Slackerama

I know I'm doing a terrible job keeping this site current. It's a good thing that only Dan and Doug read it. I am still working on the post that will convince Dan that the Religious Right is as much a "Gathering Threat" as Iraq was when Bush lied us into going to war with them, and since Dan supported that war, it stands to reason he should support this one too, rather than just writing off the antagonist as a "nuisance"....

But no time for that now. Mindless fun...about Washing-ton.

Religious Right: Mocked as They Deserve

What he said: Keep you Jesus off my penis...

Conservatism's Last Gasp

I have been arguing since George W. Bush's quasi-victory in the 2000 election that we are witnessing a decline of the modern conservative movement. People to whom I expressed this opinion, having witnessed that election as well as the two that followed it in 2002 and 2004, often gave me a puzzled look. Granted the 2002 election took me a little by surprise...and of course the 2004 election took me a lot by surprise...and neither really supported my thesis...which is to say that they appeared to entirely undercut it...But finally, finally, I think I'm on the road to my ultimate vindication.

As I've become such a slacker, this post is only going to cursorily present my arguments, but at least they'll be out there...6 years late...making me look like a band-wagon jumping pretender...but...well, screw you anyway.

The conventional wisdom for the last 10 years at least - to hear talk-radio and the news tell it - is that this is a conservative country. I disagree; I hold that it is a progressive country - I would even say "liberal" had the word not been so abused by the pundit class for the last 30 years - and here's why I say so: the Republican party has been barely beating the Democratic party in presidential elections and held the teeniest of margins in the House and Senate despite vastly superior organization, vastly superior financial resources, vastly superior political machinery, and a vastly superior propaganda machine (these things are easily verifiable by Google searches, so I'm not going to back them up unless forced).

In short, despite the apparent march of conservatism from the humiliating days Barry Goldwater to the triumphs of Reagan and Gingrich to its ultimate consummation under the Cheney/Bush, conservatism, has actually just barely been staying afloat. It has only been through intense discipline, enormous amounts of corporate money, an absolutely brilliant endless public relations campaign, and a willingness to lie unabashedly that the Republicans have managed to fool just enough of an already cynical electorate that they are responsible stewards of the public trust.

But finally, finally, the electorate is waking up. Credit what you want - the rise of the blogger class, the egregious incompetence of this particular conservative president and his administration, the natural swing of the pendulum - I personally choose to credit Jon Stewart, whose tour de force ass-kicking of Tucker Carlson provided the seed-crystal necessary to solidify public opinion against the woeful performance of the mainstream media for the last decade - but whatever the cause, people are finally demanding accountability, from politicians, yes, but more importantly, from the media. And under the strain of people questioning the spin, this loose collection of failing ideologies that banded together in a desperate bid for survival is finally falling apart.

Conservatism ain't over, and as a libertarian myself, I wouldn't want it gone, at least not the small "c" variety, but it's back on the defensive, and unless the Democrats do something utterly ham-handed, it should remain on the wane, and that's a good thing. I'm looking forward to my children growing up in a more reasonable zeitgeist than I did.

And because it makes me cry with patriotic joy, here is Jon Stewart brow-beating Crossfire to win Burke's "Man of the Decade" Award. Please watch this masterful performance:

Does Liking Wings Make You Gay?

There is some discussion of this topic in the comments section of this blog entry over at Doug's house. There wasn't room there for me to really engage the question, so I thought I'd do it here:

Does liking Wings make you Gay?

No.

Religious Right: Pernicious Threat

I've been having arguments with Dan (you will now see Dan poking around the comments...) through email since email was invented...by Al Gore. I decided that since I frequently argue the kinds of things with him that I'd like to write about on the blog, I might as well bring our fight public, streamlining my mental activity.

Thus, in an email yesterday, Dan called me a prig and posited the following¹:

I think that your characterization of this Christianity trend as a departure from the founders is only partially correct, though. One hears somewhat persuasive arguments the other way, that this was a nation politically steeped in Christianity and that godless pinko commies have leeched out all that wholesome goodness, leaving us desiccated and soul-less as a political society. I imagine the truth is somewhere in between, or rather, lots of sub-trends going in contradictory directions.

Here's what I say to that:

It's quite right to point out that Christianity is responsible for a great many wonderful things in the world, the abolition of slavery being one of those things. There are all kinds of Christian charities, and there are abundant examples of true Christians loving their neighbors and trying to help the least fortunate among us. Christianity in and of itself is not a bad thing at all.

However, I definitely think "this Christianity trend" - by which we mean a very specific contemporary ideology-cum-political-movement which exists separate from the general, traditional precepts of Christianity even while it co-opts those precepts for its own ends - embodies a "departure from the founders". *Not* because I think the founders were irreligious but because I think the architects of this movement are so misguided as to have no sense of the breadth of the founder's vision.

The contemporary Christian right has all but abandoned the Love Thy Neighbor and Live and Let Live aspects of the bible in favor of the fire and brimstone bigotry and the endless moralizing. Christianity in the hands of these charlatans has become a vehicle for authoritarianism, and that is as far from the ideals of the founders as you can get.

¹ At no point did Dan call me a "prig"

Busy Busy Busy

My life is a task-list that is constantly 20-items deep.

Chip away at a few now and then, but there's always a new one coming along... To some degree, I resigned myself to this when I bought a house. However, I didn't fully appreciate how much a wife augments the scenario. Now, it's not just me tripping over my toolbox on the way to the bathroom at 2 AM; it's also my wife...my pregnant wife. I'd put the toolbox away if I was done with it, but I need to screw the kitchen cabinet doors back on now that we've finished painting most of them. Of course, the toolbox probably wouldn't have been in the way in the first place had the all other available floorspace not been covered by drying kitchen cabinet doors. She really wanted those cabinets painted.

Of course, once we're finished with the cabinets, clearing valuable space on the living room and office floor, we'll immediately have to lay out all the baby clothes, so that we can organize them, plus there's the crib, and...oh yeah, we'll have to buy a trillion things for the baby; add items to the list for each car-seat, carriage, and hi-chair.

I don't know when the last time I paid a bill was. Thank god for the internet and auto-pay. Still, I should check the statements...as soon as I get out from all the other stuff...like getting rid of the cats that we can't keep (they're so cute). And God Damn! I'm starving.

Cortisone Went Well

This is a quickie. Those none of you who read my post about my back might be interested to know that I got a cortisone shot to my spine, and I feel significantly better. It doesn't feel as good as new or anything like that, but it's so far from the debilitating condition of the last few years, that I'm actually feeling hopeful about starting some exercises to help my back get and stay healthy, maybe take up yoga again, which kept me pretty healthy in the mid-90s.

The prognosis is this:

• The area from which my pain normally originates has become only a dull ache.
• A relaxed standing posture, that is, one in which I let my torso settle naturally onto my pelvis, causes no pain. prior to the shot, this position aggravated the entire left lumbar region of my back; there is now only a slight feeling of pressure.
• Standing with knees straight and feet together, I can bend forward to 90 degrees with only slight pain. For reference, my pain was so severe before the shot that I could not bend more than 15 degrees at the waist; getting further was not a question of fighting the pain; it was simply impossible.

In all, the overall feeling is all dull aches and no shooting pains. I'm still being very ginger about how I move, but I'm now very eager to ask the doctor about beginning a course of physical therapy to keep my back strong and healthy. When I return for my next shot on 20 December, I will do just that.

Happy days to all.

Well, Really, It's Baker's War

As usual, I was scooped by Glenn Greenwald, but I figure I should soldier on anyway. Here are a few musings jotted down last night as I watched the cable news replays of the historic Iraq Study Group Report:

• As Greenwald demonstrates, it's fairly ridiculous for anyone to take anything James Baker says too seriously, though Greenwald has different reasons that I did. As I was watching him speak on the report, I couldn't help but think back to his role in 2000 in Bush v. Gore. It's not too much of a stretch to say that, as an advocate for the appointment of George W. Bush to the office of the Presidency, James Baker is responsible for this war. Notwithstanding that he did everything he could to keep the votes from being counted and the voice of the people heard (whatever the outcome), a moral crime in and of itself, one has to wonder if he perceives any irony as he stands there desperately trying to clean up the mess created by the man that he put in the White House.

• Being unable to think much further than "this is as much your fault as anyone's, Baker" anytime he opened his mouth, I found Lee Hamilton a much more effective advocate for the ISGs findings. In fact, I don't think I had ever seen Hamilton speak before, and I was actually impressed by his clarity and forthrightness.

• At one point on 360, Anderson Cooper asked Baker and Hamilton whether President Bush had the credibility to follow-through on the ISG Report's findings and get us out of this mess. I would have given a million dollars to see Hamilton say, "As you know, you make peace with the President you have. He's not the President you might want or wish to have at a later time..."

• There was one moment in which Hamilton floundered on a question about the credibility of the Generals in Iraq. I wish I could remember the context...anyway, it was his only bad moment of the evening.

• Finally, I can't get past Greta Van Susteren's mouth. She could be the smartest woman on television for all I know; all I see when I look at her is that crooked slash, and I just want to smash it. I realize how awful that sounds, but what can I do?

Oh, and one more thing. Dan Savage kicks ass. He was on one of the shows, I can't even remember which one, now...maybe Cooper's, and he intelligently and forcefully defended gay parenting rights from the spokeswoman for "traditional families". Great job.


I know what your thinking: I should take the time, do the research, and get links to all of these stories for illustration and illumination. I'll do it if you pay me, so I can quit my day job.

Men Who Have Touched my Penis

1. My father

I can only assume that, in the course of his patriarchal duties, he had at least one occasion to graze the peter. Did he derive any enjoyment from it or go out of his way to repeat the incident once it occurred the first time? We can only speculate. And since I can't remember him touching it even once, we're just speculating on speculation.

2. My cousin

Everyone goes through a pre-pubescent exploratory phase, and mine involved a male cousin and I imitating a number of sex acts - really, engaging in them. Though I don't recall any manual contact, I would be lying to say there wasn't some oral contact. No full intussusception that I recall, but lips definitely touched glans on more than one occasion. Frankly, I would have preferred to have gone through this phase with a freaky-deeky teenage girl, but what can you do?

3. My doctor

Everyone gets a physical now and then. No hanky-panky, Dr. Jellyfinger.

4. Rex

When I was 19, I hitch-hiked from Boulder to Seattle, and the first guy who picked me up, an overweight 40-something named "Rex", grabbed the cock. I almost puked. It was awesome. At least he had the sensitivity to compliment the size even if it was just pillow-talk; [thanks, Rex.] He was a good liar. I think the best quote of that trip was "as good-looking as you are, I'd sure like to jerk you off". I'm not good-looking, you lecherous old smooth-talker.


How many men have touched your penis?

15 Minutes per Day

Though I know no one is currently reading my blog (with the possible exception of Doug and the occasional person who might happen upon it from Doug's blog), I find myself enjoying writing. It's a pleasant feeling to have my random opinions (like my Rolling Stones opinion below) out there in the world, and the mere prospect that someone might actually view them gives the act of writing much more weight than if I were simply writing an old-fashioned diary.

Now, I've never been a giant fan of the "washed-my-hair-this-morning-then-didn't-do-much-else" personal blog, but I've realized that if I ever do want to get and maintain some traffic here (which admittedly I do want), I'd better update my content reg'lar-like. To that end, I'm going to dedicate at least 15 minutes per day to writing and posting here, so there will always be new content.

Obviously, I can't guarantee quality, because A) I've never been much of a writer and B) forcing oneself to write in the absence of any real inspiration to do so is not a recipe for sparkling, insightful posts. For illustration, see this post.

In conclusion, I believe that I may have prematurely sold my Sun Microsystems (SUNW) stock at $5.55. I made money on the transaction, but I see now that the share-price has gone as high as $5.59. Alas, that's the game. Can't get overly attached to what might have been. Still, I'm kind of banking on them getting back down to $5.45 in the next week or so, so I can buy 'em back.

This is all part of my master plan to learn how to play the market. Sun shares are sufficiently cheap that a small investor like me can buy enough to spread the commission (typically $12.99 on E*Trade) over 200 or more shares. You see, in order for me to make money on the transaction, the price has to increase enough that I make back the cost of the two commissions (one purchase and one sale) required to execute the transaction (so bottom-line, $25.98 for the whole deal). Thus, if I only own one share of a stock, then in order to make money by selling it, its price has to go up by at least $26. This is an extremely unlikely scenario. However, if I own 200 shares, then each share only has to go up by 13 cents for me to cover the commissions, which is much more likely.

Anyway, I bought 200 Sun shares at $5.29, sold 'em for $5.55, netting a paltry but real $26, and now I'm looking to buy 300 shares when they get back down to $5.45. With 300 shares, of course, the price only has to fluctuate by 9 cents for me to cover. Pretty soon, I'll be in day-trading heaven.

In the time it's taken me to write this, SUNW has gone up to $5.62. Blast.

The Rolling Stones are Over-rated, but Not Worthless

There are many people out there who think The Rolling Stones are good. Worse than this, there are many people out there who think The Rolling Stones are better than The Beatles, a proposition that used to infuriate me in my youth but which I now simply find laughable. So laughable, in fact, that I'm not even going to try to substantiate my opinion, which I consider empirically obvious to any objective listener. I suspect that anyone who prefers The Rolling Stones to The Beatles is reacting to each band's myth rather than their music.

I could continue on about how even the myths are misleading and that people who gravitate toward the Stones, or rather away from the perceived mainstream poppyness of The Beatles are being fooled by the Stones cultivated grittiness, by their very publicly diving into the seamy side of the Rock 'n' Roll lifestyle - a move which did much to obscure their mostly upper- and middle-class background - when it was actually The Beatles who were a product of the gritty working-class world that the Stones would so successfully co-opt. When the Beatles became the undisputed rulers of the pop-music world, they had no reason to exploit their rough background. It would seem that they were just as happy to let it go...and leave it as yet another crumb for the always second-best Stones.

But enough of that; I didn't start this post to slam The Rolling Stones. On the contrary, I wanted to praise them for writing some of the most kick-ass music of all time. Am I contradicting myself by saying this after spending my first two paragraphs lambasting them? No. I never said The Rolling Stones were talentless, only that they were over-rated and don't deserve the place that they appear to occupy in music history as peers of The Beatles. The Beatles had contemporaries...but no peers, and if any artist came close, it was Bob Dylan, not The Rolling Stones, but again, I digress. Having been fed the Beatles/Stones dichotomy by the pop historians of the last 40 years, it was a logical place for me to start, but I only use it to say this:

While The Beatles were a musical phenomenon of amazing consistency who put out more than one LP averaging 14 songs each year from 1962 to 1970, each LP containing great songs from start to finish (with minor exceptions in the "Beatles for Sale" and "Magical Mystery Tour" cases) and whose worst output remains catchy and listenable, for all of their accomplishments, The Beatles never wrote anything that kicks as much ass as "Monkey Man", which may be one of the toughest, ball-crushingest songs in the universe. Much as I like to say The Beatles have no peers, I'd like to say "Monkey Man" has no peers. However, it does. Fortunately for the Rolling Stones, they also wrote "Can't Ya Hear Me Knockin'" which, along with The Faces "Stay With Me", may have one of the most viscerally infectious intros in musical history; so, not content to have written the singularly kick-ass "Monkey Man", the Stones went ahead and wrote the would-have-been-singularly-kick-ass-if-we-hadn't-written-Monkey-Man "Can't Ya Hear Me Knockin'". That's two songs that I would be hard-pressed to leave out of my top ten songs of all time list, and both of which might find themselves in the top five. The Beatles probably don't get more than one in there.

And that's what I have to say for the Stones. I don't really like The Rolling Stones. I don't have many of their albums, and those that I do have were bought of a sense of obligation to explore this music so hyped by so many people and, after two or three listenings, have been subsequently left to gather dust. "Exile on Main Street"? Sure, it's ok. It's got "Loving Cup", so it can't be all bad, but if I put it on, it's only for the Quartet:
5. Tumbling Dice
6. Sweet Virginia
7. Torn And Frayed
8. Sweet Black Angel
9. Loving Cup

And really "Sweet Virginia" is only tolerated because it happens to come between "Tumbling Dice" and "Torn And Frayed". "Sticky Fingers"? It's got "Can't Ya Hear Me Knockin'", but frankly, I'd be better off with some compilation, because other than occasionally feeling like a little "Sister Morphine", that album can go in the trash.

Yes, there is much sludge in the Stones's song catalog. Still, when they get it right, the get it right with a mother-fucking vengeance, and ultimately, it's worth going through the sludge to get to those gems.