an apartment complex that will let us keep them without charging through the roof pet fees.

American Idol is about to start up again and I have the intention of posting day-after recaps after each episode... it remains to be seen if I can pull this feat off especially once I start school, and I have yet to discover how I am going to get to and fro said school that is only a few miles from downtown austin while I live way out in the suburbs. Then there's the issue of my checking account. Thanks to the holidays I my checkbook is looking rather bleak, and I didn't overspend either. Actually I got less than half the hours at work I usually do because they shut down for so many days during christmas and new years. On top of that the company I work for isn't getting many jobs currently and is regularly cancelling my shifts. And while its nice to not have to go into work, and then suffer another itchy, stingy rash all over my hands from the inadequate protection against the vapors of certain chemicals I work with, I really really need the income.

So I think we should open our borders to immigrants of all nations and extend a special welcome to tsunami victims and send gingrich to the south east orient for a couple years and then see what he thinks about presidential politics. Beyond that my brain has little room for crazies right now.

Christmas and more

2004-12-28T13:45:00.000-06:00

So I had a good christmas and now I'm trying to get back into the swing of things especially with blogging. The fact is this time of year everyear has always been a vacation for me so now I'm like "shouldn't I be doing nothing right now." Its not a vacation though I'm going back to work today, and I'm not really looking forward to that. I've begun to wonder if I'll ever have a job that I look forward to going in to. Nonetheless I feel like I should write something today.

Discrimination against introverts pisses me off. I've been reading a book about introversion - I'm an introvert - that basically makes the case that both introversion and extroversion are natural temperments. Both are based on an individuals brain chemistry, in other words you are effectively born with one temperment, the other, or somewhere in-between. So why is it okay for employers to throw tests at us that allow them to figure out which one we are? Is it ethical to not-hire someone because they are introverted or extroverted. Those personality tests really piss me off. I went for an interview at Rudy's the other day. Rudy's is a combination restaurant and gas station that sells barbecue. The interview was a "pre-interview" which basically meant that they would call me back for a real interview if they were interested. The interviewer also mentioned that when I came back I would take a 150 question test.

Hello!?! A 150 question test so I can sell people barbecue? Gee I wonder what's on that test probably a few questions to determine if you are an honest theif (have you ever stolen anything from a previous employer?) (What is the exact monetary value of all the goods you have ever taken from previous employers?). Then a few to see if you can perform basic arithmetic. A few about how punctual you are and whether or not you are actually paying attention to the test and then the bulk of them in my experience are almost always personality questions. Particularly on tests that are that long. Its the 10 to 40 question tests that leave personality stuff out. Whereas a long test means they are going to ask you if you like to be around people most of the time, all the time, some of the time, never? If you like to work by yourself some of the time, all the time, never? If you are messy, if you need supervision?

All of these seem like legitimate questions to ask if they had already hired you and were trying to figure out how to place you best within the company. However they are not. They are really designed to see if you are introvert or extrovert and in some cases some of your other personality characteristics. Many tests I have taken focused on whether you were a "p" or a "j" perceiving or judging. I don't know which of these they had a preference for but I suspect most places would prefer "p's" to "j's," because they are less likely to form judgements and are more concrete thinkers. All I know is that I have hardly ever encountered an extrovert who had trouble with one of those tests. If you are extrovert you will get the job, or at least will not be disqualified by the personality portion of the interview.

Walking into Rudy's one of the things that struck me was how extrovertive the people working there who I spoke to were, which tells me exactly what said test will be looking for. To be honest I do not even want to work at Rudy's but it bugs me that I'm even encountering this nonsense at a restaurant. Out of all the jobs I've ever had only one of them required me to take a test in advance, and none of the test had anything to do with my personality type. It was just to determine how good I was at following directions and whether or not I was computer literate.

I've decided though that if a place is going to discriminate based on mental temperment (introvert/extrovert) I am not going to work there regardless of whether the discrimination is in my favor or not. I have excelled in plenty of job environments where I had to things that were more challenging for introverts and easy for extroverts, and it pisses me off that anyone would rank that over the experience I have and the hurdles I have already overcome.

Its like they are saying I have a disability and cannot overcome it. If you are an introvert you will not be good in sales... if you are an introvert you will not be good in customer service... if you are an introvert you will not make a good cashier... if you are an introvert you will not be good in retail...

It seems like more and more places are looking at personality type to figure out who to hire and who to weed out of the candidate list. But our personalities are not the final say in how well we do our jobs all they do is spell out preferences and tendencies. If I tend to work well alone that does not mean I won't work well with others. If I don't like talking to people on the phone at home that doesn't mean I won't do well in a job where I have to talk over the phone frequently. If I tend to leave the dishes sitting in the sink a few days longer than I should at home that does not mean that I will be that way on the job.

I am beginning to wish places would just put up a sign that says "introverts need not apply," because time after time I enter a place where I am easily qualified and am confident that I can do the job only to discover variations of a 150 question test that I've already taken a dozen times. Tests designed to see if I can "really" do the job and "really" fit in based entirely on my personal tendencies and opinions regarding my own nature. They usually attach some rule to the questionaire like you cannot ask an employee or the administrator for assistance, you must complete it in x amount of time, you must answer every question agree or disagree, and should not "think" too much about the answer. So if they are deciding not to hire me because my answers were not "consistent" enough based on some invisible standard, or like wal-mart because they do not like my personal opinion on the drug war I cannot even know much less attempt to reason with the people making the decisions. That is precisely what they do not want someone disputing their weed-out methods and their reasoning (or lack thereof). Its all about getting the hiring managers to not have to make actual judgements except when they feel really really "safe" about doing so.

Meanwhile every employer I've ever had wanted to hold onto me, and told me that I did a great job (even the crook), but these places don't even want to know if I am any good. They are too afraid of being sued when they have to fire a bad employee.

Gmail Advice

2004-12-23T13:24:00.000-06:00

There is this particularly nasty person in my extended family. Of course I do not consider her "family" because my "family" is the people in my life that I love and care about. Whereas this particular person is someone who if they dropped off the face of the planet tomorrow I wouldn't even care to know that they were gone. Those of you that know me personally can guess who I'm talking about. Anyhow said person knows I do not want to have anything to do with her, and that I am an atheist. In spite of this she makes every effort to find out ways to contact me and harrass me. Usually its by simply not respecting my religious beliefs by ignoring the fact that I don't agree with her x-tian propaganda. Though of course if she can violate my explicit wish to keep her out of my life at the same time she'll do that too. So every year I usually get some email, card, or random piece of crap she bought at the dollar store that she pretends is a gesture of goodwill but in fact is her way of showing her disrespect and complete lack of regard of me as a person. Naturally I don't give a rats ass what she thinks of me as a person or if she has any respect for me. And yet every couple of years instead of my usually feeling of amusement at her impotent and worthless attempts she manages to stir in me an incredibly strong feeling of revulsion. Its kind of like when you get one of those forwarded emails from a christian-ghetto-er thats trying to guilt trip the whole internet into being better x-tians (nevermind those of us that aren't). Or when you read a really bad conspiracy theory and find yourself looking at, to put it lightly, some of the worst blind foolishness humanity has to offer, and you feel kind of dirty just having read it. So to get to the point I occassionally find myself surprised that this woman can still turn my stomach with simple words in an email or on a card. I suppose that its appropriate that a show of extreme vice should turn my stomach, however, it seems surreal to me that extreme viciousness can translate in email.

Anyhow I have actually blocked this person from all my accounts but one, but like the slithering reptile that she is she has managed to get a hold of the one address I hadn't blocked yet: my gmail account. To add insult to injury for several days I had trouble figuring out how to block her address in gmail. There doesn't seem to be a readily visible means of doing so. So what I did was I created a filter with her email address and directed the filter to bypass the inbox and deliver mail from that address directly to trash. Which is basically what a normal block does, except the block in yahoo will immediately delete the message rather than sending it to trash. I suppose it doesn't really matter because I don't ever look in the "trash" folder anyway and it deletes itself every couple of days, however it seems infinitely preferrable to me to have messages from her deleted before I even see them. I could one day accidentally click on "trash" before its had a chance to delete itself and end up seeing her name or the subject line and accidentally experience said revulsion again. Though that is unlikely to happen. So if you want to block someone with gmail the filters work well. Hopefully they will create a better block or at least a more accessible one before they open gmail to the public.

The Patriot Act revisited

2004-12-19T18:06:00.000-06:00

Today at church I got to participate in the high school RE (that's religious education for those of you that don't know) program. I was invited by a friend of mine who thought I would have a unique perspective to add to their discussion on the PATRIOT Act. Sure enough I got to be the one to interject a healthy level of suspicion into the conversation.

We had this hand out where the government was "dispelling" the myths about the patriot act. Specifically things the ACLU says are true that they say are in fact untrue. I had two important points to make:

1) power corrupts

Therefore any increase in government power and/or decrease in checks on government power SHOULD ALWAYS be viewed with suspicion no matter the intent.

2) Its easy to make people who are suspicious of government power look overly paranoid, even when they have every reason and evidence in the world to be paranoid. Given #1 and the fact that the Patriot Act decreases checks on government power specifically in regard to the 4th amendment if you don't look at least a little paranoid on paper then you aren't paying attention.

Finally and this was the point that I think resounded the most is that every law is up to interpretation. No matter how innocuous that law looks that outlaws murder or theft, or even smoking tree bark in the privacy of your own home the nature of the law is infinitely dependent upon how its terminology is interpretted. The Patriot Act defined a new crime called "terrorism." The degree to which this law or rather that section of the act infringes on the civil liberties of individuals is dependent upon how the term "terrorist" is interpretted, and how an "act of terror" is defined.

In my opinion murder is murder, and until we start calling serial killers who very specifically terrorize their victims before brutally killing them "terrorists," there really isn't any good reason to use the term on anybody else. Imagine if instead we called them "abject-fear-ists." We have coined a term out of an emotion after all. It starts sounding a little silly.

Though perhaps the term is appropriate since terrorist organizations attempt to achieve political and social ends through the use of coercion, ignorance, and fear.... come to think of it I can think of a few other organizations who utilize similiar methodology.

In fact, given that definition it is not a far cry to describe the PATRIOT Act as an "Act of Terror." Pun intended.

Light and Lively...

2004-12-12T08:22:00.000-06:00

I am in one of those rare moods when the problems of the world just don't seem very weighty, and the problems in my life just don't seem particularly hard to solve. I have this general sense of well being like somewhere deep down I know everything is going to work out. I've got a bunch of committee meetings to go to at my church (which is scarier me at church or me in a committee?!?) and I feel strangely productive... like the world is ready to take off and the starting point is my own brain.

Usually when I'm in this mood it's fleeting, and I am ultimately disappointed. Today I think its going to be different. Okay I really don't have much basis for that statement, but when ideas are rushing through your head you feel as if you can do anything. As if nothing is out of reach or too difficult. Here I am reading another email that someone has forwarded me about how the planet and country is going to hell in a handbasked because the left's favorite regulations are getting underminded and I'm not even feeling my typical cynicism at such a limited worldview. Instead its like... yeah thats not a problem... its all gonna be just fine.

And while I've been feeling rather disillusioned regarding the limited perspectives, and understanding of a handful of leaders at my church (live oak not wal-mart for those of you who follow my posts) I also see this wide open path before me saying "come, come, this is what you can do here. Look, this is what you can do here." Its a weird feeling. Its perhaps a difficult path, but its also one I know I can take.

Where are we going? I don't know but I believe I'm going to enjoy the drive.

Separate but Equal...

2004-12-06T18:03:00.000-06:00

Bradenton Herald | 12/06/2004 | Gays challenge military policy

The "don't ask don't tell" policy of the U.S. military is distinctly reminiscient of the "Separate but Equal" policies that upheld segregation. Eventually the Supreme Court decided that the very act of separating races by law was necessarily inequal treatment before the law. Likewise its time the courts recognized that forcing a specific group to hide their own nature, desires, sexuality, and relationships is legally forcing them into an "underclass." The military has made its homosexual servicemen into subcitizens. Its time we changed that.

The GIGO World...

2004-12-04T11:18:00.000-06:00

I hate it when I'm not working on writing. I feel like I'm floundering. My idea all along was to live in as cheap a place as possible, that took as little time to maintain as possible, work outside of my home as little as I could financially get away with, and ultimately spend as much time and effort as I could on improving my writing skills. The ultimate goal being to create works that I am proud of and that will sell.

So where am I now? I'm living in suburbia in a house that I couldn't even dream of having the skills and time to keep up (at least not at this point), I can't afford even the reduced rent on it so someone else is picking up the difference, I'm working overtime in an environment I consider to be somewhat hazardous (though I'm honestly not sure how "hazardous" it is), I am allergic to one of the chemicals I work with and in spite of my best efforts the skin on my hands breaks out every time I work (and having latex gloves rub up against itching and stinging blisters makes my 12 hour shift that much more fun), and the few blog entries I manage to get up is the only real writing I am managing to pull off.

For some reason I can't seem to get anything done on my days off, and then there is this nagging voice that says "your lazy, there is something wrong with you, if you wanted to write you'd write..." and maybe its right... I don't know. So I find myself contemplating jobs I could take, courses I could take, and degrees I could get that would land me jobs that would make it easier to fit in (financially and otherwise), but in the end I feel like all these things are just taking me further away from where I want to be.

Meanwhile most everyone in my life's position on my writing seems to be "don't quit your day job" (in my case "night job"), except everyone wants me to quit my night job cause they are afraid they are going to get a call from a hospital one day and find out I accidentally inhaled some acid at work or something.

Meanwhile even BilLee is touting the "this will look good on a resume" line. Like we should dedicate months and years of our life to looking exactly the right way on paper to appeal to the prejudices and biases of hiring managers. I wouldn't write essays in college to appeal to the biases of my professors even though I often had problems because of it. I failed a few tests because of it, so why would I now? In hopes of edging out an equally or better qualified candidate for the same position by being a little more clever in the presentation of my resume, or by having some little job or club I was in here or there that was completely meaningless to my personal development that just makes me look a little more savvy than the next girl/guy... FUCK THAT!!!

And meanwhile I have people telling me that I should lie on applications so that on the little personality portion I look like an extrovert instead of an introvert, because almost all retail jobs have apparently decided that introverts do not work well in their particular "sales" environment. Meanwhile I actually know of introverts who are great salesmen. The only difference is that the skill doesn't come quite so easily to them as it does to some extroverts, but when they have the skill down introverts are just as good (and sometimes better) at sales as the so-called "out going" extrovert. So all this is just more bullshit and prejudice, and I shouldn't have to lie when I know perfectly well that I can do a job and be good at a job if given the chance -especially since I am already over that particular learning curve thanks to Papa John's and Dial America.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with having to "sell yourself" in terms of convincing an employer that they should hire you (presuming said employer is rational and you are not having to appeal to irrational biases), but that really should be for the interview or the cover letter. And unless the job you are applying for is particularly sensitive to people with mental disorders (like a security job or something) there is no good reason to be taking any sort of psychological test.

If I want a sales job the hiring manager should be looking to see if I can sell him or her on me, and if I can't he has good reason not to hire me. There should never be a "I'm sorry but your personality profile doesn't quite fit what we are looking for..."

I have actually sat before hiring managers and thought "you know what, I could do your job a hell of a lot better than you." I've sat before guys who were awkward and uncomfortable trying to figure out if they should recommend me to their boss who ultimately does the hiring, and who didn't even seem to have a clue why their own job existed.

So we go from the GIGO university systems to the GIGO corporate world, and you don't have to go far to find the garbage either. And I'm supposed to try and fit into that... is someone laughing somewhere... isn't this just a big joke... and I'm supposed to try and live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood and have pretty pictures to put on my walls, and pretty curtains to put over my windows, and random nick nacks to put in random places, and completely useless pieces of furniture to store dishes I never use, and display random I items that just collect dust.

Its not that I disdain those things, or people that have them, its just that I really don't want them, and I feel like I'm supposed to. Now I look over what I've just written and I think aren't you being just a little hypocritical here or there, don't you just want to have your cake and eat it too? Aren't you just being unrealistic? What's the point?

You know what I want? Right now I want a little apartment thats easy to keep up. I want to get rid of all the junk I don't need that just clutters up my space. I want to put my own art work (and that of my friends and family) on my wall, have a nice quiet corner to work, and a comfortable living room to entertain guests in (and to just chill out in), I want to have a small managable wardrobe, a small managable kitchen, and I don't want to work in an environment that causes me to have the equivalent of a perpetual case of poison ivy. I want to spend as much of my time as I can writing even if I am barely making enough money to survive, and I never want to ever have to give a damn for even a moment what happens to be on my resume, or how it will look that I was only at x job for two months, and I kind of like the idea of being a street poet -don't know if I'll be able to pull that one off or not. I'd like to learn spanish, take some martial arts classes, get into better shape, possibly take some voice and/or acting lessons, and maybe just maybe if I'm good enough and have the time get involved with a small community theater (or maybe found one someday). Then I want to expand my family, have kids, homeschool them or found a school, and hopefully by that point I'll have a life I'm proud to bring them into, and an environment that is manageable. Is that too much to ask?

Making friends with mean people

2004-11-26T02:03:00.000-06:00

Today I had to deal with someone I really really don't like. Someone who is overbearing, manipulative, reactionary, and in my opinion very shallow. I have managed in my life to get along for the most part with most people. The people who most people find annoying or irritating were usually the people I ended up making friends with. The people who were just "a little too much" or someone who many people say they could only take in "small doses" were usually the people I found the most interesting and wanted most to be around. I even thought Jar-Jar Binks was cute, and not annoying in the slightest (while Anakin with his "what does this button do" and "lets try spinning -its a cool trick" means of saving the day was utter B.S. that was incredibly irritating). So I am always caught by surprise when I encounter someone that really bothers me, who I really cannot stand, and who I actively avoid being around. Of course I know they exist, my grandmother is one of them, but the response I have to her is more based on personal history and less based on personality issues (though I certainly find her personal philosophy, values etc. detestable to say the least).

Then there was this other person I hung out with today (whose name I can't share) who is just really really awesome. Nothing seems to bother her. Someone being mean or disrespectful to her just completely rolls off of her. Meanwhile she's creative, optimistic, passionate, and just a really happy, cool person. I see people say mean things to her, and its like she doesn't even know that they are mean. And I am certainly not going to tell her they are. I don't know if it is an "ignorance is bliss" sort of thing or if she knows and just really doesn't care. Which makes me wonder why I care. Its not like that particular person mentioned above has any bearing or real impact on my life. Its not like I have to deal with them everyday, nor that I would ever take their comments with any seriousness. So why do I care if they are being disrespectful, underhanded, manipulative, or even mean?

So I hung out with someone today who seems to have the rare talent of being able to make friends with mean people, not care one bit that they are mean, and not only tolerate them but respect them in spite of it. So why is that so amazing to me? I guess I have this sense of equality that says everyone should treat others with mutual respect, and when some people don't its like they are trying to lower you -make you unequal by demeaning you. Of course they can't make you "unequal" with just their words -they can only lesson you to the degree that you allow them to. Ultimately they lower themselves with their behavior, and respecting them in spite of it might just be a way of lifting them back up again -of saying "welcome back to humanity, I hope you enjoy your stay."

Personality conflicts, and value conflicts I think should be the first things to fall away (be put aside) when serious work needs to be done, and yet they often seem to be the hardest issues to resolve. Obviously we can't leave either our values or are personalities at the door, but it would be nice if we could rank them substantialy lower on our priority list when we have common goals and needs that need to be addressed. I think learning to make friends with "mean people" could be a step in the right direction.

If you can't beat-em...

2004-11-25T10:31:00.000-06:00

AlterNet: Election 2004: The Progressive Morality

So I guess the Dem's approach to revitalizing their party is now going to be a revamped attempt at "our morality is better than your morality."

::sigh:: So what did I expect anyway? For all those self-described "progressives" to do what they've seemingly advocated for so long and leave morality out of politics. Yeah right suddenly a vision of the Women's Temperance Union comes to mind. Progressives brought us prohibition among other things. They have certainly never been above legislating morality.

This is like two giants arguing over who gets to eat the puny human who accidentally wondered into their midst.

Left: "We'll force our morality on America... Ours is better."

Right: "Yeah right we won the election we get to force our morality on America."

Giant to the Right of the Puny Human: "No I get to eat the human he's on my side."
Giant on the Left of the Puny Human: "But he's in a blue state damnit I get to eat him."

I kind of wish we could lock up all the Demopublicans up in a room somewhere and just let them go at it. Hey I know y'all guys can have California... go ahead fight out your little morality war, us puny humans will be over here living better without you.

As bad as it gets... Hopefully.

2004-11-14T05:39:00.000-06:00

Sermon: Living Under Fascism : Davidson Loehr

Okay I admit I've only encountered a small handful of the conspiracy theories out there, but this has to be one of the worst. Its one of the worst because it combines actual cultural trends, a strong rationalization, and as near to the ideology of most Democrats as I have seen, while convincing itself that it is the liberal side of a cultural war where the conservatives have won. Reading this as a libertarian actually made me feel dirty. It was just kind of gross. What's worse is that it came out of a UU church. This is the kind of thing I would have expected out of some random pentacostal church with too much money and time on its hands. Not a church that is mindful of social responsibility, reason, and cultural and political differences.

The author used a classic trick that fundamentalists like to use, and that is to take their own major political agendas and wrap them up with the idea that a failure of these agendas spells gloom and doom. In conservative christian churches that gloom and doom is anything from cultural decay to the apocalypse itself. Apparently in liberal and democratic leaning churches its the rise of fascism and with it the oppresion of discension, academia, individual rights, and intellectuals in general... oh yeah and the oppression of workers -how communistic is that?

I mean just imagine if you were a libertarian and favored privatizing social security, medicare, and public education. You believed free trade was a good thing and that taxation was legalized theft. This would come off as moralistic, self-delusional tripe. Typically in more fundamentalist (i.e. less rational) congregations this kind of thing would be presented before an election to convince the members of the great importance of x candidate winning the election, and thus the importance of turning out to vote. Apparently Austin Democrats need to hear this thing after an election. Maybe its their way of convincing themselves that their loss was somehow important, and not simply the "push-over" of a very meaningless, and irrelevant "push-over" campaign.

I got instalanched!!! I got instalanched!!! WoooHOOOO!!!!

2004-11-13T23:23:00.000-06:00

Instapundit.com -

So I wrote this great article over at catallarchy called "A Rejection of Liberalism or Just the Left?" and it got linked over at instapundit. :::music playing::: :::"you should be dancin.... yeah! You should be dancin... yeah!":::

Just a warning to all those Democrats and those sympathetic to the Democratic party, I was being as characteristically undiplomatic in my views about John Kerry and the Democratic party as I always am.

Check out some of my archives if you don't believe me. My favorite was when I accused John Kerry of "fence-straddling wormism." That one always makes people think I'm Republican. Sorry guys this isn't about party loyalty (hard-core classical liberal over here thank you very much). I actually think John Kerry was a very very lousy candidate and that y'all have been behaving very badly this election season. Now you (the Dem's) probably weren't any worse than Republicans historically are, but honestly why set the bar that low?

So check out my article. Instapundit gets over 200,000 hits a day, and my article will hopefully direct a few thousand of them over to Catallarchy. WooHOOO!!!!

Ashcroft Resigns

2004-11-09T20:25:00.000-06:00

Ashcroft and Evans resign.

Ashcroft's critics cheered his departure. "We wish John Ashcroft good health and a good retirement. And we hope the president will choose a less polarizing attorney general as his successor," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "Mr. Ashcroft's legacy has been an open hostility to protecting civil liberties and an outright disdain for those who dare to question his policies."

Does anybody actually doubt the ability of a Republican administration to find somebody worse for attorney general?
I don't.

Actually I don't think John Ashcroft was any worse than Janet Reno. He just had a little more power in light of 9-11. I wonder what Reno would have done in similar circumstances. I mean think Waco, and Elian Gonzales. She wasn't exactly above violating civil liberties (among other things) to get what she wanted.

I think its time we got an attorney general who's not a power-hungry, statist, bureaucrat. I'm not holding my breath.

Finally election day.

2004-11-02T14:28:00.000-06:00

So its finally election day and somehow I really don't care anymore who wins. For the longest time I had this strong feeling that John Kerry winning would be a very bad thing. Not a "he'll ruin our country thing" so much as a "the democrats are gonna become a poorer party for it thing."

Then I was thinking about something the other day. I go to a unitarian universalist church in part because they tend to be very liberal (as I am) and are open to all different sorts of religions/beliefs -including my own (atheism). I was discussing the other day how everyone at my church always assumed that everyone else's political affiliation at the church is democrat, because its a "liberal church." What occurred to me was this would have been very much like church was when I was growing up.

My grandparents were baptist and so we went to many baptists churches. Given that those churches were typically in georgia and South Carolina I'd be willing to be that most people assumed that everyone else at the church were affiliated or at least sympathetic with the Democratic party.

I wonder how many churches there are out there that are still like that. Obviously Baptist as a denomination has changed substantially since then, and so has the Republican party. Many religious conservatives now favor the Republicans. That being said conservative southern democrats do still exist, Zell Miller is one of them. There are those old-guard Democrats that say "this was our party first and we are not going to be run out of it."

My point is why should I consider the Democrats the "party of the liberal" anymore than "the party of the conservative." Most leftists I do not consider to be liberal anyway. The anti-tech people, and identity politics people are certainly not "liberal" by any meaningful definition of the term. Mostly I have just wanted to see all those friends and acquaintances at church who strongly believe in the Democratic party and who are working hard to make a difference be forced to recognize that they've lost their party, that the party they are working so hard for isn't really liberal, and doesn't really represent what they want. I want them to see that they shouldn't succeed on a negative message but have to promote a positive message (something other than anybody but Bush) to win office and get the support of all those undecideds out there.

But alas I have to ask myself "what difference does it make?" Okay Kerry certainly is not the better choice for all of those soldiers and people in Iraq, and that is certainly a good reason to not want him to win. But I kind of think that my "liberal" friends should have woken up to see the party caving in a long time ago. There is no gurantee they will now, even after throwing all their support behind a bogus message of "we hate Bush, give us anybody else," and potentially seeing their believed solidarity fail miserably. Who's to say that will really sway them?

So beyond my belief that Kerry could worsen the situation in Iraq and thus expose more soldiers to increased danger I really do not care who wins. I certainly do not want to look at either candidate for the next four years, and I already cast my vote for Badnarik. The fact that all those self-proclaimed liberals joined the Democratic party is a bit of a mystery to me. Maybe its like all those Republicans trying to convince libertarians to join ranks with them in spite of the fact that we have contradictory views. Only the democrats succeeded where the republicans are mostly failing.

Rainbough's Stupid Quote of the Day

2004-10-27T07:12:00.000-05:00

"The only people stupid enough to believe that Republicans are the party of small government are themselves Republican. That should tell us something."

-Yup I came up with the stupid quote all by myself.

My thoughts on Texas voting...

2004-10-27T06:08:00.000-05:00

So on the way home from work today (that was at about 9 am for those of you who haven't heard), I stopped in at the Williamson county annex (which happens to be right down the street from where l live) and voted. Texas has what they call "early voting," something I never experienced in Georgia. Basically instead of having to wait until election day and stand in long lines at the polls, you can show up at a less convenient place to where you live (though obvioiusly more convenient for myself) stand in a shorter line, and cast your ballot a couple weeks ahead of schedule.

So thats what I did, and honestly WTF is up with Texas ballots? Okay they aren't confusing or anything like the whole "butterfly ballot" nonsense. They are fairly straight forward and easy to understand. So here's my problem:

1. Straight party ticket voting.

Fill in the oval next to the party of your choice if you would like to vote for all the nominees of a particular party. So in Texas I don't even have to read the names of those who are voting in particular races. I don't even have to find out what offices I'm voting for, all I have to do is get my ballot and fill in the oval next to the party of my choice and be done with it. Woohoo for partisan politics...

2. Marking political affiliation but not incumbency.

In Georgia if you don't like what's going on in your district you just go in and vote against the incumbent. Of course many people go in and vote for the incumbent figuring that they did a pretty good job, seeing as they haven't heard anything negative on the news about them. So I guess the whole marking the incumbent thing is a mixed blessing, nevertheless it'd be nice to know on the ballot who is the challenger and who is the incumbent. I guess I could be not lazy and figure out who is currently representing my little numerical corner of texas for district judge, state representative, constable etc., but seeing as I have the strong conviction that political offices are not meant to be careers, but temporary positions at best, it makes more sense just to vote against incumbents wherever I happen to find them. Guess I'll have to keep track of who the incumbent assistant deputy dog catcher for district 8 of williamson county is from now on.

3. Write-in candidates

So there is this message in the little booth/box that I voted in:

"The approved write-in candidates are... ...Don't bother filling in anyone's name that is not on the approved list. Absolutely nothing will happen. They will not be counted..."

WTF!!!!! The state has to approve who I write-in on the ballot. Okay I know georgia has this thing where a write-in candidate has to petition to get write-in status, but really that just means they will get added to a list that you will see in the voting booth, and you can write them in. If someone is not on the approved list in Georgia you can still write them in, but you would have to know their name and that they are running in advance instead of having that handy dandy information right there for you. In spite of the fact that Texas has paper ballots and that it would be very easy to write-in a candidate of your choice in the space provided, apparently the state of texas thinks it is more appropriate to ignore anyone that they didn't officially approve of as a "write-in."

Someone or something is going to have to go in and read all of those individual write-ins anyway doesn't it make more sense to just keep track of this stuff. I mean hello democracy? ...and we got 5 votes for micky mouse for president, 20 votes for nobody, 80 votes for Al Gore...

Obviously it won't be reported on T.V. during the prime time election coverage but this kind of crap is nice to know. "Oh Mickey mouse got more votes that Pat Buchanan... again. Fascinating." Sure its not that important as far as the reporting goes but it would be a nice symbol of the fact that we take democracy seriously, and that we live in a country where anyone really can run for office... imagine that. Democracy is supposed to be time consuming and inefficient, thats part of what makes it Democratic. If you're aiming for political efficiency (cause damnit having to record all these different votes is sooooo inconvenient) try fascism. I heard the fascists could even make the trains run on time... woohoo.

4. Write-ins part 2.

And I can only write-in a candidate in certain races WTF!!!! The only race on my ballot that even had the option of writing in a candidate was president (like a write-in is ever going to win president). See a write-in might actually be useful in the uncontested election for constable, or district this or that... you know assitant dog-catcher etc. Instead in all those uncontested races that I was supposed to cast a vote in (and honestly WTF is the point of that?!?) I couldn't even write-in "none of the above."

I mean I could have written it on the ballot, but there was no special space provided, and no oval next to said space to fill in that the device they are scanning these with might actually pick up on. Of course seeing as NOTA is not an officially approved candidate I guess that doesn't really matter cause they wouldn't count it anyway.

5. Paper ballots...

I know there is all this paranoia over electronic voting, but we just got electronic voting two years ago in Georgia, and its a hell of a lot better than this fill in the oval with the approved marker crap. Plus ironically its much more flexible. Even if I vote for lwkjeklrjelke and his pet dog Zeus for president the computers in the electronic voting machines can easily keep track of that. No one has to parse my hand writing or read every individual write-in.

The computer will immediately spit out when the votes are tallied:

"Write-ins: 50 votes al gore, 30 votes NOTA, 20 votes Mickey Mouse, 1 vote lwkjeklrjelke and his pet dog Zeus."

And at least in the last election we were able to write in NOTA even in races that had no officially approved write-in candidates... imagine that. I can understand the concern over there being "no paper trail" for electronic voting, but there is also such thing as too much of a paper trail. 50,000 ballots with hanging chads come to mind.

6. And the rest of the ballot is where...

Okay maybe I shouldn't complain but where are all the referendums and crap on the ballot? I mean there is a huge state government not 20 miles from where I live. I live in a city with a government, a county with a separate government, and a state with obviously another government. Where are all the referendums and crap on funding x program, and building x school, and how about cutting taxes for this small group of farmers in x county? So maybe its a good thing to not have all that stuff on there. As a libertarian it could mean that there is less stuff we have to try and fight against. It could also mean the state, county, and local governments can do a lot more crap without having to ask for approval from the people (please tell me I'm not in a less democratic state than Georgia, I mean its Georgia its not any prop-312 recall election California, I'm not setting the bar that high). What's more likely to be the case is that all of those separate governments hold some of their elections separately. Great so how many times a year am I gonna have to do this?

The inefficient part is supposed to be because its democracy and you have to strive to make every vote count and every voice that wants to be heard heard. Its not supposed to be inefficient because the county decides to hold a separate election everytime they feel like taking more money from you.

In Georgia the local governments strive to get anything they can onto presidential ballots, mayors' races, sales tax increases, dog catchers. Maybe this is an indicator of a good thing, like that the local governments don't play well together. On the other hand there is that part of me that suspects that something more sinister is going on. This is the place where G.W. hails from after all. It can't be all good.

Man of Steel: Christopher Reeve 1952-2004

2004-10-16T03:28:00.000-05:00

Man of Steel: Christopher Reeve 1952-2004 | PopMatters Film Feature

So I'm not paying attention for a week or two and Superman dies. Honestly I'm not much of one for the whole inspirational story blah blah blah... crap. I guess all that stuff gets kind of soppy after a while. Like we decide someone is special because they're disabled, and then anything they do is like that much greater. Obviously stuff is harder for them, and a quadriplegic lifting a finger would be a huge accomplishment as compared to me lifting a finger which I'm doing easily while I type this.

But I spent most of my life trying to keep people from seeing me different after they learn about my childhood. People always thought that I must be special because I had a rough childhood: "you must be so strong" "I can't believe how great you are after all you've been through." etc.

Suffering doesn't make a person special or great and neither does survival. Anybody who valued their life would fight terrible odds to survive, and merely the belief that there may be brighter days ahead can take people through extreme amounts of suffering. This isn't greatness (nor is it a bad thing) it is just part of being human.

Christopher Reeve was different. He wasn't fighting to survive. He was fighting to better his life, and pushing the bounds of known science and medicine in the process.

Everyone says he was "heroic" and "inspirational." In a way I kind of feel like they are missing the point. Superman was a role, but Christopher Reeve's life wasn't. I can say something about him that is far more powerful than any role he may have filled for others as a "hero" or "inspiration."

If Christpher Reeve had lived long enough he would have walked again. In my book that makes him a pioneering transhumanist and he'll be missed.

Job update

2004-10-14T11:59:00.000-05:00

Okay its really weird jumping into a full time job after having not worked a regular job in about a year and a half, but that is what I've done. I've been working solid 8 and 9 hour days every day since last tuesday and I won't be getting a day off until Saturday.

My boss wanted to make sure I got plenty of training. Which of course is a good idea but I'm already starting to get that "oh do I have to go into work today" feeling that comes from working 10 days straight without a day off. I'm anxious to get into my regular schedule which is going to be night shift and give me 3 and 4 days a week off.

I've been driving everyone nuts asking for rides to work, and home (as I still have no vehicle), and I've already had a few days where I was stuck at work a couple extra hours because I couldn't get a hold of someone to pick me up. So I can't wait until I can drive myself. Thus far the big thing keeping me from buying a car (other than the obvious fact that I have no money) is that car insurance is so expensive.

As for the job itself its a nice job I think. I basically get to work as slowly and methodically as I like and do not have to work with any customers. I'm working in a "clean room" (clean because its supposed to be clean but really isn't).

We make stampers for cd's and dvd's. They are basically molds for cd's and dvd's that other people at the company stamp out thousands of copies from. Its actually kind of neat. The only downside is that the chemicals I've been working with have caused the skin on my arms to break out. Which led me to telling some of my friends at live oak that I was "allergic to work."

So I should be back to posting regularly once I get on my regular work schedule, that means after tomorrow. Woohooo!!!! Of course there is still that issue of needing to move in the next couple weeks but I guess I'll cross that bridge later...

And one other thing... is it just me or have the last two debates been rather sleep-inducing? Oh yeah and isn't it funny how both candidates have the exact same position on gay marriage?

WooHOO!!!

2004-10-06T02:07:00.000-05:00

Okay instead of ranting and raving about more corporate fuzzy personality tests I finally have something to celebrate. BilLee and I both got jobs!!! WooHooo!!! Last week everything seemed so bleak, now its like -Why was I worried?

It turned out that two different people at church were able to help us get jobs. My friend Leah recommended me to her employer who hired me and I will be starting tomorrow -er rather later today. Another of our acquaintances at Live oak happened to have just gotten promoted to hiring manager at his company and offered to hire BilLee as a vacuum salesman. Strangely enough we both seem to have found jobs that are good fits for our individual personalities, yet neither company required any sort of personality test... mmmhmmmm...

But enough about that its time I get some sleep.

Case in Point...

2004-10-04T02:02:00.000-05:00

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > State -- SoCal peace activist launches anti-Nader hunger strike

Or we could write the headline like this: "Peace Activist desperate to disenfranchise other voters by further limiting candidate choice decides to conduct hunger strike."

It doesn't quite sound so gandhi-esque when you put it that way. This guy wants all those progressive voters out there with similar positions to his own who would otherwise vote for Nader to have no choice but to either vote for Kerry or stay home. It amazes me that more people don't find this guy downright offensive.

I mean if my choice were Nader for president (and its not but if it were) why would a self-described peace activist want to take that option away from me. Oh yeah so that I would vote for the guy that he wants to win. That's cute. I got an idea since solidarity is soooooooooooo important. I think Gore really divided the country in the last election. If the Democrats would just stop running candidates for president our electorate wouldn't be so divided. We should just have one candidate on the ballot. The Democrats afterall have no business running when all those voters out there would otherwise vote for Bush in an uncontested election.

From now on the office of President will be effectively decided in the Republican Primary that way we won't split the pesky American vote and thus take away votes from their rightful owners -the Republicans.

Ranting and Raving Yet Again

2004-10-03T23:36:00.000-05:00

Okay I have two things to bitch about today. I've been trying to put up less of the "here are my complaints" blog entries because I honestly don't like stressing the negative. Its depressing. That being said I do have a few things that have been bugging me the last several days and since my blog isn't a captive audience it still remains the best place to put this stuff.

The first thing is that Bravenet is no longer allowing remote linking of images. This bugs me for two reasons. Number one is that the reason I choose to have my articles hosted on their site as opposed to the many many other free hosts is because they allowed remote linking of images. Unlike yahoo-geocities and a few other places who do not limit bandwidth but choose instead to block remote linking, bravenet seemed ideal because it simply limited the amount of bandwidth you were allowed to use in any one day. That way if I found an image I wanted to put up on blogspot which does not host images or a message board like The Ponderer's Guild I needed merely upload the image and remote link it to the site. If I exceeded my 17 megs of bandwidth in any one day the images would be blocked for the remainder of the day.

That seemed like a great system to me, meanwhile I have to look at their ads on my pages, and in my guestbook so it seemed like a good tradeoff. For some reason they decided to end this policy, and suddenly images I have had up for literally months are showing an image but not the one I put up. Instead the images says "remote linking not allowed." Now I understand that businesses occasionally have to change their policies, but it sure would be nice if they had some kind of grandfather clause. You know allow the people who have images from months and months back posted all over the web to continue on the old system at least for those old images.

What this means is that there is now probably several dozen small images on various sites with my name attached that say "remote linking not allowed." Having not kept track of everywhere I linked an image this is a real pain in the ass. It seems I'm going to have to find a new host for my images and articles. My bravehost guestbook seems to have become the tool of people who simply want to promote their website and not something that anyone uses who actually read or was interested in my site. Not that I mind people linking their sites in there. I guess I just come from an older "age" of the internet when you at least said a few things about what you liked about the site before your shameless self promotion. Like "that was a great site I really loved your poetry. My site is at www.crappyteenanxtpoetry.comnet. Now the most spammers put up is "nice site." Come visit mycrappypictures.net or somescandalIminvolvedin.net etc. So I guess its high time I got rid of that too. I've only had one "real" entry in all the months I've had it up.

You know this was a little long I think I'm going to save my latest rant on fuzzy personality tests for another post. Part 2 I guess.

All around the kerry-bush, the kerry bush...

2004-10-03T02:12:00.000-05:00

I have one thing to say to all those anti-war democrats out there. The ones who felt disgusted and dismayed over Bush's decision to escalate the war in Iraq through what they considered to be preemptive warfare. The ones that claimed that war was never the answer and that preemptive warfare was not only a terrible precedent to set, but could never be justified, the ones that believe that because of bush's so-called "preemptive war" anybody is better than Bush, and our highest priority should be getting Bush out of the white house:

You're going to vote for a candidate in favor of preemptive warfare, you're going to vote for a candidate in favor of premptive warfare... you're going to vote for someone that just told the whole world on national television that when America feels threatened its okay to throw the first blow. You say "anybody but Bush" but Kerry is selling himself as Bush with greater media savvy, and better manners who is explicitly no different in all the ways that matter. Such as his position on preemptive warfare.

I don't think I'll take democrats seriously ever again.

Back in the Day 7...

2004-09-29T01:05:00.000-05:00

Well I had been feeling like I was blogging next to nil over this past month and sure enough that was the case. Between looking for an apartment, a job, and all the stuff I've been doing at Live Oak UU I just haven't been very motivated to blog. I'd say I haven't had time, but I'm sure I could have found it. There's just been this general feeling of stress all month. Luckily BilLee and myself got to go down to Padre Island in Corpus Christi Texas this past weekend with the church. That was a nice getaway, but now its back to business. We both have interviews tomorrow, and I am in the process of filling out about 3 more applications as I type this. Its beginning to feel like a waste of time sharing so much personal information on another piece of paper. Everyone seems to be looking for people to hire yet no one seems to be calling us back. I think we get about 1 call back for every ten to fifteen applications we fill out, and those are the ones that interview everybody and screen out later. You would think we were applying for positions we were unqualified for and not basic entry level stuff. But enough about that its had me in a bad mood all month, and I really really can't wait until I get back to regular writing, and blogging. Filling out all these forms and perusing apartments that don't want me to live there unless I'm employed just seems to suck the life out of me.

So without further ado here is my incredibly short Back-in-the-day post, a couple days late, for September. BilLee put up some interesting quotes from Aristotle, I complained about Wal-mart's application process, ranted some more about job hunting, put up some links to entries on a great transhumanist blog, contemplated what it took to get on an "ethics board," and I finished off the month talking about some of the great bands we saw at the Austin City Limits Music Festival.

See told you it was short. But don't worry we've slowed down, but we are far from out.

Great Music in Austin

2004-09-22T17:30:00.000-05:00

This past weekend BilLee and I went to the Austin City Limits Music Festival. In spite of being hot, expensive, and very crowded it was a lot of fun. Here are some of the bands we saw that we thought were great:

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band
David Garza
The Wailers
The Pixies
The Neville Brothers

We were particularly fond of The Dirty Dozen Brass Band out of New Orleans. BilLee described them as a "real" jazz band. According to their website they are playing in Athens this weekend at the Georgia Theater. So if you are in Athens I recommend checking them out. They were really good.

Just a thought...

2004-09-18T01:07:00.000-05:00

HoustonChronicle.com - Ethics panel to weigh charges against Tom DeLay

I wonder exactly what qualifications it takes to get on an "ethics committee." I hear about "ethics committees" all the time. Committees reviewing the ethics of some procedure in medicine, or some research at a university. There are even "bio-ethics" committees now.

Which leads me to wonder why should anyone give a rats ass about the opinion of some bio-ethics committee. I guess in congress they'll be able to do stuff, but what about out in the real world. Can these committees stop research, and medical procedures, and if so what makes them authorities on ethicality?

Obviously someone has to be an expert on ethics but how do you decide, and once again who gets on the committee. I think the procedure for determining whose on the committee would ultimately determine the value of the opinions and/or statements of any ethics committee.

I love this Blog!!

2004-09-10T03:05:00.000-05:00

Sentient Developments always seems to have fascinating posts up. This week there is a link to a critique of the Drake equation (that's the famous equation that guesstimates the amount of intelligent life in the universe), also there is an interesting post on the relative uniqueness of our solar system, and a post on the likelihood of intelligent life "snail mailing" us via hardware rather than using radio signals.

Plus much more great stuff.

Job Hunting Madness

2004-09-07T03:32:00.000-05:00

I really hate job hunting. Its not that I don't want to work, on the contrary I do, but I would really prefer to not work for somebody else. I don't like trying to convince people that I am worth hiring, that there is some characteristics about me, and some characteristic about their company that make me a perfect match. I don't like wanting to work at a specific place, then not getting the job and thinking that there is something wrong with me that kept me from getting it. I know that it is not about me. It is about the employer, the employer's needs, and who they feel is the best candidate for the job. Well because I am an introvert my personality doesn't typically show much to people I don't know well. It certainly isn't going to wow an employer. Instead introversion is usually seen as a weakness, and one that in many cases would make me an unattractive candidate for a position. So I usually don't mention that I'm an introvert, and instead my limited-looking personality probably blends in with the crowd of other applicants rather than having my name jump out as a "hire me." Or perhaps that is simply the way I perceive it.

In any case I suppose that is what the references are for, so that other people can say: "Rainbough was a really great employee she worked really hard, was very talented, learned quickly, was very conscientious, and is trustworthy."

The problem is that the last few jobs I have had had duds as bosses. My last employer happened to be a crook (of course I didn't know this when I started working for him). In spite of the fact that he was constantly impressed by the work I did (and said as much), bragged about the quality of work I did to clients, said on many occasions that he was always pleased with my performance, and the fact that I was working about 50 hours a week for what amounted to close to minimum wage for a highly specialized job, he told my supervisor that if ever I needed a reference he would effectively try and convince the individuals calling not to hire me.

When I found this out I quit, and I know the venom was not aimed at me but at some of my co-workers who he had been getting frustrated with. Nevertheless I end up with a job where some of the best work I have ever done can't even be used as an asset for a future employer. (BTW the reason I worked for such a low pay was because part of the value I expected to receive was a good reference). I can't give new employers a number to call where a boss will say "yeah she was great!" and I can't explain the situation because of course no one ever believes that an employer would say something like that without good reason. He had a good reason. He knew that his current set of employees knew enough about him to get him in trouble with the law and he wanted some leverage, (like the fact that he didn't pay taxes and that he lied to his clients). Then there was a telemarketing job where I doubt anyone would remember me because they have such a high turnover, and before that I worked at Papa John's for nearly two years. That is one of my biggest duds.

My boss there was more interested in political maneuvering within the company than in employee performance. The fact that I was a hard worker, trustworthy, skilled, and knew enough to manage the store was overshadowed by the fact that I was not an interesting male that he could relate to. I suspect if I used him as a reference he would not even remember having me train new employees, temporarily manage parts of the store and other employees, or that he considered me the best person to operate the cash register because my drawer never came up short. These are the kinds of things that new employers need to know.

So here I am picking and choosing between my known acquaintances for references that might tell an employer something useful about me and not just "You should hire her because she's my friend." My anger at the constant insistence at drug testing has dwindled to annoyance, and frustration that so many employers feel that an expensive invasion of privacy that tells them nothing about job performance or charcter is necessary. Also I kind of think that that practice strengthens the unethical and immoral war on drugs. But apparently most of the entry level high turn over jobs (especially in retail) feel that it is an effective way to weed out potential problem employees. Maybe it is, but I have never been a problem employee, and while I have no doubt that I would pass these tests it still bugs my moral sensibilities about what is and isn't reasonable information to collect from job applicants, and about the ethicality of cooperating with measures that may strengthen the war on drugs.

I can't afford to say no to drug testing because too many companies require it, and will not consider you without it. But a part of me wonders if perhaps I am being complicit in helping to continue the drug war. A part wonders if I am selling out to not rip to shreds the applications of those companies who would not even consider me for employment if I chose to deny them consent to invade my privacy in regards to substances I might have consumed before I ever applied for the job, and that have no bearing on my actual job performance. A part of me wonders if the more I say yes to drug testing the more it becomes "standard practice" and therefore okay to expect it from all applicants. Unfortunately if I let those companies fall away I'm left with the companies who would pretty much hire anyone, and have to because something is so bad about their job that they have a very very high turnover.

And then I end up working for people who will not remember my name, face, or how I did on the job in 3 years. I end up in a job that I can't stand doing, or maybe I end up with another crook. Who knows? and those are just a few of the reasons why I hate job hunting and would like to work for myself. Apparently though if you go to college you are less likely to be subjected to the drug test runaround. Instead they subject you to extensive personality tests. I can only imagine having a test that says "your personality isn't quite right for our company I'm sorry we can't hire you." I mean what are the standards for the tests? Anyhow that's my rant for the day.

Welcome to Wally World

2004-09-01T23:45:00.000-05:00

Being in need of a part time job while I establish residency in Texas, I decided to apply at Wal-Mart today. Now I happen to be particularly fond of Wal-mart. I have gotten great value out of their low prices and good quality products, and I would certainly have a lower quality of life if Wal-mart stopped doing business. That being said the application included a mandatory questionaire at the end that I found, to put it bluntly, a little fascistic (I believe thats a word).

You fill out the application on an electronic kiosk in the store so you have to answer all the questions or your application will be incomplete. There were 67 questions and all of them were about my personal opinion or past experience with certain subjects. At the beginning of the test the directions made clear that you had to answer every question, that you could not take the middle ground of no opinion on any question, and that you had only 15 minutes to complete the test. It further insisted that there were no right or wrong answers and that you could not "fail" the test.

The questionaire focused on several main issues: marijuana usage and drug policy, stealing from employers, work safety regulations, and punctuality.

You had ten options of how to respond to each question: very slightly agree, slightly agree, strongly agree, very strongly agree, totally agree, very slightly disagree, slightly disagree, strongly disagree, very strongly disagree, and totally disagree.

Then the questions would go something like this:

"In the past I have had trouble being on time for work but that is behind me now."

Then you specify your level of agreement or disagreement with the statement. The punctuality statements didn't bother me. It was the drug policy stuff. For example:

"If a person only smokes one marijuana cigarette a week then they do not have a drug problem."

"I occasionally experiment with illicit drugs."

"An employer does not have the right to inquire about my usage of illicit drugs as long as they do not affect my performance on the job."

"One marijuana cigarette is equivalent to one alcoholic drink."

So of course I am wondering if my opinion on certain subjects will keep me from getting hired at Wal-mart. They said you couldn't fail the test, but some of the questions were about employee theft.

If you answered "Totally Agree" to the statement:

"It is okay to steal from your employer if your pay is very low,"

surely they wouldn't hire you. Which means that you can fail. You can answer in such a way that they will choose not to call you in for an interview, or consider you for the job opening. Which brings me to one of the most problematic questions of all:

"An employee should criticize the company they work for if they believe that they are wrong."

How do you answer a question like that? If they are wrong about something trivial it might not be worth bringing up, but what if they are wrong about something important? I'm not going to talk bad about a place while I'm on the job, but honestly are they or are they not open to criticism? Perhaps this question was an attempt to find people who stand by their principles, are willing to question authority, and stand their ground for employ. Or maybe its a way to root out the wal-mart-hater or the trouble makers from the application process.

Which makes me wonder, if they read this blog would they be reticent to offer me a job?

Smoking pot should be legal!!!

How about now?

Aristotle (384-322BC)

2004-08-31T20:57:00.000-05:00

Without the legacy of this man, the dark ages would have lasted longer than they did. It can be a little overwhelming to ponder the impact of this one man on history.

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

We make war that we may live in peace.

"To the query, "What is a friend?" his reply was "A single soul dwelling in two bodies.""

Wit is cultured insolence.

Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power - that is not easy.

It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

"All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, desire."

"In the arena of human life the honours and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action."

"The quality of life is determined by its activities."

"It is easy to fly into a passion - anybody can do that - but to be angry with the right person to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way - that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it."

"He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander."

"It concerns us to know the purposes we seek in life, for then, like archers aiming at a definite mark, we shall be more likely to attain what we want."

"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self."

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.

Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.

Change in all things is sweet.

Education is the best provision for old age.

Man is by nature a political animal.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit.

    We become just by doing just acts,

        temperate by doing temperate acts,

            brave by doing brave acts.



                       -Aristotle

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

He who hath many friends hath none.

It is better for a city to be governed by a good man than by good laws.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well.

Check Out:

Aristotle - WikiQuote for more quotes from the person whom medieval scholars referred to simply as "The Philosopher".

Back in the Day 6...

2004-08-27T03:22:00.000-05:00

Okay its that time of the month again (well not THAT time). Its time for the month in review post. Actually I'm a couple days late for the actually anniversary but here it is anyway. Somewhere over the Rainbough has now been in existence for 6 months.

This month we posted quotes from William Shakespeare, Confucius, and a collection of Chinese Proverbs.

BilLee started the month off complaining about the how the U.S. steel industry has found success by using government force to tax international competition. He followed this with a rant about living outside the mainstream political debate.

Next I presented my reasoning for why I think the Democrats should lose the upcoming presidential election. I followed this with a rant about my blogroll, and news about BilLee's new niece Madeline.

BilLee put up a post about how the associated press's attempts to deal with the issue of genocide in a politically correct manner led them to describing the situation in Sudan as an attempt to purge Darfur of citizens of "african origin." Next I posted a rant about breast feeding and how annoying it is when people think their own squeamishness on a subject should be able to substitute for actual reasoning.

BilLee followed this with some short posts on the perseid meteor shower, and bad arguments against libertarianism. Then I expressed my extreme dismay at discovering an extreme lack of Waffle Houses in Austin, I discussed the possibility of boycotting advertisers who utilize spam and spyware, and I ranted about the insane and incomprehensible scoring of gymnastics in the Olympics in Athens.

Olympic Mayhem

2004-08-24T05:01:00.000-05:00

Yahoo Sports - Olympics - Hamm manages silver in surreal gymnastics circus

I have been watching the Olympics nearly every day this past week. For me its kind of a fantasy about what could have been had my grandparents decided to continue paying for gymnastics lessons when I was a child. Mostly though I like seeing what sort of grace and flexibility is possible for the human form.

As the article mentions, tonight and this whole past week have been surreal. Because the scores in gymnastics are determined by judges there is almost always a score or two in any given year that seems too high or too low. There are always perceived biases in the scoring.

This year that effect was amplified. Nearly half of the routines seemed like they were poorly scored, and instead of showing a bias towards certain countries this year, the judges seemed to show biases towards certain individuals. Part of the problem was that the format of the competition had changed over previous years particularly in the all-around team competitions. The scoring method had also changed.

I'm not familiar with precisely how the scores were determined in the past, but now each routine has a determined point value that is determined in advance based upon difficulty. Then certain mistakes earn specific automatic deductions in point value.

Presumably this scoring method is supposed to make judging more objective. It seemed, however to have the opposite effect. Night after night there have been scores that are completely inexplicable. Last night for example was the men's steel rings competition. A competitor from greece went first. He was good but his hand stands weren't very straight and he shuffled a little on his landing. Then one after one 5 or 6 more competitors got up. Each one had routines that were at least as difficult as the first one, and each of them managed to stick their landings.

It seemed as if each performance was slightly better than the last, and all of them were better than the competitor from greece was. Who get's the gold? The guy from Greece. It was as if the scoring were entirely arbitrary. Tonight we saw lots and lots of ties between routines that were clearly of differing merit. It was bewildering to both the audience and the commentators, and that is why the crowd reacted the way that it did.

The problem the audience had was not the precise score of the Russian athlete but his score relative to the previous two contenders. You see something that looks better and you think it should be scored better. But the athletes are not actually scored relative to each other. The judges presumably do not say to themselves "Okay we gave the last guy a 9.75 and this guy is clearly much better so we'll give him a 9.85."

Some of the deductions seemed to come out of thin air. A perfect routine with a 9.7 difficulty would earn a 9.3 for no apparent reason. A 10.0 routine that was done without mistakes would get a 9.7 or a 9.672. Now I don't know all of the ins and outs of gymnastics but I would think that they would make the judging fairly clear and precise for such an important and well known event.

Even the athletes themselves were often confused by the scores. We were told by the commentators that deductions were made for stuff like stepping out of bounds, falling off the apparatus, putting weight on your hands, knees, or bottom when you landed, "holding," wobbling, stepping or hopping on the landing, and a lack of smoothness in execution. So you watch a 9.9 valued routine and you see none of these aforementioned mistakes and you think okay 9.9. Wrong! 9.612. And suddenly you begin to wonder if they have really managed to squeeze out the biases after all.

After Svetlana Khorkina made a big mistake on the uneven bars and still scored a 9.66, even the commentators speculated that the score was based upon her reputation and not upon her performance. Which means that at the heart of it there are still judges going "Oh that looks like a 9.5 to me." They have only added a little something like "Oh yeah she stepped out of bounds better make it a 9.4."

Spammers and Virus Writers Unite

2004-08-20T19:09:00.000-05:00

Internet News Article Reuters.com

I have gotten quite a few emails as of late in my catallarchy.net email account. Typically they contain an attachment that contains a virus. Right now the favorite trick is to send messages using the email accounts of other contributors at catallarchy. Though occasionally I have also gotten messages from nonexistent accounts like hotchick(at)catallarchy.net or management(at)catallarchy.net etc.

What bugs me though is that I often get bounce back emails from someone (or something) that was listing my account as the send address to try and send viruses. I get messages that tell me that some person or other could not receive the email I sent because it contained a virus, that they could not receive it because the email address didn't exist, or even that they could not receive my email because their account was full. The problem is of course that I never sent the email to begin with.

Meanwhile spyware has become much more virulent. According to webroot.com spyware programs can now piggyback on downloaded images from popular websites. That means that when you visit your favorite newsite you might be downloading spyware with the images on the page, and the host site wouldn't even know it. We now have to remove spyware two or three times a week at minimum sometimes its several times a day and that is with a program running that is designed to block such programs.

Which brings me to my next point. Many of the pop up ads that come up from this spyware, not to mention many of the companies listed when my error page gets hijacked are perfectly legitimate companies. E-Loan for example gets listed often, and I have gotten spam from companies like Kaplan. So along with all the nigerian bank schemes, bad pornography, and outright fraud that gets thrown at us through spam and spyware there are strong well known, well respected companies that apparently have no qualms about invading our computers and email accounts.

Of course why should they, many of them telemarket as well. My point is this, if we all hate these sort of business practices so much shouldn't we attempt to boycott the companies that do it. Sure a boycott won't stop the nigerian bank schemes, the annoying chainletters, and the get-rich-quick schemes. But if we really dislike having our homepages and error pages hijacked, and having pop up ads thrown in our face when we visit pop-up free sites, then I think we should make it clear to those companies that that sort of business practice is unacceptable.

In other words if I see an ad for your company pop up on my screen from a spyware program that installed itself on my computer without my knowledge or consent I not only won't patronize your company but I will discourage others from doing business with you also.

Thats how I feel about companies that would invade my computer and copy personal information from my computer without permission. If they were sneaking into my house and posting advertisements on my wall, or ruffling through my personal information I would feel the same way.

Reality Crashes to a Halt...

2004-08-18T01:18:00.000-05:00

I have recently made a terrifying discovery: There are no Waffle Houses in Austin.

My whole life there has always been a Waffle House within a few miles. Whether we were travelling to a neighboring state, going to the beach, going to college, visiting friends, no matter where I was and what I was doing, no matter what time of day or night if I got hungry I could say "hey lets go find a Waffle House," and be certain that one would be nearby. Now I am in Austin and if I find myself up a little late, starving, with nothing but ramen noodles to eat I can choose between IHOP and Denny's. Both of which sport chicken sandwhiches at about $7 dollars a plate, that do not compare even remotely to Waffle House's grilled chicken sandwhiches ($4.00 a plate), which happen to be made with the best grilled chicken on the planet. Their cheeseburgers are equally expensive at about $6.50 a plate -compare to Waffle House's $2.50 for the sandwhich about $3.50 for the plate and about $4.50 for a combo that includes both hasbrowns and a drink. You want a drink at Denny's or Ihop you'll have to pay another $1.50 which will bring the price of your meal to $8.50 not including the tip.

Let me put it this way both restaurants are two or three times more expensive than waffle house, their food is not nearly as good, and they are not nearly as fast. We went to Waffle House in Athens probably an average of once every 2 weeks though sometimes it was more often. With the price of Denny's (and IHOP) we could not afford to visit them more than once a month (probably less). The price for 1 cheese burger with fries, 1 coke, 1 chicken sandwhich with hashbrowns (with nothing on them) and 1 sprite at Denny's is about 18 dollars with out the tip. We could have had the same thing only better at Waffle House for under 10 dollars.

The Universe doesn't make sense anymore.

Our common hope.

2004-08-13T06:04:00.000-05:00

Alphecca: NJ Gov. Comes Out...: "I hope we reach the day, finally, where people can simply be what they are, or at least love who they love, without having to hide and feel shame and feel that if they don't pretend, they'll never get anywhere in life or will lose the love of their family and friends. Of course, that means that the rest of us have to do our part to stop worrying about who they love and instead focus on how they live."

I share this hope as does the entire Bi Poly community.

We love the night sky.

2004-08-13T04:04:00.000-05:00

The Perseid Meteor Shower was quite impressive over the past couple nights, here in central Texas. Rainbough and I enjoyed it. We were reminded of it when Rainbough saw a shooting star while getting the mail in the middle of the night. Eventually, we intend to join a local astronomy club. That way, we'll be reminded of these things ahead of time and possibly have a little party at the same time. ;-) (I love people.)

I'm now logically stupid.

2004-08-12T07:57:00.000-05:00

FunctionalAmbivalent: Slow News Day, Might As Well Pick a Fight:

"And all Libertarians are stupid."

I'm a Libertarian.

Logically, I'm stupid.

I used to have my doubts, but thanks to a fellow blogger that is apparently functionally ambivalent on everything but this I now know for certain.

Via LJ.

Confucius (551?-479? BCE)

2004-08-12T06:34:00.000-05:00

Lest y'all think my studies have been limited to the fruits of Western civilization. Here are some quotes from one of the great philosophers of the East that I studied in my youth, Confucius.

Only the wisest and the stupidest of men never change.

"Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors."

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

It is not possible for one to teach others who cannot teach his own family.

The superior man is modest in his speech but exceeds in his actions.

He who merely knows right principles is not equal to him who loves them.

To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.

We don't know yet about life, how can we know about death?

Tsze-Kung asked, saying, 'Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?" The Master said, "Is not Reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."

Mankind differs from the animals only by a little, and most people throw that away.

If you enjoy what you do, you'll never work another day in your life.

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant;
if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone;
if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate;
if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.

The Master said,
To learn and at due times to repeat what one has learnt, is that not after all a pleasure?
That friends should come to one from afar, is this not after all delightful?
To remain unsoured even though one's merits are unrecognized by others, is that not after all what is expected of a gentleman?
The Analects, (I, 1)

The Master said, 'Clever talk and a pretentious manner' are seldom found in the Good.
The Analects, (I, 3)

The Master said, (the good man) does not grieve that other people do not recognize his merits. His only anxiety is lest he should fail to recognize theirs.
The Analects, (I, 16)

Check Out:

Confucius - WikiQuote for more quotes from this philosopher from the Ancient Far East.

This is a great line.

2004-08-12T05:21:00.000-05:00

I found a great line over at ENFP - The Visionary which is a page describing my personality type. :

"'When I'm not near the ones I love, I love the ones I'm near.'"

I felt like sharing that with the rest of you. It's the first time I came across it and I'm a sucker for a nice turn of phrase.

FYI: Rainbough is an INTJ.

Our day will come.

2004-08-12T01:23:00.000-05:00

Hector Sanchez made a good point about file-sharing over at Pharaoh Speaks. Go check it out.

We are the ones who grew up on the internet with the hacker motto "Information wants to be free." As soon as we conceptualize a way to explain this to the rest of our citizenry, the liberation will commence. I don't mean to sound trite, but we need "to free their minds, man."

Breastfeeding and Social Squeamishness

2004-08-11T15:48:00.000-05:00

Breastfeeding Moms hold Nurse-in at Starbucks

You know if women were allowed to go topless in public this wouldn't be an issue at all. Honestly, what makes the nipples so different on a female that seeing them in public is offensive, while seeing a male's is not? Sure they are larger and more pronounced, but its our bodies. I think the real issue is that breasts have a stronger association with sex than pecks do. There are more people that might find themselves aroused (or perhaps turned off) by a random set of exposed breasts than by exposed pecks.

Well I am female and I do not like seeing other females breastfeed in public, nor do I like to see pecks or breasts of less than healthy people. However I attribute all that to my own squeamishness on the subject. I haven't gotten over this weird negative association with bodily fluids that I developed as a child. I expect that by the time I have kids of my own and am one of those breastfeeding moms I will be long over it. At least I certainly hope so.

In any case I cannot stand people that sit back and spout stuff like "I don't want to see some nursing woman waving her breast in my face" or "I don't want to see my grandma walking around with her breasts hanging out," and then expect that their own squeamishness on a subject should pass as a political opinion and be reason enough to outlaw the practice.

There are plenty of things in this world that do not fit my personal aesthetic, and a handful of things that I still feel a little squeamishness about. But I would be the last person to advocate forcing others to make their own behavior and actions fit nicely into my personal comfort zone.

Not only would such an attempt fail, but we would end up much further from a "comfortable" society than we were before.

A short Collection of Chinese Proverbs

2004-08-10T02:50:00.000-05:00

Here is some selected chinese proverbs that I found interesting:

You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.

You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.

Who rides a tiger cannot dismount.

With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.

When you want to test the depths of a stream, don't use both feet.

When you fall into a pit, you either die or get out.

What you cannot avoid, welcome.

We are not so much concerned if you are slow as when you come to a halt.

Who is not satisfied with himself will grow; who is not sure of his own correctness will learn many things.

You can hardly make a friend in a year, but you can easily offend one in an hour.

You must have crossed the river before you may tell the crocodile he has bad breath.

You won't help shoots grow by pulling them up higher.

The rich man plans for tomorrow, the poor man for today.

The sheep has no choice when in the jaws of the wolf.

Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad.

To attract good fortune, spend a new coin on an old friend, share an old pleasure with a new friend, and lift up the heart of a true friend by writing his name on the wings of a dragon.

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.

To get through the hardest journey we need take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping.

This makes my brain hurt.

2004-08-05T03:42:00.000-05:00

Kansas City Star | 08/05/2004 | Sudan fears it will be a low priority: "The United Nations and international aid organizations accuse the pro-government Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, of waging a brutal campaign to drive Sudanese citizens of African origin out of Darfur, which borders Chad."

Did you catch what made my brain hurt? Here, let me narrow it down for you in case you missed it.

They "accuse the pro-government Arab militia...of waging a brutal campaign to drive Sudanese citizens of African origin out of [a region of Sudan], which borders Chad."

Here's a hint. The whole country of Sudan is in African, hence all Sudanese are African. This includes the Arab-dominated government of Sudan.

It appears that these linguistic and geographic contortions arise from an inability of this Associated Press reporter to say that some Arab people in the Darfur region had taken it upon themselves to attempt to kill off all the black people there. Genocide.

When the genocide is aimed at a people simply because of the color of their skin, obscuring that fact aids and abets the activities of those who have taken part in this atrocity.

You know perhaps I am being too hard on The Associated Press. It is possible that they just never fact-checked their story against a basic world map.

Yes, that makes me feel better. In the absence of better data, I'm going to choose to believe that.

I would hate to have to believe that we have reached the point as a society that we would believe that attempting to direct people's attention to obvious genocide might unnecessarily offend someone.

BilLee's an Uncle.

2004-08-05T02:26:00.000-05:00

As of around 2 Am yesterday (august 4th), BilLee became the uncle of a newborn niece. Madeline Grace Miller was born yesterday suprising us all by arriving in the middle of the night. Congratulations to Jimmy and Delena on their new daughter, and of course to BilLee at his newfound word to add to his already long list of adjectives that describe himself. Madeline is healthy with a full head of hair and we are all very happy to welcome her to this planet. Happy birthday Madeline.

A note about the blogroll

2004-08-04T15:41:00.000-05:00

I have had a couple people mention how "unwieldy" our blogroll is here at SotR. One blogger mentioned that I linked to everyone on the planet, which I found amusing. The trouble I have is that occassionally people who make a point to reciprocal link people who link to them or who have previously linked to me, suddenly decide to remove their link because they feel that my blogroll is too long.

The premise is basically that the more links you have the less valuable each individual link is. I mean a link from a site that limits their blogroll to 40 is seen as far more valuable than one that links to 300 plus and rising (of course the number of visits you get is also relevant in the valuation of your link). Here's the thing, to all those other blog owners out there: My links are not about you!

BilLee and myself link to sites that we think are good, and that we think would be worth visiting for someone perusing our site. We try to link to those sites that link to us regardless of how many outgoing links they have but that is not our main criteria. We link to blogs we enjoy, blogs we find interesting, blogs of people we know personally, blogs with similar positions to our own, blogs with directly opposing positions to our own, blogs of subjects we find interesting but do not regularly blog on or do not know enough about to blog on personally etc. The idea is to link to regularly updated quality blogs that have a diverse array of subjects focusing on our interests but not exclusive to our viewpoint and opinions. When I find a really good leftist blog I link to it, when I find a really good conservative blog I link to it. When I find a blog randomly interesting I link to it.

It has nothing to do with trying to be generous or hospitable or doing a favor to the blog owners. Its my way of saying: "this blog is a good place to visit" or perhaps "for a different or opposing viewpoint go here" etc.

So if you do not like my blog, you do not think it is something you want to link to, or you simply do not like how I write or what I say and so do not want to link to me I understand. By all means keep your links to yourself. For those of you who think that my links are not valuable enough to reciprocate regardless of how you feel about the site, I honestly think you miss the point of having a blog. You've certainly missed the point of having a blogroll.

So use whatever strategy you want for choosing who to link to, but keep in mind I am never going to limit my blogroll to make you feel special. There are too many good blogs out there and too many great ideas and thoughts I would have to cut out, just so you could be like "wow I got a link to someone who only links to ten other people."

Why I Want the Democrats to Lose.

2004-08-03T00:13:00.000-05:00

Before I start I want to point out that I do not care for the Republican Party, and am no fan of George W. Bush. I do not believe he is the lesser of two evils nor would I ever vote on such a premise. That being said here is why I want the Democrats to lose the presidential election this November:

Reason 1. You should succeed because of who you are not because of who you are not.
Reason 2. The Democrats have been in power for too long.
Reason 3. The Democrats are dying.

I'll start with the first one. The Democrats are running on one specific rallying cry "anybody but bush." Now I have no doubt that the Kerry campaign is trying to look like they are promoting some positive message; some real positive value that is more than "we're not this guy." But regardless of the campaign and the official party line, most Democrats do not like John Kerry. Most of them are going to vote for him, and are supporting him now on one solitary premise: anybody (or rather any democrat) is better than George W. Bush.

Well forgive me for being pessimistic but there are plenty of other candidates that meet the "not Bush" credentials, and I honestly think we could do a hell of a lot worse than G.W. Bush. The sentiment rests on the premise that Bush is the epitome of evil, and that any democrat would make a better president. However I simply do not believe that there is something about the Democratic Party that causes it to imbue its members with some special quality of goodness.

It would be much easier to believe that John Kerry represented a meaningful political position and had an actual political message if he were not constantly changing his position on crucial issues (the war on terror, and the patriot act come to mind). That's the problem Kerry's position on everything from abortion to gay marriage to the patriot act changes according to who he's talking at. Surely this should bother the Democrats themselves. It doesn't because it's not about who he is, it's about who he is not. Which brings me to my next point.

Reason 2. The Democrats have been in power too long.

No the Democrats are not in power now, but previous to 1994 they were in control of congress consistently for something like 30 years. When push comes to shove the Democrats are accustomed to being in power and the republicans are accustomed to not being in power. As a result both parties are treating the current situation (republican control of both the executive and legislative branch) as a fluke. The republicans are attempting to push through congress as many amendments, laws, and judges that are consistent with their agenda as they can, while they can. Meanwhile the Democrats think that if they get the right guy in the right place with the right amount of money they can take back the Whitehouse and his momentum will help them to restore themselves back to their accustomed spot of majority in the house and senate.

This is a perfectly feasible strategy, more or less, but the problem is their ultimate goal is to get back to functioning as they were 10 years ago. They want to get back to functioning as the entrenched legislative machine that they once were.

Reason 3: the Democrats are dying.

No they are not physically dying, but whatever spirit the party might have once had has now decayed into so much mush. The party has become a coalition of entrenched bureaucrats, career politicians, social engineers, ignorant celebrities, and thousands upon thousands of local level activists. It's the local activists I am concerned with. There are thousands of people whose main reason for being active in politics is because they feel threatened (and rightfully so) by the fact that there are republicans being active in politics. Long before the presidential election in 2000, "not republican" was a rallying point for Democrats, and others that considered themselves to be on the left side of the political spectrum.

I personally met many, many people in college who felt that it was important to be active in politics in order to show solidarity in their not-republican-ness. As a result the term "left-liberal" has decayed into meaning something along the lines of "not on the right." The bold movements from which the current Democrats and left-liberals claim kinship have also decayed. Feminism, once responsible for the sexual revolution has become a conglomeration of bad literature, poor scholarship, and a socialist agenda that has nothing to do with women's rights. Those that once burned bras during the sexual revolution now burn pornography, and see any open sexual expressions in mass media to be a debasement of female sexuality. Equal rights has decayed into legislating special privileges and protections for certain groups. Left-leaning campuses once proud of their principled adherence to free speech and willingness to hear opposing views now regularly have student activists that run their opposition off campus claiming that their opponents politically incorrect opinions are "repressive." Even civil disobedience and protest on the left have turned into petty vandalism and the modern equivalent of pitch-fork-mobs (check out an anti-globalization protest and you'll see what I mean).

Here's where the problem comes in; political parties measure their success by the number of offices they win as well as the level or power of the offices they get. There is nothing like winning a presidential election to make a party feel like it is a big success, likewise there is nothing like success to keep a party from noticing that it is dying (or long dead as the case may be). The Democrats need to lose this election for their own sake. They need to rethink their politics, their agenda, their message, ultimately who they are and what they want to represent. As long as they think they are successful, and as long as the party machinery can get back into their favorite trenches there will be no incentive to do so.

All those grass-roots, and local activists trying to create better communities will get to spend another 4 years or more as not-republicans on the illusion that their guy will make things better. Instead of being a party with an active vision, and a coherent message they will simply be the party in power. Now I do not expect to ever agree completely with the Democrats, and it is no skin off my back if they continue to decay into their soul-less mush. But the fact is I know many good people that are Democrats, and I do not want to watch them spend another 4 years supporting a party they readily admit they are disillusioned and frustrated with. I would like to see more people recognize that solidarity behind a "not-message" is meaningless, and a waste of their efforts.

Now perhaps those good people will not need such an obvious upheaval to start actively changing their path. Perhaps they will have the courage as the Libertarians did to set out on their own and create organizations that represent their own principles, and that honestly work for a better world rather than working to be in power. In any case the Democrats might manage to get into office based on who they are not, but they will only succeed in creating better communities and a better world based on who they are.

Living outside the mainstream political debate.

2004-08-02T17:18:00.000-05:00

At the end of a hatchet job of a political candidate I intend to support, which consisted mainly of echoing an echo of somebody else's hatchet job, was this little tidbit.: "I don't know why third party candidates in the United States tend to be embarrassments to themselves and others. However, like most people, I've effected by that reality. As disappointed as I am with the major parties, it is them I take seriously."

First, let me say that just because somebody else is embarrassed by someone that doesn't mean that one has embarrassed oneself. Some people are just easily embarrassed. If I spill my drink on myself, then that might mean I have embarrassed myself. If someone else spills a drink on me, then that embarrassment would be totally different matter indeed.

Major party candidates spend most of their lives grooming themselves and each other to run for political office. Third party candidates, by their nature, generally haven't and wouldn't want to if they would be strait-jacketed that way.

If you want least-common-denominator political candidates who are more concerned with getting elected/re-reelected than with openly and honestly presenting their discomfort with various institutions, then by all means continue to support mealy-mouthed liars and the decline in voter participation that accompanies them.

I support third-parties. Here is my order of support:

Libertarian Party
Green Party (as long as the candidates are truly green and not watermelon)
Reform Party
Nader
Any Independent
Constitution Party
The non-incumbent major party candidate
None of the Above (write-in, because I hate uncontested elections).

Based on what the Silver Rights guy wrote, he seems that he will be part of the majority not-voting. This would be fine if it were out of principle like the voluntaryist, but it appears that it is simply out of discomfort with regular people running for office. Few people would look "non-loonie" in a campaign when vetted by any dedicated journalist. As a result, we end with those candidates best capable of hiding/denying their past. Maybe one day, we'll value honesty more. When that happens, prepare for the real cultural revolution that will make the founding of our country look like a slight tweaking of British custom by comparison. That is the day that I'm working for. If you agree that is a day worth working, then support third-party/independent candidates. I'm going to vote for Badnarik. You can support someone else. But as long as we maintain open and honest discourse with each other, we will succeed in learning the limits of what can be achieved withing a constitutionally-limited federal democratic republic. Once we know that, we can decide together if we want to move outside that framework into something new that most of the electorate will not have a chance to consider otherwise.

The future is always open regardless of how the present appears.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

2004-07-31T15:13:00.000-05:00

Here are a few quotes from the bard.

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
William Shakespeare

from Shakespeare's Othello:
"I had rather be a toad
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others' uses."

"O monstrous world! Take note, take note, o world,
To be direct and honest is not safe!"
(~Iago, Act III, Scene 3)

Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) _All's Well That Ends Well_ IV.v
A scar nobly got, or a noble scar, is a good livery of honour; so belike is that.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not. -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

"Action is eloquence."
- William Shakespeare

Juliet: What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
-- (Romeo and Juliet Act II, scene ii)

Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
-- Shakespeare's Othello

"A good wench, give it me!"



                -Iago, from Othello II.iii

Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
- Iago,

Othello (1602-4) act 3, sc. 3, l. 155

Fierce extremes
In their continuances will not feed themselves.

-- King John, Act 5, Scene 7

Doubt thou the stars are fine
Doubt that the sun doth move
Doubt truth be a liar
But never doubt I love
- Hamlet

Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.
Twelfth Night

Some men never seem to grow old. Always active in thought, always ready to adopt new ideas, they are never chargeable with foggyism. Satisfied, yet ever dissatisfied, settled, yet ever unsettled, they always enjoy the best of what is, are the first to find the best of what will be.

It is meant that noble minds keep ever with their likes; for who so firm that cannot be seduced.

Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits.

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

He is not great who is not greatly good.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; the thief doth fear each bush an officer.

There is a history in all men's lives.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

It is the mind that makes the body rich; and as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, so honor peereth in the meanest habit.

Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country, as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.

There's not one wise man among twenty will praise himself.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Each present joy or sorrow seems the chief.

Strong reasons make strong actions.

Our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.

Gold is worse poison to a man's soul, doing more murders in this loathsome world, than any mortal drug.

It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

We know what we are, but not what we may be.

I had rather have a fool make me merry, than experience make me sad.

"Ah, that death would annihilate it, it would be infinitely preferable to the world as it is. Ah, but there lies the rub!" - Shakespeare

This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
-- William Shakespeare
(Hamlet)

Ophelia: 'Tis brief my lord?
Hamlet: As a woman's love.
-- William Shakespheare (Hamlet)

He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.
-- William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Act I, scene 2)

What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! -- William Shakespeare (Hamlet, Act II, scene 2)

"Good Night, Good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow."
- Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare.
Act II, Scene II, lines 220-221

'Tis a common proof, that lowliness is a Edward Young ambition's ladder, whereto the climber upwards turns his face; but when he once attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks into the clouds scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend.

'Tis in my memory lock'd, And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

'Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.

'Tis the mind that makes the body rich.

... and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

"This music crept by me upon the waters, allaying both their fury, and my passion, with its sweet air."

"How sour sweet music is when time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men's lives."

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, rounded with a little sleep.
from the Tempest, Prospero said it to Ferdinand and Miranda at the play performed by the spirits

"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, to dig the dust enclosèd here. Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones."
Shakespeare's epitaph.

Check out:

William Shakespeare - WikiQuote for more quotes from this Author of many of the classics that helped define and standardize the modern English language.

Fallacy Files Weblog

2004-07-30T18:43:00.000-05:00

Fallacy Files Weblog

I found reference to this from one of the blogs in my giant joy of a blogroll. I forgot which one. I would like to give them credit for the find. Well, if you think it was you, feel good that I'm sharing it.

Anyway, it appears to be a great blog that I'm going to add to my blogroll and visit as much as I visit Roderick T. Long's Austro-Athenian Empire. (That's a compliment by the way.)

It's about time we start having blogs with a focus on epistemology that's on par with many blogs' focus on political philosophy.

Update: I was able to relocate the post that I was looking for. So thank you Order from Chaos, I'm sorry that I forgot that I got the link from you.

Tariffs Piss Me Off

2004-07-27T18:27:00.000-05:00

PITTSBURGH -- U.S. Steel Corp. (X) turned in a second-quarter profit, thanks in part to strong demand for steel products and higher prices.

Was this why we increased steel tariffs and caused the steel importers in New Orleans to lay off more workers than there were in the entire "threatened" domestic steel industry. (Not to mention the increased costs down the line in construction, durable goods, etc.

No wait. Didn't they remove the new tariffs recently. I think it's about time we remove the remaining ones.

The nation's largest steel company, which posted its second consecutive quarterly profit following four quarters of losses, said net income in the latest quarter was the highest recorded since the company began reporting steel results separately in 1991. The company also said the quarter benefited from the acquisition of National Steel Corp. last year as well as ongoing cost-reduction efforts.

I wonder if those steel tariffs they lobbbied Bush for a few years back was part of their "ongoing cost-reduction efforts".

U.S. Steel Tuesday reported net income of $211 million, or $1.62 a share, compared with a year-earlier net loss of $49 million, or 51 cents a share.

The steelmaker said a charge for the early redemption of senior debt reduced its latest earnings by $22 million, or 17 cents a share. Results in the year-earlier period included a gain of $23 million, or 22 cents a share.

Revenue, meanwhile, surged 47% to $3.47 billion from $2.36 billion a year earlier.
U.S. Steel said its domestic and European results were helped by "significantly improved prices and margins," despite increased costs for purchased raw materials.
Looking ahead, U.S. Steel Chairman and Chief Executive Thomas J. Usher said in a prepared statement that the company expects "continued strong profitability through year-end resulting from robust world-wide steel pricing and tight supplies, as the world economy continues to recover and as demand from developing countries, especially China, remains at very high levels."

-Yolanda E. McBride, Dow Jones Newswires; 609-520-7861
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
07-27-04 1040ET

So, let me see if I got this straight. Those "damn Chinese" who were "dumping their steel" on the world just a few years ago and were the reason we need to have "protective" tariffs from their "predatory" activities are the one's you can't say enough nice things about.

Oh wait, that's right. It's bad mercantilist economics to attack "the colonials" when they're staying in their proper place.

***Grumble, grumble, grumble...***

Back in the Day 5...

2004-07-25T19:47:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the 5 month anniversary of Somewhere over the Rainbough, and you know what that means: time for my month in review post. I was a little busy (and a little lazy) yesterday and did not get to it. I also attempted to get BilLee to do it until I realized it would be quicker and easier if I did it myself, so here goes.

BilLee started off this month with quotes from Joseph Addison, a dead british guy who contributed to the Cato Letters. Later he posted quotes by Dale Carnegie, the renowned self-help guru from whom we get the phrase "when life gives you lemons make lemonade." He also put up quotes from the greatest of all philosphers, Socrates.

I started with a spirited rant about universities using government funded grants and scholarships to hide the rising cost of tuition. Then I complained about the sheer lunacy of requiring a permit to practice a constitutionally protected right. Next I shared my discovery of America's civil peacetime flag (as opposed to the military wartime flag that we typically fly).

BilLee shared his thoughts on independence day and how great it is for us that our founding fathers were such successful traitors. I followed this with another long tirade about the Martha Stewart case and the newest moronic rulings of the judge presiding over it. BilLee discussed his own dressing habits and how unusual personal styles can be considered terroristic threats, and he followed this with his own thoughts on instant runoff voting.

I put up a post next on the strangness of my own brain at 5 am, and my own tendency to have neurotic dream imagery in "My Nocturnal Brain." Next I shared my frustration with the anti-war-litmus-test-libertarians along with my own confusion regarding their skewed definition of what a war is. Then I had a fun post contemplating the possibility of a recession in the blogosphere and whether or not such a thing could be accurately determined.

BilLee shared his thoughts on our new 5 kittens that our recently inherited cat gave birth to. I shared my entries into the Badnarik campaign blog's photoshop contest. Finally BilLee ranted about partisan driving skills, and shared his own experiences as a momentary escape artist and why getting around any given restraint is ultimately possible with a little patience and thought.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

2004-07-24T02:23:00.000-05:00

Over at gAmanda, I came across this post about her daughter.

It reminded of a time I was in a hospital. My mental state was a little out of kilter. The nice people in the hospital uniforms decided that I should be strapped to a bed for a little while. (BTW, believe it or not, they were actually nice about it.) While I was strapped to the bed, at some point (probably the next morning) I decided to unstrap myself. Because of my mental state, it did not occur to me that the straps were originally designed not to be removable. So I examined them, then removed them. After I had succeeded in the task of unstrapping my wrists, it occurred to me that the lack of efficacy of their equipment might frighten the nice people working there so I stopped. I informed them that I was no longer all strapped in tight in a manner as to avoid the possibility of frightening them.

Not only was the person I told not frightened, he was actually impressed by my "Houdini maneuver". He saw no point in continuing to restrain me and removed the remaining restraints. I still believe there is a way out any situation if someone actually wants to leave it. The subtlety comes in determining if the situation is really one that should be left behind remaining fully aware of the price that might be exacted in the process.

Elections influenced by bad driving

2004-07-22T02:35:00.000-05:00

Earlier this evening, I was driving along and someone in a small truck (one that was maybe slightly larger than my car) cut me off. It was annoying. He didn't put on his blinker or anything.
He had a "John Kerry" bumper sticker in his rear window.

I dislike Bush, but I dislike Kerry just as much. So, this honestly was not going to have any effect on my vote, but it got me to thinking. What if I had been an undecided voter?

A guilt-by-association could be achieved by hiring bad, aggressive drivers to drive around sporting your opponents' bumper stickers. Think about it. A close election swayed by the emotions generated by drivers selected on their basis to foster "road rage"-y sentiments.

This was just a thought I had earlier today when some annoying fellow decided to cut me off and didn't deem me worthy of receiving the warning of a blinker that is designed to signal a desire to change lanes. He has a bumper sticker to signal a desire to change presidents. This seems to be a disconnect between politics and practice. Perhaps if there was a little less of this kind of hipocrisy, there would be a higher voter participation rate.

Ok, I'm going to bed now. I simply felt like sharing that random thought I had. Maybe later in the year I'll get cut off by someone with a GWBush sticker. Perhaps that would return balance to the bumper sticker politics. I guess I have just been having strange thoughts lately.

Fun with Photoshop

2004-07-20T03:27:00.000-05:00

In order to try out Blogger's new interface and image uploading feature, I thought I would share my entries into the Badnarik 2004 blog's photoshop contest. In the first contest I entered this one which I call "libertarian chalkboard" (yeah I know, real original title, maybe I should try "civil liberties... in chalk" or something like that). I didn't win unfortunately, but perhaps libertaria will pick up the image idea and use it in the future. It would be really easy to switch out the picture and campaign info at the bottom for other names, other years, and other campaigns. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge... It's public domain so feel free to use it if you like. I also have a 300 dpi (print) version sitting all alone and unused on my computer...

Here is my entry into the second contest it is called "Veto Power!" Unfortunately only myself and one other person has entered the contest thus far and it ends in a day and a half. So get cracking!! I worked hard on this image and would hate to win because the pickins were slim. Maybe they will extend the contest for a few days. For extra points (think of these as whose-line-is-it-anyway points) guess whose body I pasted Richard Campagna's head onto (hint: yes that really is the oval office).

Socrates (470 B.C. - 399 B.C.)

2004-07-19T03:11:00.000-05:00

Here are a few quotes from the fountainhead of Western Philosophy

Let him that would move the world first move himself.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
Socrates
469-399 BC
From Diogenes Laertius,
Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. II, sec. 31

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

"Wisdom begins in wonder."

What you cannot enforce, do not command.

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.

Wind buffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

He is richest who is content with the least.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

Here are Socrates' two simple rules for life:

Know Thyself
Take nothing in Excess

I know I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.

Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt? - Socrates' last words

Check out:

WikiPedia's article on Socrates to learn more about this man. (Hint: He wasn't just a character in Plato's writings.)

Five more mouths to feed, overnight

2004-07-19T02:15:00.000-05:00

The cat we inherited from the neighbors that moved away had kittens last night (Saturday night/early Sunday morning). The cat Gizmo (I didn't name it, the neighbors did and since it responds to that name I decided to keep it.) gave birth to 3 white ones, one black one, and a gray one. The gray one is the same color as she is.

Is the Blogosphere headed for Recession?

2004-07-16T01:13:00.000-05:00

Wired News: Bloggers Suffer Burnout

Okay it's the middle of July, everyone is on vacation, and there haven't been many interesting things going on in the news since the launch of SpaceShipOne a few weeks ago (keep in mind I said "the news" and not "the world"). So the blogosphere has slowed down a bit. A lot of bloggers are posting less, taking days, and even weeks off, and many bloggers are posting snipits and links who might have normally favored long entries and essays.

There is nothing to be alarmed about after all it is the middle of July in an election year. The most exciting thing going on where I live is voter registration drives. What I am concerned about is a bigger trend.

After reading the above article about "blogger burnout" I have begun to contemplate the question "what would it mean for the blogosphere to suffer a recession." At first I thought that it would mean that the total number of active blogs would have to be decreasing, as the total number of jobs typically decrease during a recession. But upon further thought I realized that that was incorrect.

An economic recession is when the economy itself contracts rather than expanding/growing. The blogosphere seems to be continuously growing in the number of blogs out there, but what if the actual blogging activity were decreasing. Fewer posts, or possibly even simply less content overall might indicate that blogging activity was in fact decreasing.

However given the huge growth in the blogosphere over the past year I doubt this is the case. The demand for new content, new ideas, new links, and yes new blogs has not gone down a bit. In fact since the recent lull began I have also been posting less (mostly due to my move and job-hunting activities) yet the hits to my website have been steadily increasing for the past few weeks. Which tells me that either my posts have simply become orders of magnitude better (and I'm not ruling this option out ::big grin::), I have picked up a stalker that visits 10 times a day, or that there are many people out there in my corner of the blogosphere that are having to look a little harder to find the amount of content they are accustomed to.

Perhaps its just because its July, and skimming the blogosphere for content for a potential blog post when the sun is out and the neighborhood kids are playing with the slip-and-slide feels like a chore. In any case it does feel like a "recession" in the blogosphere, but perhaps like most recessions we won't know if it really happened until its over, and given the amount of accurate data on the subject nowadays, (not to mention how ambiguous the limits of the blogosphere are) we might not even know then.

The Big Picture

2004-07-14T04:07:00.000-05:00

This was a comment at catallarchy in response to the post of a fellow blogger who happens to share my position regarding the invasion of Iraq. In response to my anger on the subject BilLee introduced me to this quote. It was lifted from the last page of the epilogue of The Ultimate Resource II by Julian Simon.

The worst offence... which can be committed by a polemic is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men. To calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but themselves feels much interested in seeing justice done them; but this weapon is, from the nature of the case, denied to those who attack a prevailing opinion: they can neither use it with safety to themselves, nor, if they could, would it do anything but recoil on their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degreee without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.

-John Stuart Mill

This obviously isn't about the mainstream popular opinion, but rather it is about the popular opinion amongst libertarians. Most libertarians oppose what they call "the war in Iraq." They believe this war was started by President George W. Bush as a pre-emptive attack against the regime of Saddam Hussein in the name of national security. There are a few of us however that do not believe this is the case. We recognize that a war has been going on in Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait in 1991 through regular bombings intended to enforce the no-fly zone that killed hundreds of civilians each year, and through economic sanctions that killed many thousands more. Some figures regarding the deaths of civilians in Iraq during this time estimated that 100 thousand plus civilians died each year from inadequate food and medical supplies, a situation brought on by the sanctions, and not remedied by the U.N.'s disastrous oil-for-food program.

The U.N. primarily through the insistence, support, and skills of the United States military and U.S. tax dollars was killing many thousands of civilians every year in Iraq since the supposed end of operation desert storm. Yet we were not at war? Of course we were at war. We just were not hearing about it on the news. It wasn't american lives that were being lost. It was thousands (possibly millions) of innocent Iraqis.

Now that that has been said here is the part of the comment that bugs me. If you want to get the context of the original comment I suggest you read the original post and the comments section in which it first appeared.

Brothers and sisters in the struggle for liberty: our position on non-intervention is sound. Be proud of it! Stand by it! Even if you can’t marshall all the arguments have faith that when the facts of any war abroad are eventually gathered you will be vindicated. If you ever receive information that convinces you that a particular war deserves your support - know that based on past precedent, you have been lied to. Lie down till you feel better. Go to a holy person for excorcism. But do not support any war that will ever be waged by the Washington regime. Support all soldiers who refuse to go.

Meanwhile I will vote for any and all Libertarian candidates appearing on my ballot except for those I find out are war-supporting infiltrators.

I could agree with all of this. I would agree with the entire post (minus the war-supporting infiltrators nonsense). It was an interesting and very informative post about the impact of American interventionism and how we created both Saddam and Bin Laden (a fact I was previously well aware of). The problem is that once again we find a libertarian using the term "war in Iraq" to indicate the invasion that happened last year, and implying that those of us that supported that escalation of the war have decided to favor interventionism because it happened to suit us at this particular point in history. But the fact is I, and those who I have encountered who share my position, have never supported foreign intervention, premptive warfare, or anything that would qualify under the detailed pitfalls of America's history of foreign meddling that he mentions.

What Mr. Kelsey, and many like him seem to fail to understand is that sometimes escalating a war is the only way to end a war. Now perhaps an escalation of the war in Iraq was not the only way to end our 12 year conflict, however, I believe that it was the only politically feasible means of doing so for America. Furthermore many of the so-called anti-war libertarians seem to think that support of any military action is an implicit support of the entire war and warfare in general. This would mean that since I supported the invasion that occurred last year, I must therefore support the entire war including the 12 years of sanctions, bombings, and our initial operation in 1991. Oh yeah, and I must therefore support military interventionism in general. None of this happens to be true.

Phrases like "bring our troops home" and "end the war in Iraq" are bandied about so much that many seem to think, and in fact argue as if war could be ended by the wave of some magic wand, and that troops can be brought home just as easily without care or thought to the consequences. But there are consequences and wars do not always end simply because troops are pulled back, and declarations are made.

To those supposed anti-war libertarians, I supported ending the war in Iraq in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003. I was hoping it could be done without additionaly military action, but I believe this became unfeasible after 9-11. What were your opinions then? Did you know there was a war going on? Did you care? I know some of you did or I wouldn't have ever recognized the situation myself upon becoming libertarian.

This is remniscent of summer 2003 when many millions of Americans took down their yellow ribbons when President George W. Bush declared that hostilities had ended in Iraq in spite of the fact that we were not bringing any soldiers home and were in fact sending more into danger. Likewise for those of you who think the Iraq war started in 2003 and cannot recognize a situation as war unless it's labelled that in big letters on CNN I can only ask: are you blind? or is it something else?

I'm beginning to think that its merely an attempt to stigmatize those of us that disagree as unlibertarian, and "war-supporting infiltrators." I know my opinion is unpopular amongst libertarians, but that doesn't mean that its wrong. They are looking for a black and white world where they can blacklist anyone who ever supports any action by the state as immoral war-mongers even if it is their own stance that would have ultimately led to more death, decay, and warfare. Meanwhile their litmus test would have failed to root out certain libertarian presidential hopefuls opposed to the war in Iraq who also opposed open borders, and who didn't oppose taxation on principle. I don't know about you but I would rather vote for a "war-supporting infiltrator" who's goal was to end a war, than a self-described libertarian who's own professed positions were inconsistent with the non-coercion principle. But I suppose my priorities aren't shared by all.

My Nocturnal Brain

2004-07-12T05:19:00.000-05:00

I'm convinced that I have a nocturnal brain (presuming there is such a thing in humans). That is a brain that is most awake and active at night. Why do I think this?

Because after not having the time or patience to pull a blog entry out of my head for several days I suddenly find myself overflowing with ideas, and it's 5 AM. And of course I have to be up early tomorrow, but little things like that do not seem to matter to my nocturnal brain which had decided that thinking is more important than sleeping.

I'm well aware of the fact that your brain never really sleeps, and that for most people it can be more active when you are asleep and dreaming than it is during the day. I have a particularly active brain though when it comes to dreaming. I woke up from another neurotic dream a few hours ago to find myself contemplating my past, the use of symbols in dreams, the clarity (or lack there of) of my own thoughts, and the nature of morality itself, among other things. And like any brain active in the middle of the night I had to think about these things all at once, jumping from one topic to the next before I was even conscious that the subject matter had changed.

Now I am awash with thoughts I would love to blog on, and talk on, and think on, I have crazy dream imagery of giant rats and strangely formed tigers fresh in my mind, and I have to be up in about 5 hours to go to a job fair that I do not really want to go to.

I've been thinking about altruism (and not in a postive light), the nature of spirituality, ethics, imagination, creativity, evil, social diversity, and the impact of one's past experiences (my own in particular) on the present. And I've been wishing that there was some way I could convey all this mess of random thoughts into one clear coherent form, but alas it is 5 AM and coherency does not seem to be a high priority in my brain at this moment.

So since I do not think I could do justice to a rant on any of the above topics I've decided to blog on my brain. My brain should not be up at 5 AM when I am getting up at 10Am. My brain should not try to rehash my past while I am sleeping. My brain should focus on one thing at a time at least until the point that I am fully conscious of what I am thinking of before it changes the subject. My brain should let me go to sleep when I want to. My brain should not use people I do not like, and events in my past I would rather forget as recurring symbols in my dreams for issues in my current life.

My brain should find fascinating topics to contemplate when the sun is up, and not when I am trying to sleep. My brain is probably the perfect brain for an aspiring writer, and I should probably stop complaining about the inconveniences of having a very active imagination. There are worse things than being inconvenienced by an active mind that won't let you sleep. I just cannot think of any at the moment. Okay I am going to try and sleep again. If you find a long post here on the evils of altruism in the morning that means I failed. Goodnight er-morning... it's almost 6 now. Good brain, ignore all that stuff I just said, and let me sleep without fighting off tigers and giant rats...

I'm a fan of Instant Runoff Voting

2004-07-11T02:51:00.000-05:00

I am in favor of adopting Instant Runoff Voting. I think it would discourage negative campaigning since candidates won't want to turn off voters that might have otherwise picked them as their second choice option.