Friday, November 30, 2007

A Very Special Friday


Today is the last day I have to spend in this shiteous job. On Monday I begin a job that embraces new marketing concepts, creates value for our customers, and generates (hopefully soon -- fingers crossed!) profit for the company. This is opposed to my current focus on offshoring jobs with the explicit purpose of putting US workers out of work to cut cost... even where it doesn't make sense and isn't to anyone's benefit (try motivating yourself to get out of bed and do that every day).

This isn't to say my new division is Utopian by any means but I will be creating instead of destroying and you have no idea how grateful I am for that distinction. I'm even starting to feel a stirring of something vaguely familiar... something I used to feel with regard to my career... ambition.

It's taken 9 months of focused effort to escape (the division I'm leaving is notoriously hard to move out of) but here it is. And I'm sooooo ready. Thank you, thank you, thank you to the Universe.

Happy Friday!

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Republican Debate

I did not see the Republican's Youtube debate tonight (Kid Nation!) but I did read some stuff on it. My favorite so far was a pre-debate comment from John Cole:

Like a Cowboys/Browns Superbowl, I am rooting for injuries.

Did anybody watch? What did you think?

Sounds like it got a bit dirty. I wonder if Giuliani's performance was affected by his big news story. Also, Drudge is highlighting this complaint about a Clinton campaign supporter sneaking in a question.

Hillary-ious!

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Phone Bank

I did some phone bank work for Obama tonight... cold calling residents of Columbia, South Carolina, to invite them to attend an Oprah-Obama event in January. It was interesting.

First, why Oprah? What a stupid pairing. Is he trying to be more appealing to blacks? To women? To black women? I have no idea.

Second, cold calling people is brutal work. Lots of: "Who? What?" Immediately followed by: Click.

Third, it's a very small world. There were a dozen of us making calls (all but two were 40 or older) and I happened to know three of the people. One was someone I went to high school with, one was a doctor from a previous insurance plan, and one was the wife of someone my mom used to work with. Also... the building we were in just happens to have the parking lot where my best friend took me to get high for the first time when I was 16 (sorry Mom, it was 24 years ago, these things happened).

More DOW Charting


Has anyone else noticed the wild up and down daily swings in the DOW since mid-summer? I thought it was due to erratic / emotional investors but it may actually be the result of something else.

I was trolling the Yahoo message boards on a particular stock at lunch and I saw a random comment about how the demise of the Uptick Rule on July 6, 2007, was allowing Hedge funds to distort the daily stock trends. I went to my handy dandy DOW graph to look at the YTD to see if I could spot anything to back up that claim and, sure enough, you can sort of see it. To the left of the red arrow (July 6th) it's a smoother line. To the right of the arrow, it gets quite jagged. As always, just click on the image above to enlarge it for easier viewing.

I'm not sure that it means anything important except maybe to give some peace of mind to people who freak about their retirement portfolios when they see the market leap and lurch like that every day. Short selling in general does seem a little... unseemly, though.

For those who are novices at this stuff (like, um, me...), here's the definition of the Uptick rule I found at Investopedia:
A former rule established by the SEC that requires that every short sale transaction be entered at a price that is higher than the price of the previous trade. This rule was introduced in the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as Rule 10a-1. The uptick rule prevents short sellers from adding to the downward momentum when the price of an asset is already experiencing sharp declines. The SEC eliminated the rule on July 6, 2007.
(Ding dang, ya'll... how many 'pedias are there???)

Note to Ted

Senator Ted Kennedy, 75, is poised to publish his memoir.

Dear Senator Kennedy,
Please don't. Chappaquiddick still makes my head hurt and there's nothing else about you, or "growing up Kennedy", that I need to know.

Best regards,
Think, Dammit!

Freaky

From the WSJ:
The property value of U.S. homes will fall by $1.2 trillion, and "at least" 1.4 million homeowners will lose their properties to foreclosure in 2008, according to a study released Tuesday by the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Council for the New American City.
That's $1.2 trillion that has just vanished from our working economy. *poof

And by working economy, I am referring to that part of our economy that is material to our citizenry... as opposed to the "glorious GDP growth" economy created by bankers and global industrialists, representing money we don't actually get to touch.

Walking Like A Duck

Imperialism:
im·pe·ri·al·ism (m-pîr--lzm)
n.
1. The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations.
2. The system, policies, or practices of such a government.

Today's Chicago Tribune:
It was completed as the Bush administration sought to draw attention to improved security in parts of Iraq. The text calls for the United States to help protect Iraq's natural resources, including oil, and commits America to assisting Iraq on the path to a free-market economy. Lute said the message of the agreement was that "Iraq is increasingly able to stand on its own, but it won't have to stand alone."

But Lute refused to close the door on the possibility of permanent military bases, saying it would be a subject for future negotiations.

He also said that as part of a long-term pact, the two countries would work toward achieving reconciliation among Iraq's warring sects, assuring all parties that the United States was an active partner and they should not "hedge their bets."

The declaration of principles also calls on the United States to promote private investment in Iraq, particularly from America, and steer further American financial and technical assistance to Iraqi institutions.

All Roads Lead To... Palestine?

Is it, like, a kind of presidential mid-life crisis that somewhere toward the end of their last term they become obsessed with the idea of bringing peace to the Middle East? Do U.S. Presidents experience an eleventh hour "come to Jesus" moment where the light bulb goes off and suddenly they realize they must -- Must! -- bring the Israelites and the Palestinians together?

Bush has completely, almost spitefully, ignored the topic for seven years and now, suddenly, it's at the top of his agenda.

It seems like just yesterday we went through this with Clinton.

Monday, November 26, 2007

New Years Resolution #1

I just thought of my first New Year's resolution for 2008: I am going to buy a compact digital camera and keep it with me at all times -- and -- use it. It will be off limits to kids.

We've had a horrible year for pictures. You may notice that most of the family pics on my blog are grainy... this is due to our habit of using cell phones as cameras. We do have a regular sized digital camera but there have been issues. The kids run off with it and then I can't find it when I want it. Or they erase pictures before I can download them.

The most heartbreaking loss was Kirsten's prom pictures. Mere hours after I painstakingly took dozens of shots of the beautiful Kirsten (before her date arrived - yuck), Ryan decided to make room on the camera so he could take a few pics of himself by hitting "delete all." Everything -- gone.

All that I had left to mark the occasion was the official "couple" portrait that was taken at the dance. I have finally scanned it to my laptop so I can show her off (with one little fix):


Which seemed like a better alternative than this:

Fox Cannibals

This is getting some attention around the blogosphere:
Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) suggested on Sunday that Fox News is biased against his campaign, charging that the network highlights commentators who have been critical of his run for the presidency.
The story probably wouldn't be as interesting to me if I hadn't read this previously about Fox trying to handicap John McCain:

Earlier in the week, Fox had demanded that the McCain campaign cancel an advertisement that prominently featured his performance in a debate Sunday night that Fox News had sponsored. The advertisement featured a video clip of Mr. McCain’s shot at Senator Hillary Clinton for pushing a $1 million earmark for a museum commemorating the Woodstock festival in 1969, ending with the biting observation that he was “tied up” during the concert. Mr. McCain was in a North Vietnamese prison at the time.

Earlier tonight, the Web site Talking Points Memo pointed out that the campaigns of Mr. McCain’s rivals, specifically Rudolph W. Giuliani and Mitt Romney, made liberal use of footage from Fox images to promote their candidates, but had not been told to remove the images.
Fox has always been fairly transparent with their agendas, I'll give them that. It's interesting now to see them so invested in one GOP cadidate at the expense of the others.

I feel kind of sorry for John McCain, who I still really like. The poor guy must have some really bad karma... you may recall that he got screwed in South Carolina in 2000 by the Bush campaign's dirty tricks (I suspect this laundry list of offenses is more accurate but I can't vouch for the source).

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Goodbye Thanksgiving, Hello Christmas

Thanksgiving weekend is over but I think we made the most of it. Dinner at Mom's was amazing (thanks Mom! xoxoxox). Lounged around watching movies ("House of Flying Daggers" is great... "Stir of Echoes 2" not so much, although Rob Lowe still looks hot after all these years). Shot some pool. Drank some glug. Watched some Bears. Did some shopping. Did some laundry. Dyed KK's hair (she wanted to go darker). Thoroughly cleaned Ryan's room (as opposed to pretending not to notice when he shoves all the crap on his floor into his closet).

Now we're ready to transition to Christmas.

Jeff got the outside Christmas lights up today after a few years of not getting the outside Christmas lights up. I'm so inspired I may actually mail the Christmas cards this year instead of just buying them.

Huckabee

I liked this from Mike Huckabee:

"Every time we put our credit card in the gas pump, we're paying so that the Saudis get rich — filthy, obscenely rich, and that money then ends up going to funding madrassas," schools "that train the terrorists," said Huckabee. "America has allowed itself to become enslaved to Saudi oil. It's absurd. It's embarrassing."

Huckabee said "I would make the United States energy independent within 10 years and tell the Saudis they can keep their oil just like they can keep their sand, that we won't need either one of them."

I'm not sure if we have the technology to be energy independent within 10 years but we could sure as hell be working at it a lot harder than we are.

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Pool Blogging

It has been suggested to me that I should do some pool blogging since that is what we love to do around here.

Our pub rocks... it's very cozy. It's split into two sections by an exposed fireplace -- one side is more brightly lit with games and tables, the other side is darker with a huge bar and more tables. They've got a great video music system... it's become my primary source of new music (other than trolling around iTunes).

Rascal's has gotten "trendy" of late -- which sucks -- but bar trends around here don't last long and I'm sure the "it" crowd will find a new "it" place soon. Until then, the influx of barely legals is annoying.

We go almost every Friday night and know all of the other regulars on the gaming side... a lot of really nice people. There's always a challenge to answer. Jeff has a superb game, mine is about average. Occasionally I get into the zone (feeling my SimoJo!) and am able to whoop some ass. Last night was one of those nights. I think it was the whiskey. :-)

Here's Jeff last night:


And here's me:


p.s. Sorry for the two consecutive posts with my pic. I am very uncomfortable being photographed so I usually prefer to stay away from cameras. I will return to blog anonymity immediately.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Me and Linc

Just prior to slipping into a tryptophan induced coma.

Turkey Day


A very happy Thanksgiving Day to everyone!

We got a thin layer of sloppy wet snow yesterday, our first of the season. Fortunately our regular pub is only about half a mile up the road so the snow didn't wreck havoc on our pre-Thanksgiving celebration. Or our pre-pre-Thanksgiving celebration over at Mom's.

Kirsten arrived around 6 a.m. this morning and promptly crept downstairs for some sleep (she worked all night and drove down from Madison directly). While we're heading back to Mom's for the day with my other sibs, the girls are heading out to see their dad's family before joining up with us later. As well as my ex and I have learned to get along, twelve years later the split holidays are still a bit of a drag. On the bright side, it'll be a few hours that I won't have to listen to Ryan and KK fight.

Tomorrow we're heading to a friend's annual Glug making party. If you've never had Glug let me assure you it's horrible... stay far, far away from it. If the sweetness of the brandies doesn't kill you, the Everclear will. But it's the one time of the year we get to see this particular crowd together and we haven't been good about hitting all the previous years parties so we're definitely overdue. I'm looking forward to it.

Hope everyone has a great holiday weekend. Love to my local clan, my Texas clan, my Illinois clan!

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

What Is Wrong With These People?

Wikipedia has been rejected by conservatives not just for it's legitimate failings (any Joe Web User can submit entries and edits to it) but because -- get this -- it's got a liberal media bias. Hmmmmkay? So conservatives decided to do what conservatives like to do when the the world starts looking too unconservative... they've created their own alternate version of reality. They've created "Conservapedia".

What's funniest about Conservapedia is what it tells us is important in the mind of today's conservatives. Take a look at the screen capture I did of their statistics page (click on the image to enlarge it for better viewing). Notice anything interesting about their most viewed pages?


Hilarious! I wonder if this is titillating to them in the same way that sneaking peeks at boobies in National Geographic was to me and my friends in second grade.

Except, well... we were 8.

Democracy, Anti-American Style

Oh good lord...

President Bush yesterday offered his strongest support of embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying the general "hasn't crossed the line" and "truly is somebody who believes in democracy."

Bush spoke nearly three weeks after Musharraf declared emergency rule, sacked members of the Supreme Court and began a roundup of journalists, lawyers and human rights activists. Musharraf's government yesterday released about 3,000 political prisoners, although 2,000 remain in custody, according to the Interior Ministry.

Humorously, Joe Biden makes fun of Bush for having the worst. judgement. ever.

"What exactly would it take for the president to conclude Musharraf has crossed the line? Suspend the constitution? Impose emergency law? Beat and jail his political opponents and human rights activists?" asked Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a presidential candidate. "He's already done all that. If the president sees Musharraf as a democrat, he must be wearing the same glasses he had on when he looked in Vladimir Putin's soul."

And what is the big victory we've achieved if Musharraf "takes off his uniform"? Are we to believe he won't still control the military if he calls himself President instead of General? Maybe I'm missing something here.

I think BushCo needs to rethink whatever it is they think that Musharraf is bringing to the table in the long term. Our deals with devil never go well for us in the end... the so-called "friends" on our payroll have a tendency to walk away as soon as they get a better offer.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

You've Come A Long Way, Baby

What a difference from the days of "I didn't inhale."

Obama stopped by a study hall at Manchester Central High School and answered students' questions about the war in Iraq and his education plan. But when an adult asked about his time as a student, Obama spoke bluntly.

"I will confess to you that I was kind of a goof-off in high school as my mom reminded me," said Obama, an Illinois Democrat who grew up in Hawaii

"You know, I made some bad decisions that I've actually written about. You know, got into drinking. I experimented with drugs," he said. "There was a whole stretch of time that I didn't really apply myself a lot. It wasn't until I got out of high school and went to college that I started realizing, 'Man, I wasted a lot of time.'"

Obama has written about his drug use in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father."

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final fatal role of the young would be black man," Obama wrote. Mostly he smoked marijuana and drank alcohol, Obama wrote, but occasionally he would snort cocaine when he could afford it.

The truth sounds so much less stupid than the lie.


p.s. There's speculation that this was Obama's way of "inoculating" himself against whatever it is that Count Novakula thinks Hillary has on him. It could be... and if so, smart man.



With Support Like This...

This is insane:

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

Note to everyone who thinks supporting the troops means wearing a flag pin on your lapel: You want to support the troops? Take off your worthless fucking pin and help fix stuff like this instead.

The link references a piece of legislation that's been introduced by U.S. Rep Jason Altmire (PA). I looked it up online -- it's H.R. 3793 and it's been in subcommittee since 10/19/07.

I've emailed my Congressmen to support it. Anyone interested in doing the same can do so via this website.

Lazy Blogging

John Cole spares me the trouble of writing the thoughts in my head by doing it first.

After surveying the response of Greater Wingnuttia (via Memeorandum) to the NY Times piece we discussed earlier, it is good to see there has been no reformulation in the wankosphere as to what constitutes media bias. The old formula still holds:

“If I disagree with or don’t like a story, then it is liberal media bias. If Is agree with or like a story, then it’s so powerful that not even the liberally biased media can ignore it.”

I've found it surreal that certain people have continuously clung to their fantasy that things have gone better than reported while ignoring the overwhelming body of evidence that things have NOT being going well. Like the media is acting as one coordinated, collective body to mislead us all with their media bias. Really. And most startlingly, that people like me who haven't ignored reality are suddenly aggrieved to think that Iraq might get fixed. Yeah... really.

Now that there are signs that things seem to have gotten better, I think everyone can put their personal positions and anger and ideologies aside to be glad for any improvements in Iraq. For whatever reason things are improving, I'll take it and be grateful. Due to our history there I am not, however, going to get sucked into "mission accomplished!" mania. And I would think after their history of premature celebration -- having insisted, so very wrongly, that things were fantabulous when clearly they were not -- that certain war cheerleaders would want to hold back a little longer to see what happens after we've de-surged. Or what happens when it's time to get serious about divvying up political power and assets between Iraqi interests.





Whatever Happened To...

Who was behind the coincidentally-9/11- timed anthrax attacks? It would appear they came from a home grown terrorist since the anthrax strain was traced back to a US military laboratory.

As far as I know, our first onshore biological warfare event (more scary to me than a hijacked plane flying into a building) is still an unsolved mystery. The fact that it has just sort of faded from everyone's consciousness is kind of, well... weird.

Pondering the DOW


I can't tell you how often I have looked at the DOW chart above trying to figure out what the crazy growth that exploded around the mid-90's means. By what measure is this an indicator of national prosperity? The conclusion I've drawn is that it's not. All it measures is the wholesale buyout of assets due to 'cheap money' now available at historically low interest rates. Kind of like giving in to that new plasma TV at Best Buy because it's "no money down and no interest", except on a much bigger scale. Buyers (both foreign and national) have been leveraging cheap, plentiful money (due to a combination of low interest rates and loose lending practices) to accumulate assets.

This has nothing to do with the "success" of supply side economics, nothing to do with tax cuts, nothing to do with the IT boom, and nothing to do with the real estate boom (except in that real estate was yet another asset in over-demand due to cheap, available money).

IF lending practices tighten due to subprime fallout and IF the weakening dollar brings higher interest rates, investors could dry up or start looking to other markets.

If this is true, and if the days of cheap, available money are coming to a close, so will the jacked up demand value of the DOW. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing... it's much healthier for the economy in the long run if the DOW adjusts to reflect the real value of the company portfolio it represents. I wish those companies had been busily re-investing more of their windfall in the US economy during these happy times but so it goes... to Argentina, China, India, etc.

I guess that's a post for another day.

Disclosure: Not an economist. The last econ course I took was in high school, 1985, so take it with a grain.

Funny

I love it... the King of Spain's "Why don't you shut up?" comment to Hugo Chavez is a ringtone hit!

I'd like a ringtone of the Columbia University audience laughing at Iran's Ahmadinejad.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Petrodollar Research

The petrodollar concept popped up on my radar back in 2002-2003. Usually I read about it as it related to our interest in Iraq (oil)... and usually it was frantically referenced by someone arguing against the war. I dismissed it as interesting but irrelevant. (me=sheeple)

I have read virtually nothing in the mainstream media on petrodollars in any context since. Then, over the weekend, I read this about OPEC assessing the merits of abandoning the dollar:
In an embarrassing blunder at the meeting in Riyadh, ministers' microphones were not cut off during a key closed meeting, and Prince Al-Faisal was heard saying: "My feeling is that the mere mention that the Opec countries are studying the issue of the dollar is itself going to have an impact that endangers the interests of the countries.
The idea of our enemies using our oil dependency to bring down our economy is something I'd written about just a few weeks ago. We're vulnerable. That the Wonder Twin assholes in Iran and Venezuela would be actively working on it doesn't surprise me either. What I suddenly wanted to know is, what kind of impact would the switch from petrodollar to petroeuro have on the US economy? I set off around the intertubes alookin' for a clue.

The most notable thing I found was this very thorough and inflammatory report about the petrodollar that foretells the collapse of the US dollar. I say thorough because the author provides a lot of context and a lot of facts. He also ties in a few ideas and conclusions I've reached separately and on my own (not in relation to each other or the petrodollar). In fact, as I read this report I found it absolutely uncanny that so many of the things that have been bothering me that I thought were unrelated may actually be related.

The reason I call the report inflammatory is because there are a few places where, in the absence of facts, the author does a little speculating. Normally I love extrapolating on facts to engage in a little speculation and theory creation. It's a hobby. But here I was just looking for the facts... I found his speculatory efforts a bit distracting.

I would love for someone else to read the report and discuss it with me. I'm not saying a shift to the petroeuro is inevitable but it gets more likely -- even in incremental phases -- as the dollar continues to weaken.

I don't know how credible the author is (you can judge that for yourself) but the concepts here are certainly provocative.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

This And That

  • Da Bears... *sigh
  • We found a significant leak in the main water pipe in the basement this morning. Jeff thought it wouldn't be difficult to fix so he and Ryan headed to Home Depot "for a part" as I headed to the grocery store. About 90 minutes later I returned to hear a strange noise coming from the basement, which Ryan gleefully identified for me as a blowtorch. Oy! No worries, though -- Jeff got 'er fixed. He lit, he plumbed, he conquered.
  • I guess I was the only one surprised by News Corp's support for Giuliani. My turn to be a naive sheeple! Frank Rich's NYT column dished some well-linked Giuliani dirt today. I don't know when they started live-linking opinion columns to associated news sources but it's a great idea (as well as entertaining).
  • Speaking of Giuliani, I saw a great round-up of former Homeland Security Czar nominee Bernard Kerik's boo-boo's . I was surprised to find out he started as Giuliani's chauffeur and ended up Police Commissioner? That's quite a career path!

Filed Under "Irony"

Josh Marshall has this gem:

Remember Manuel Miranda? He was the judicial nominations 'counsel' to then-Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) who got busted and subsequently canned for hacking into senate Democrats' computers up on Capitol Hill. Seems we've sent him to Baghdad to be in charge of teaching Iraqi legislators democracy.

The State Department has hired him to head up the Office of Legislative Statecraft at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Insurance

I just completed the annual benefits enrollment process with my employer. It's gone up quite a bit this year... the amount I pay for health insurance to cover my family of 5 is now $400 a month.

Freakin' unreal. How do folks without access to insurance via an employer afford it?

As an aside, this is one of the cost factors behind my company's decision to start actively dumping its US work force. When people balk at the idea of a single payer system, I think they're missing this point.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Good To Know

Sully points out that the President's oath of office was incorrectly referenced last night by both Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd. For those who are interested, the actual oath is this:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Note: Not the land or the people... The constitution.

A rather poignant distinction if you think about it in the context of Bush's actions as president.

What Happens In Vegas

I had heard that the Hillary supporters at the CNN debate in Vegas were badly behaved but this is the only first-hand account I've read.

There seem to be a lot of audience"noise" in the live broadcast but I couldn't figure out the source.

Payback

*FINALLY* someone points out to the boy king how our government is supposed to work and actually has the balls to back it up.

This is pretty damning as well.

I often get frustrated with Dems who don't like Obama because he isn't viciously partisan enough. It's hard, though, to dismiss the reason these Dems feel the need to retaliate: the Bush administration has used every opportunity it can to operate in partisan FU mode, regardless of what's in the best interest of the country.

Payback is gonna be a bitch.

Literally.

Musharraf And The Common Good

It's very naive for people to believe that our government does things for a common good outside of our own national self-interest. For example, that we took out Saddam because he was an evil dictator and all around bad person. Or that we're on a mission to spread Democracy for the good of foreign peoples.

It's all just pretty, sweet prose that the government uses to get the public to endorse some otherwise grossly pragmatic ideas. Not that that's always a bad thing... personally I want our government to act in our best interests. It's just that this particular government and I don't always agree on what that is.

Take our friend Musharraf in Pakistan, for example. Seriously, take him (bah duh dum!). He's an evil military dictator who is useful to us in the same way that Saddam was once useful to us... another one of the best friends money can buy. We give him enormous sums of money and look the other way when he plays pretend democracy and commits egregious human rights violations, and in return he keeps his thumb on the Islamic fundamentalists and gives us land use.

I'm not saying this isn't an acceptably practical approach but let's understand it for what it is: convenient. The US government is not an idealist. The US government is a pragmatist. You can't understand this as truth and still buy wholesale into the kind of hyper-emotionally charged crap we were fed in 2002-2003. That's what so infuriated those of us who were demonized in the run up to the war. Sadly, many of our peeps got swept up in a tide of nationalism and fear (born of a sense of vulnerability) and forgot that a healthy government requires the skepticism of its citizenry to act as a counterweight.

So anyway, here's where our anti-dictator, pro-democracy government stands today:
Fearing the collapse of a friendly government, the Bush administration has begun a concerted public effort to salvage the presidency of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf by pushing him to compromise with political opponents and abandon emergency rule, US officials said yesterday.

US envoys intend to warn their longtime ally that they believe his power is ebbing, that he must lift the two-week-old emergency decree and work with former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and other opposition figures to stabilize the country.

Underscoring the warning will be an implied threat that if he doesn't take such steps, Washington is ready to deal with others who will, officials said.

The new tack reflects the Bush administration's belief that the weakened Musharraf remains their best bet, but that greater pressure and appeals to others within Pakistan are needed to elicit his cooperation. As part of their efforts, the Americans might appeal directly to Pakistan's all-powerful military, calculating that influence from Musharraf's officer corps is vital to ending the widening political chaos.

Really for reals, Bush is totally almost completely 100% serious about kind of absolutely fixing that Musharraf problem, for sure.

The Great Debate

The Democratic debate last night on CNN was pretty lively despite Wolf Blitzer's best attempts to make it otherwise. Note to Wolf: A debate generally does not involve yes/no questions. Candidates are supposed to string words together to make persuasive sentences. Trying to skewer the candidates with "gotcha" questions and then removing any context from their answers is not helpful to either the candidate or the voter.

The pundits seem to have universally declared Hillary the winner. Not sure that I agree... I thought she did as well as anyone but I didn't see anything spectacular. I don't like her... I guess that might have something to do with it. In fact, I think Wolf's only redeeming moment of the night was getting Hillary to admit NAFTA was a failure. She's very well rehearsed, though, I'll give her that.

It continues to amaze me that Obama doesn't shine a bit more brightly in these things. He is probably the best public speaker I've ever heard (even the crazy 99 degree heat did not seem to affect him that day we stood by the Rock River to see him in 2004) but his debate performances continue to be wonky, thoughtful, and sensible. He's got to cut that shit out. Other than me, apparently, America does not like wonky, thoughtful, and sensible debate performances. They like zingers and funny one liners and elbow jabs. They want to see roller derby debates and they want their debaters to be in costume.

*sigh

Bill Richardson surprised me... he's a man of ideas. Unfortunately he tanked himself when he was asked if he'd put human rights above national security and he said yes (or something to that effect). I understood his point and, in the abstract, it's valid. There's definitely an argument to be made that our foreign policies, where they've undermined human rights, have created more (or, perhaps, different) threats against us. But you can't actually SAY that and be taken seriously by anyone... it's just not the national mindset. Stick a fork in poor, earnest Bill... he's done.

The immigration questions were all very interesting. From drivers licenses for illegals to border control and immigration, the responses were quite varied. I think drivers licenses are a good idea and I understood Bill Richardson's and Obama's positions (and Hillary's, before she chickened out). Since I'm a recent convert on this idea, I totally understand all of the arguments against it. I don't think of it as "a nice thing to do for illegals." It's become a matter of safety and, ultimately, national security.

Immigration reform is necessary for our economic future. We need more workers to replace the boomers who are nearly ready to start dropping out of the workforce. This is how our labor force has grown in the past and it's how it needs to continue to grow it in the future. We need to tighten border control and then make it easier for folks to enter the country legally. Undocumented workers cause more downward wage pressure than documented workers and it does not help us, culturally, to have illegals with one foot in this country and one foot still in Mexico. What we have in place right now needs to be fixed for our own future prosperity.

Dennis Kucinich was very entertaining... he's a funny little man. I'd invite him to a party... I would not invite him to be President. He certainly takes himself very seriously, though. It's kind of sweet and crazy at the same time.

I liked Chris Dodd, too, for his strong positions. Not necessarily positions I agree with but it takes some guts to say what you mean and mean what you say. Obviously he's not a serious contender.

John Edwards has shifted purposely to the left to court the base. I am uncomfortable with the obviousness of this move although I understand it... the base controls the primary. His political persona just seems so contrived to me. I know a lot of people love him but as far as I'm concerned he performed an admirable service as a malpractice and liability lawyer (and made a lot of money doing it) and he should be content to leave it at that.

Which leaves us with Joe Biden. Delaware Joe. Mr "In bed with the Financial Industry" Biden. If "politiciany" was an adjective it would be reserved exclusively for Joe Biden. His cynicism is almost palatable. He probably knows the ins and outs of Washington DC better than any of his peers on the podium, though, which could come in handy. On the other hand... ick.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Republicans Have All The Fun

The gay-tolerant, pro-choice, condom pushing Democratic Party gets way too much credit for taking this country to hell in a hand basket. After all, it's the Republicans who seem to be having all the fun! Add this to the list of gay preachers, bathroom trolling gay Congressmen, and prostitute lovin' Senators.

Not only does Fox understand the "do as I say, not as I do" nature of these people, they're actively marketing to them. Check out the latest from Robert Greenwald:

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Giuliani's Guardian Angel?

Scary, if true.

Judith Regan, the book publisher who was fired by the News Corporation last year, asserts in a lawsuit filed today that a senior executive at the media conglomerate encouraged her to mislead federal investigators about her relationship with Bernard B. Kerik during his bid to become homeland security secretary in late 2004.

The lawsuit asserts that the News Corporation executive wanted to protect the presidential aspirations of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Kerik’s mentor, who had appointed him New York City police commissioner and had recommended him for the federal post.

The obvious question here is, why is News Corp so invested in Giuliani? And why were they so invested in his presidential viability all the way back in 2004? I admit I have not really understood Giuliani's appeal as a presidential candidate but until now I've been a casual and dispassionate observer of his campaign. He's definitely popped up on my radar with this.

Smoking Gun has the lawsuit docs here.

I have never been comfortable with the size of these crazy media conglomerations. Especially News Corp, the largest of the bunch, which owns Fox News and has a list of other holdings that's longer than my arm. The ability to control information (and access to information, it seems) has got to be the ultimate power play.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Justice For All

One of the occasional positions on which my dad and I agreed.

For as often as we disagreed, I always felt especially happy during those times we stood on common ground. And if any single position could withstand both of our equal-but-opposite scrutiny and come out unscathed, you just knew it had to be a Universal Truth.

Fool Me Once...

I'd support this resolution if it also named the PKK as a terrorist organization. That's what it would take to convince me that we're truly interested in targeting terrorism as opposed to just targeting Iran. Otherwise I'm sensing a weird sort of Iraqi deja vu that it'll be bundled with a few other convenient outrages and used to sell the sheeple a new war for oil.
While the resolution, by Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., attracted overwhelming bipartisan support, a small group of Democrats said they feared labeling the state-sponsored organization a terrorist group could be interpreted as a congressional authorization of military force in Iran.
Criz-azy! I mean, where would anyone ever get an idea like that?

Would You?

Kanye West -- a controversial rap singer I know very little about -- has lost his mother after complications resulting from her cosmetic surgery.

Question of the day: Would you do cosmetic surgery?

Check out the Awful Plastic Surgery website for an incentive to age naturally. My personal faves are Mickey Rourke (I remember him being hotter than hell in Wild Orchid... what happened?) and, sadly, Mary Tyler Moore.

Veterans Day

Proving eagle eyed milton (now sadly absent) correct about my whiplash-inducing intellectual schizophrenia, I am going to post about an individual Iraq war casualty just days after pointing out that I never do that. This particular war casualty, however, is not about a loss of life. It's about a lost life.


Photo by Luis Sinco

I first saw the photo above on November 8, 2006. I know this because it struck me so viscerally when I saw it that I impulsively copied it to my hard drive. November 8, 2006 is the date on the file. The picture was associated with the battle of Fallujah and had appeared on the cover of the New York Post some two years earlier. "Smokin' " was the headline. "Marlboro men kick butt in Fallujah."

For those of us who tend to think of war in the abstract (and for those of us who prefer it that way), the rawness of this picture forces a necessary reckoning.

I found out today that the soldier -- James Blake Miller -- has a story that needs to be told. Take away from it whatever you will... it's also a story that needs to be heard.

His own words.

Luis Sinco's words (part 1 and part 2)

p.s. The LA Times online site requires viewers to register. It's free, takes about a minute, and doesn't lead to intolerable spamming (I've been registered for years without any resultant spam issues).

Sunday, November 11, 2007

How American!

China cranks out yet another hazardous toy in the form of "Aqua Dots" loaded with a chemical compound that turns into GHB when ingested.
Companies worldwide have increasingly outsourced manufacturing, often choosing Chinese factories for their cost and quality. But heated competition among factories and the rising cost of labor, land and fuel have sometimes put pressure on profits, causing some producers to cut corners.

In the latest case, the Aqua Dots or Bindeez were supposed to have been coated with nontoxic 1,5-pentanediol, a chemical commonly used in computer printer ink. But that chemical generally sells for three or four times the price of the toxic compound found on the tainted toys, 1,4-butanediol.

Private sector purists must be so proud of their Chinese understudy. In the purist's world, government regulation (which adds cost) is not needed to ensure worker, consumer, or environmental safety. If kids get hurt or start dying, market forces will eventually correct the problem -- right? Let the actuaries determine risk tolerance based on financial reward.

It's worked out so well for the lending community, after all.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Tsk Tsk!

Nice.
  1. Hillary campaign racks up a $157 bill at Maid Rite.
  2. Hillary campaign skips out without leaving a tip.
  3. Hillary campaign lies about leaving a tip.
  4. Hillary campaign uses the launch of her new instant rebuttal website, "Fact Hub", to lie about the facts.
All's I'm sayin' is anyone who'd stiff a waitress probably kicks puppies, too.

**Disclaimer: Former waitress

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Obama And One America

Andrew Sullivan, the conflicted conservative queer that I love to read, has been doing a lot of great posting on Obama of late. Sullivan, an Americaphile by choice instead of by birth, seems to be stirred by the leadership qualities he sees in Obama, the same ones I see.

You don't hear a lot of vitriolic garbage coming from Obama because he really doesn't see two Americas, "one red and one blue." I don't believe he'd stoop to creating wedge issues to subdivide Americans for political gain, either.... I think he really believes in the greatness of one America.

Sullivan today links to this Atlantic article and it's a good one. My choice graf:
Obama’s mother was, in fact, born only five years earlier than Hillary Clinton. He did not politically come of age during the Vietnam era, and he is simply less afraid of the right wing than Clinton is, because he has emerged on the national stage during a period of conservative decadence and decline. And so, for example, he felt much freer than Clinton to say he was prepared to meet and hold talks with hostile world leaders in his first year in office. He has proposed sweeping middle-class tax cuts and opposed drastic reforms of Social Security, without being tarred as a fiscally reckless liberal. (Of course, such accusations are hard to make after the fiscal performance of today’s “conservatives.”) Even his more conservative positions—like his openness to bombing Pakistan, or his support for merit pay for public-school teachers—do not appear to emerge from a desire or need to credentialize himself with the right. He is among the first Democrats in a generation not to be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary. He does not smell, as Clinton does, of political fear.
Bingo! The author has successfully articulated what I have always sensed without fully understanding. I'll also say that Obama's willingness to step to the right when it makes sense is a major turnoff to those who sit far to the left of mainstream. It also happens to be how I used to be, before Bush and his delusional wingnut minions made me want to vomit on the entire right side of the spectrum. Refreshing.

I also liked these grafs regarding his religious experience:
You cannot confront the complex challenges of domestic or foreign policy today unless you understand this gulf and its seriousness. You cannot lead the United States without having a foot in both the religious and secular camps. This, surely, is where Bush has failed most profoundly. By aligning himself with the most extreme and basic of religious orientations, he has lost many moderate believers and alienated the secular and agnostic in the West. If you cannot bring the agnostics along in a campaign against religious terrorism, you have a problem.

Here again, Obama, by virtue of generation and accident, bridges this deepening divide. He was brought up in a nonreligious home and converted to Christianity as an adult. But—critically—he is not born-again. His faith—at once real and measured, hot and cool—lives at the center of the American religious experience. It is a modern, intellectual Christianity. “I didn’t have an epiphany,” he explained to me. “What I really did was to take a set of values and ideals that were first instilled in me from my mother, who was, as I have called her in my book, the last of the secular humanists—you know, belief in kindness and empathy and discipline, responsibility—those kinds of values. And I found in the Church a vessel or a repository for those values and a way to connect those values to a larger community and a belief in God and a belief in redemption and mercy and justice … I guess the point is, it continues to be both a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey for me, this issue of faith.”

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Barack Still Ba-ROCKS!

There may not be a perfect presidential candidate out there but I'm still of the opinion that Barack Obama comes pretty damn close. I've been purposely laid back in the last few months, trying to force my mind open regarding the slate of Democratic candidates but I've done my due diligence now and I'm ready to bring it home.

Politics is a dirty, dirty business and I'm pleased that Obama has resisted becoming more dirty than he absolutely needs to be. He took a lot of shit for not hammering on Hillary more but he got some swings in when he needed to and he didn't sound like a lame-ass, transparent, sound-bite posturing politician when he did it -- I liked that. His debate performances were much less stunning than I expected but, on the other hand, there's a believability about him... it's as if he hangs back and says the things he means instead of prattling on just to have something to say. He's also been getting a lot of flack for poor attendance in the Senate this year. Can't say I'm all too pleased about that since he's my Senator but I can't say it's really his fault, either. The way our primaries are rigged and the way the money flows there's just no other way to run a serious campaign.

I'm also pleased that Obama hasn't pandered to the base on Iraq, or on any issue actually. There's been a few missteps, perhaps... I suppose he shouldn't have actually SAID ALOUD that he'd go after the Taliban in Pakistan with or without Musharraf's permission. Then there was that whole homophobic preacher thing that pissed off the LBGT community but good. And, lest we forget, he was caught by Faux News with a bare lapel (full frontal flaglessness!). My only complaint is that, while he's been busily churning out wonky policy papers on his website, he hasn't been doing more of what he needs to do to beat Hillary... which is to say big, splashy appearances. Ok, so normally I don't like politicians who act like politicians but in this case I think he needs the exposure in order to counter Hillary's household name. Democratic sheeple are still sheeple.

Surprisingly, I dislike the idea of Hillary as president less than I thought I would. I am still appalled by the idea of alternating Bush - Clinton dynasties. I still don't find her personally appealing (she is not someone I'd want to have a beer with, if it mattered). I also think occasionally she sounds more like a Republican than some of the Republicans out there. But I'm telling you, she is one cold, cunning woman. A more enlightened version of Cheney, perhaps. I would be more than comfortable pitting the likes of her against Putin or Ahmadinejad. This may sound like I'm reading out of the media's "Conventional Wisdom on Hillary" handbook but for once I think the media has it about right.

So anyhow... I've got two Obama activities pending. The first is actual door to door work in Dubuque, Iowa, on the 17th (Iowa being kind of make-or-break by most estimates) and the second is phone work from the headquarters here in town on the 27th. If any of my lurking friends are interested in joining, please let me know.

Stream of Conscious Blogging

I've been thinking about context ever since I made an offhanded reference to it in a previous blog post.

There is a big difference between having facts and understanding them in context. For example, I can read factual news reports about recent events in Turkey or Pakistan all day long and still not really understand what's going on over there. I -- and apparently most of our media -- lack the indepth regional knowledge required to assemble the facts together in a way that depicts reality. What we get instead are a bunch of jumbled images and distorted ideas. Most of the time I spend online is not about trying to get facts; it's about trying to understand facts in context.

It can be a very frustrating and humbling experience, this iterative process of "learn fact, find context, revise opinion".

A few related and unrelated items swirling around in my brain today:
  • It's nice to see I'm not the only one thinking about context... Americablog struggles to put the Pakistan crisis in perspective (with better results than I've been able to muster on my own).
  • As readers of my blog know, I don't do Iraq body counts. I don't count civilian casualties. I don't post about car bomb incidents. I don't howl about every suicide bomber. This is because individual episodes, and even monthly totals, can be entirely anomalous to the big picture. Anomalies distort the truth. We saw this in Iraq back in 2004 when the insurgency was in its last throws and democracy was on the march in the Middle East. With, like, one month's worth of data/events, I was questioning whether I'd been wrong in all of my assessments regarding the war. As it turned out, I was not... at least not then. And that's why I haven't gotten too excited about the current numbers, promising as they look. I don't have the context... no clue what caused the drop in violence or if its sustainable. I'd like a few more data points this time before we declare victory.
  • There was a little burst of discussion in the blogosphere yesterday regarding Republicans having a change of heart regarding Democratic positions on issues once they themselves have been personally impacted by those issues. The impetus of this discussion (also here and here and here) was the current housing mess but it led to other cases, too, like Nancy Reagan's support of stem cell research when Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I also recall a conservative columnist, Catherine Seipp, who extolled the virtues of the private sector until she got cancer and spent the last precious months of her life battling with her private insurance company for treatment. Less specifically, I would cite the overwhelming voter response to "culture of life'ers" like Rick Santorum (later booted out of office) for messing with Terri Schiavo's right to die (a little empathy apparently goes a long way on this topic). And if I were to be utterly crude, I would include the number of women who call themselves pro-life right up until they, themselves, need an abortion. Ah, yes... WIIFM ("what's in it for me?"). A little empathy goes a long way if you're capable of applying it in theory before it directly impacts you.
  • This sounds blasphemous even to my own ears but I wish like hell BushCo would have laid out its Middle East strategy in its proper context from the get-go: without oil, the US economy will be laid to waste. Not only is our economy vulnerable to the threat of peak oil, but also growing global competition for the world's oil reserves. And the Middle East's own intra-regional squabbles. The scariest thing, though, is that we're also vulnerable to deliberate economic blackmail and/or ruination if certain countries decided they wanted to bring us down. Just look at all the strange international alliances being formed around oil deals in the past year or two. In that context, the war sort of makes sense. Instead of laying out the cold truth, though, Bushco played a bunch of emotional cards in order to win over the sheeple, while completely alienating anyone who tried in vain to follow their trumped up logic. Am I saying I would have supported a war strategically designed to protect our oil interests in the region? I'm not sure... I'm pragmatic but I don't know if I'm THAT pragmatic. It sure would have opened up some interesting discussions, though, regarding conservation, our national will to sacrifice, financing of, and speculative investment in, alternative energy sources. Instead we wasted years of valuable time debating the existence of WMDs in Iraq and whether or not Saddam and bin Laden were butt buddies. How insulting.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Checking Out The Dodge Charger

I have seen my midlife crisis and it looks like this:


UPDATE: Unfortunately, I have also seen my checkbook and it looks like this: $0.

Also, oil just hit $98. Oy.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Google

We have a saying in this house... "Google is your friend." Mostly it's directed at kids who ask questions (I'm trying to teach the use of reference materials for self-sufficiency). I myself use Google so much that I've made it my homepage. I use Google news like a maniac because I appreciate the ability to look at multiple news outlet's takes on any given story.

I have heard that Google has left wing bias. I haven't noted anything too overt in this regard for whatever algorithm they use on their news page but I have seen some nonsensical match ups of photos and news stories. For example, a health article related to teenagers with sexually transmitted diseases once was accompanied by a close-up picture of male genitalia. Full frontal. I figured it was the work of some pimply teenaged hacker.

This morning I was scanning the headlines (Pakistan's "state of emergency" -- whoa!). There was a headline about Bush's Attorney General nominee, Michael Mukasey. Note the accompanying picture on this one:

In case it's hard to make out the picture, that's the famous "thumbs up" pic from Abu Ghraib. Accidental or on purpose? Seems kinds of suspicious to me. What do you think?

Friday, November 02, 2007

Happy Friday (Really, For Reals!)



I got the job offer!

No start date yet but current manager has promised she will release me... should get a commitment next early week. Hopefully she won't drag her feet. New boss wanted me to start on Monday, which would have been just fine with me.

And get this -- I got another job offer two hours later, unsolicited. Same division though, no freakin' way.

Thanks for your good vibes... obviously these things matter. :-)

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Pussification, Etc.

Any feminist passion I had burned hot and bright in my early 20's and then quickly burned out. I can't say this was the result of a sudden epiphany... it was mostly because the topic became uninteresting to me. The prevailing forces in my life -- marriage, kids, career, house (or trailer, such as it was) -- consumed most of my attention. Everything else was just peripheral blah blah blah. I didn't need to champion the cause of feminism; I was already living it.

So anyway, today I was doing my usual lunchtime eating-while-surfing routine and I linked to this, which linked to this, which linked to a humorous 2003 blog essay entitled, "The Pussification of the Western Male." A person can't help but be intrigued by a title like that.

The contemporaneously challenged author of this essay, a man with the unfortunate gender-bending name of 'Kim', presents his case in three parts. In the first part, he waxes romantic about the good ol' days in which men were men. In the second part, he demonstrates the many ways in which men have lost their manliness. Finally (as in, "oh thank God it's over"), he promises to bring down The Man, er... um... The Woman... by voting for Bush, a man who surrounds himself with real men like Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, the latter who "if he wanted to, could fuck 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too." It's a slightly dated essay but don't let that dissuade you from the opportunity to look deeply into the soul of a troubled modern man.

Now, we could look at this essay as a tasty, low-hanging fruit and slice it all up into amusing little bite-size morsels that we could pop into our mouths and savor all night. We could do that... and Kim, bless his he-manly heart, couldn't have made it any easier for us. But in a way I'm sympathetic toward Kim because I recognize this wistfulness of his. I know men like this, and they are men I actually like. So while I can't cover Kim's individual points with any seriousness (save one, and I'll get to that later) I will address the topic in the abstract. That's right... I'm going meta.

*********

It's a tempting thing to measure the present against the past but we'll never be able to do it accurately. Something about rose colored glasses and selective memory. That isn't to say we don't try. For example, I have repeatedly told my kids about my first bike, a lime green, banana seated beauty, the greatest bike ever made. It had a very tall orange flag on the back which appeared to float above whatever hedge I was riding behind until the hedge ended and you could see that the flag was actually attached to my bike -- totally awesome! I used a laundry pin to attach a single playing card to the frame so it hit the spokes just right and made a really cool clicking sound that kept pace with my speed. And, before I got too cool for it, I had a white basket in the front that I thought made me look a little like Jan Brady. So, what do my kids prefer to ride all these years later? Dirt bikes. Short squatty alloy things with no character and a seat that disappears entirely under their butts when they sit on it. It's a wonder they can ride them at all with those hideous wide legged pants. Back when I was in high school we could not get our pant legs straight enough. We actually tight rolled the cuffs of our straight leg pants to make them even straighter. An ant could not have crawled up past my ankle without suffocating. But these kids today, they... oops, I digress.

It's a generational dynamic to revel in the absolute uselessness of those who come after us. Two years ago I had saved up some frequent flier miles (all of them, actually) and I decided to bump myself up to first class on a flight to Albuquerque. I was enjoying my complimentary mimosa about an hour into the flight when the man next to me, an older gentleman in a suit, said to no one in particular, "I remember when people used to dress nice on airplanes." After two seconds of wishing I hadn't gone with flip-flops that day, I let it go. It isn't 1955 anymore, and flying isn't the hallmark of sophistication, and having to remove my shoes at every gate is a significant pain in the ass. I'm not going to don heels and white gloves and a pillbox hat for the benefit of his memories.

And that's part of what I get from Kim's essay -- aside from gender issues, Kim is yearning for a past that still has meaning to him, where he is still relevant. The next generation propels culture forward while we're still clinging to the years that shaped us. Whether those years were superior is a bit subjective. How can my kids not see that a lime green banana seated bike with a flag is far superior to a cold impersonal light weight alloy imposter?

My mom has marveled many times that her grandfather's life spanned from covered wagons as the norm to a man walking on the moon. In the millennia that humans walked the earth, have we ever made a leap like that within a lifetime? If you think about it, man spent more than two thousand years living more or less the same way and then, BOOM! he completely changed everything he ever knew in the course of about 150 years. It's almost unfathomable in the big picture sense and yet it hardly registers with us at all as we scurry around attending to the day-to-day, measuring time by the width of our pantlegs.

Of all the cultural changes that progress has wrought in the past 150 years, the most important is this: strength is no longer a prerequisite of survival. Consider that for a moment. Since the dawn of man... since the time he first huddled in caves... the survival of our species has depended on big, burly, aggressive men. If you weren't a big, burly, aggressive man yourself then you'd better have been in the good graces of one if you wanted to have food, shelter, or protection. Their physical strength built cities, and nations. Hundreds of thousands of years of Darwinian programming have bred men for this purpose. The last 150 years of progress have made it unnecessary.

We have long been accustomed to the luxury of paying others to do what we can't. We buy food we don't kill or grow, we live in houses we don't build, we pool resources to pay police to keep us safe. But recently, productivity advances are about removing all physical labor from our lives. Whether its machines doing heavy lifting for us or just doing our laundry, we do less by brute force every day. A woman no longer needs a big, burly, aggressive man to meet her survival needs, nor do the aged, nor do the physically challenged.

Now this is not as dire a situation for men as one might think, for while he's been genetically designed to be big, burly, and aggressive, he's also been genetically designed with a great big brain to adapt to, and even drive, change. Besides opening pickle jars, change is the best thing he does. So maybe he loses the slight edge he had with the strength thing (since women also have big brains) but hopefully his cranial capacity will help him reconcile his place in the world over the next hundred thousand years or so.

But what to do about the here and now. If being a man isn't about big, burly, aggressive strength, then what's being a man all about? Kim goes in two different directions here. On one side he clings to the "male as master" stereotype of yore and the other side he's painting a Man Show caricature that's all about beer, boobs, and midgets.

My dad's generation may have been the first to really understand that their role in the world as males was changing and that it wasn't changing back. I'm not sure if it was as subtle and self-aware as that makes it sound, though... it was probably an awakening more akin to getting kicked in the scrotal region. This was probably the last generation of nurture vs nature manly men (whatever role genetics played in their nature, these men were raised to be big, burly, and aggressive). Men were men, women were whatever men wanted them to be, and children were to be seen and not heard. Or so it was what they expected. But if those WWI boys didn't want to stay on the farm, those WWII women sure as hell didn't want to stay in the kitchen. By the time the men of my dad's generation were starting to hit their stride, it was starting to dawn on women that working meant money, and money meant power, and power over their lives was something they wanted. After that came Elvis, women in the workforce, and the pill, and nothing was ever the same for anyone after that. The men who were raised to be the kings of their castles had suddenly found themselves in the middle of a revolution.

But I think Kim's insistence that women have pussified men is a little off base. Men may have lost control over women but that doesn't mean women have gained control over men. While sharing power may not exactly seem like a step up for men, it's really the cultural shift wrought by technology that has changed the role of men in a civilized society. Male traits of strength and aggression are becoming less necessary and are therefore becoming less valued. In today's heavily populated, predominately white collared, technologically driven first world, there are new characteristics needed to succeed. Collaboration. Compromise. Communication. Intelligence. These may likely form the new path of our evolution, and three of the four of them are traditionally considered "soft skills" that are associated with women (intelligence being non-gender specific).

This presents some problems for men as they try to adjust. Hundreds of thousands of years of genetic programming is not going to turn on a dime. Plus, the last 150 years of change are probably just the tip of the iceberg (I think it's going to be exponential). The good news first: it's not just nature at play here, but nurture, too, and the ability of humans to adapt to their environment seems almost limitless. The men of my generation seem less off balance than their fathers, and my son's generation even less. Plus there are still plenty of ways to channel natural aggression for fun and profit.

Now the bad news: as the mother of a boy, I know how hard it is to reconcile letting him "be a boy" versus teaching him how to do what's expected of him to succeed. This is not an issue to be underestimated. Big, burly, aggressive boys who grew into big, burly, aggressive men didn't necessarily have to adapt to a white collar world 50 years ago. There were plenty of blue collar jobs to support a strong, grunty sort of man and his family. That is becoming less and less so. Also, expectations at school are changing. This may be the single item on which I can agree with Kim -- aggressive "boy behavior" is treated like a disease and Ritalin is treated like the cure. Parents of boys are just going to have to stay vigilant about helping them reconcile their innate characteristics with those they need to survive and thrive in their generation.

For whatever we appreciate about progress, change is awkward. And, worse, it makes us feel awkward. How well we process it depends on several things... how big the change is, and what's in it for us. Women have been redefining what it means to be a woman for the past 100 years. They took a very narrowly defined role and customized it for themselves. Now women run the gamut from traditional stay at home mom to single career woman. It's true that men have been struggling to adjust to changes in the male/female dynamic at the same time they've been faced with changing cultural requirements but I have faith that they'll eventually figure it out. The changing culture will be a catalyst for them... and maybe it's a good thing. Manhood has always been a very small box. "Men do this." "Men don't do that." If one man wants to wax his unibrow and the other man doesn't, who the hell cares? As Darwin used to say, "May the best man get laid." Or something like that.

Request For Good Vibes

If you're so inclined, please throw some positive energy out into the universe with my name on it. I'm trying to get a new job in a different division of my company (one that will make me happy and productive instead of sucking out my humanity and whatever remains of my soul) and I should find out if I've got it in the next day or two.

This could make a ginormous difference in my life... fingers crossed!!!