Hand Made Luck

Wee Hours Monday Morning

2012-01-30T05:26:00.002-05:00

Busy weekend.

Busy times.

Little VJ has finally started outgrowing some of his clothes.

Good news.

Chapter 22

2012-01-23T06:08:00.009-05:00

This week the Kodak company filed for what is jokingly called "Chapter 22 bankruptcy" which means Chapter 11 for the second time.

Here's the thing.

It is a great day today because we take pictures pretty much for free.

Not like way back when my family had the Kodak Instamatic camera, which took pictures looking very much like the second image from the top.

You bought the camera, the film, the flash cubes (On the top camera), the picture comes out of the side, you pull back the... ... "paper" and in a few moments your image appears. If that image is terrible, you already paid for it.

In the early 80s the Polaroid company sued Kodak and they were no longer allowed to sell instant cameras or instant film.

Kodak bought back the Instamatic and sold us the "110" film & development camera.

With this, you had to wait three days for the drug store to develop your pictures before you found out if the pictures you paid for were worth the paper they were printed on.

Liking instant cameras all these years, we got a Polaroid instant camera.

They take pictures like the one Guy Pierce is holding.

Like the Kodak 110, the Polaroid had a built-in permanent flash.

Flash cubes had four, flash bulbs before them were one-and-done.

Today we take pictures basically for free.

I take all mine from my so-three-years-ago cell phone.

The quality is very good, just as good as the Instamatic, and if the picture doesn't work out, I just delete it and try again.

No charge.

Ain't it great?

If I Were More Cynical

2012-01-19T21:33:00.004-05:00

If I were more cynical I would speculate that right wingers beastly treatment of Barack Obama isn't to whip up support from their own side but to get lefties like me to come to support the President.

Think about it.

If there was nothing but crickets coming from the right, there would be little for liberals to love about the Obama administration.

It's almost as if Mr. Obama and the Republicans are engaged in a clever farce to make us think this center-right President is actually a good liberal constantly harried by mean, nasty "conservatives".

Hoards of overpaid right wingers calling a basically right-of-center politician a fucking communist as obnoxiously as humanly possible and liberals flock to support President Obama because punching every right winger in their fucking face just isn't logistically feasible.

How much is the political game just a game?

I mean really, the two sides fight over whether basic human rights (Muslims to be non-Christian, Gays to be equal citizens, women to have control of their bodies, undocumented Latinos to exist) should be protected or not, but are in complete consensus that wealth should continue (quietly if possible) to be redistributed upward.

They invented a Culture War, goad us into fighting it and then their benefactors pick our pockets and use it to buy an even larger share of our economy and our political system.

I am waaaaaaay to the left of Barack Obama yet I already know I'm going to vote for him this November and I already know who is going to win.

Business is going to win. Wealth is going to win. Inequality wins no matter which candidates pretend to represent the public or which ones go back to the private sector.

Yet I still want to campaign for Mr. Obama only because right wingers have too many faces and I only have two fists.

I'm running on a wheel.

What choice is there?

I know it's a scam but there's no viable alternative.

No alternative to the Business Party with two names.

It's as fake as professional wrestling.

I know Ron Paul isn't the answer.

Anybody who thinks public education is communism is beneath my contempt.

Resemblance?

2012-01-19T02:02:00.002-05:00

I may be crazy but the other night when VJ was sick with a cold, crying, haggard looking with mussed hair, I thought he looked like Cheech Marin.

Obviously one of these people is middle aged and the other (the one on the left) (just trying to help) is three weeks old but that's what I saw in the middle of the night.

Odd.

Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs

2012-01-16T18:36:00.003-05:00

On this MLK Day I've been thinking about how right wingers have been trying to make Martin Luther King apolitical.

Besides being complete bullshit, Dr. King was deeply political, I celebrate his politicality.

The world is a better place today because this man was political.

It just strikes me as odd.

The same right wingers who simply cannot keep themselves from sucking the dick of Ronald Reagan's corpse in public insist that a crusader for civil rights, who spoke out against the Vietnam War, who was organizing a Poor People's March, who was agitating with striking sanitation workers when he died, was supposed to be non-political.

A saint (he wasn't) who died and took our history or racism with him (he didn't).

In his day the same right wingers were calling Martin Luther King Jr. a communist.

Now they try to take him away from the left or even worse, claim him as one of the right.

"Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs" makes me think of Dr. King.

It was a defense of being political.

Nighttime

2012-01-16T05:59:00.004-05:00

Must learn to sleep in the day time.

The little one's night screaming hours have been expanding.

Capitalism And It's Discontents

2012-01-13T04:57:00.003-05:00

Culminating in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday there has been a critique of Mitt Romney's time as a venture capitalist running a private equity firm (Bain Capital) has been coming from an unusual place, it's been coming from his right.

This has been driving Fox "News", Rush Limbaugh and right wing columnists crazy.

They have been saying that Newt Gingrich sounds more like Occupy Wall Street than a Republican candidate. (Rick Perry has been getting less criticism for the same offense, commensurate with his standing at last place.)

Here's the thing though, criticizing the abuses of capitalism does not make a person a liberal.

The right wing base and the right wing elite are not the same thing, not even close.

The right wing base is not a capitalist movement, it's an authoritarian movement.

Just as there is an authoritarian argument against pot smoking (though it harms no one) and an authoritarian argument against gay sex (though it harms no one), there is also an authoritarian argument against unrestrained capitalism (which actually does harm people).

Newt Gingrich has no genuine disagreement with unrestrained capitalism, Gingrich is a common grifter, he is running a merchandise table cleverly disguised as a Presidential campaign.

Rick Perry is just a douche bag (and, shockingly, too much of a douche bag for the Republican electorate) but he's closer to the genuine argument.

The argument is best voiced by cranky old racist Pat Buchanan.

See, demographically, on paper the right wing base looks a lot like me.

White, male, hetero, over 35, no college, blue collar worker. (the fact that I'm not a Christian is a negative indicator and the fact that I've been a lefty to my core for over twenty years also helps)

Buchanan is no "free market" "libertarian".

There is an ism called producerism, one that puts emphasis on the honor of being productive and borrowing money to buy ailing companies (transferring that debt to said ailing company), selling off assets, laying off workers, outsourcing jobs is not only not productive, it's also not honorable and it nets an obscene amount of profit.

Even though this discontent over Romney's time as a venture capitalist "corporate raider" is made by petty politicians who probably don't really mean anything by it, the discontent is real.

This is the seem where the right wing juggernaut can be split.

Not only do the tea bagger types not like Romney because he probably thinks gay people are human beings and probably doesn't want to take control of women's reproductive parts away from women, they probably don't like Romney's image as a guy who made money off of taking away the jobs of working people.

Is there any way I can help?

An Outsider's Perspective

2012-01-10T21:19:00.003-05:00

Okay, Christian Mingle (.com) has a tag line on a commercial I saw this morning: "Find God's match for you".

I'm an atheist and I find this slogan at the least presumptuous and possibly blasphemous.

That was this morning, later in the day my travels took me to a nearby truck stop which features this Trucker Bible.

It's just a New Testament, so there's no Trucker Torah, sorry Jewish truckers.

Why not a Trucker Koran? Tao Te Ching for Truckers?

The Analects of Confucius, The Master... of the Open Road?

Mind you I've seen some truckers who looked like Jesus (It's quite a common look for roadies too) but this Trucker Bible just seems like the worst kind of pandering to me.

Besides being really rude, conversion just seems so cynical to me.

So much like a con.

And getting butts in the church pews is just the beginning.

Those preachers want 10% of the audience's income.

I'll bet the dating services ain't cheap either.

14 Days

2012-01-07T18:33:00.004-05:00

Little VJ is two weeks old.

He's eating well now and stretching his long legs a bit more.

He's not holding up his neck yet but I can see him exercising it, getting stronger.

He still doesn't like to sleep at night but he's still new.

Conspiranoia

2012-01-06T20:09:00.004-05:00

Just read this book. I've been on a weird-history kick for a while now and this one satisfied.

Here's the thing about conspiranoia, I think it's a thing that requires faith.

It's all about the invisible hand.

The invisible hand is the hand of god.

Whether Pat Robertson's vengeful god who flooded the low rent sections of New Orleans for... for... Mardi Gras?... or Milton Friedman's invisible hand of the "free market" or the conspiracy to keep people from driving electric cars.

Canadian author John Reynolds goes over the Tinfoil Hat All Stars, the Knights Templar, the Masons, the Rosicrucians, the Bilderbergers, Illuminati and even some secret societies that are something more than paranoid fantasy like Mafia organizations in Italy, China, Japan and the USofA.

Reynolds breaks down how these organizations started (the ones that actually existed) and goes into how a lot of conspiracy theories about them are totally bullshit. (But that's just what the Order of DeMoley wants you to think...) He really takes Dan Brown to the woodshed.

He also mentions organizations that are genuinely scary but don't get the History Chanel treatment like the American National Security Council.

I would have liked to have seen anything about paramilitary militias, a source of my own fascination/paranoia.

It's weird to think about. Conspiracies, paranoia.

Conspiracies are about victims.

If a shadowy cabal of bankers or Hollywood moguls or Old World royalty are secretly controlling the world, then aren't we all their victims.

Sometimes it's about things that actually really happened, like when Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG, anti-regulatory regulators and a bunch of minor league scumbags caused an economic collapse of epic proportion a few years ago.

But none of those guys were out to dominate the world, they just wanted to make a dishonest buck.

But really, a lot of these conspiracies do require a lot of faith.

A non-believer could care less about the location of Christ's bones or secret progeny or Muhammad's last half-eaten sandwich or even Roswell space alien carcasses.

As for secret societies themselves, aside from a few cults, secret societies are so 19th Century.

Our society is much more free than it has been in the past.

Secret societies are just not necessary anymore.

Sub rosa societies are for people fallen through the cracks of the larger society and aside from our comically unequal wealth distribution, our society has a lot fewer cracks than it used to.

It's not even illegal to be gay anymore.

Tame

2012-01-06T18:07:00.002-05:00

I am very high strung.

I'm hoping little VJ will help me to work through that.

For The Team

2012-01-05T04:09:00.001-05:00

Baby is being fussy tonight.

Staying up with him so his mother can get some sleep.

Back To Work

2012-01-03T21:04:00.001-05:00

Went back to work today.

I went a whole five hours before calling to see how el baby was doing.

Looking at him right now, he's good.

Photoshoot

2012-01-01T15:57:00.001-05:00

Little V.J. had his first photo shoot (in two parts) Friday and today.

Typical naked and semi naked baby_on_a_blanket shots for the birth announcement.

He's eight days old today.

Baby

2011-12-28T19:06:00.003-05:00

This week V.J. Patel is nocturnal.

(is it offensive to refer to my half Caucasian/half African American son as "Vijay Patel"?)

I think he's fully in day-mode at 5PM.

So far...

Stately Patel Manor

2011-12-28T18:19:00.002-05:00

Home for over a day with the wife and son.

It's no longer theoretical. I am somebody's dad.

I'm home till January 9th then back to work.

The mother of the house will be back in mid February.

To be fair, she did all of the work of carrying/giving birth.

We're looking at day care places again.

On a completely unrelated note, Tami Hart peeped up on Facebook.

She is one of the most talented non-famous people I've seen perform without being friends with them.

(That's quite a proviso) Here's some proof.

and

Mellow

2011-12-26T14:23:00.002-05:00

According to a very slim volume on Buddhism, we have two kinds of fears, one is that whatever is going on is going to go on forever: the spiral, the other is that even if it doesn't go on forever, the pain of whatever is happening will be so terrible we won't be able to bear it: the giant.

Apparently babies can sense your state of mind.

This was quite a revelation.

In forty years I don't ever remember having this Mr. Spock-like quality.

Apparently if a baby is very fussy and the fussiness is freaking out the parent, that will further harsh the baby: the spiral.

I took some time last night/this morning to get me head together.

He's a Capricorn, born in the year of the Hare.

I'm a Capricorn/Boar, his mother is an Aquarius/Snake.

We're getting him to eat better: the source of my anxiety.

There will be other anxieties over the years.

I hope to be able to roll with them better with time.

The Birth

2011-12-24T10:00:00.002-05:00

Baby Patel.

The Birtharium

2011-12-24T00:09:00.000-05:00

Induction

2011-12-22T08:14:00.001-05:00

The baby will be born any day now.

The process might start Friday, might start Monday, might start on it's own.

Very shortly we will be a parents.

A Festivus Miracle

2011-12-22T07:49:00.003-05:00

Even though I no longer have a Huffington Post account I still occasionally read the comments and the ones for this post about the Winter Solstice were particularly nasty.

Christians pissed off that non-Christians exist, Atheists bugged that theists keep right on believing in spite of so many clever Atheists, ecumenicals wishing everybody could get along.

I like the Winter Solstice.

Sunlight is important to me and this is the day that the sunlight hours start to grow longer again.

I think the problem underlying these nasty comments is a refusal to coexist.

This is a problem for me as well.

When I see a Tea Partier, a right winger, I hate them.

I'm quite sure if they knew me as the left winger that I am, they would hate me too and somehow that seems fair.

But it's not helping.

I'm not saying that we need to roll over, give in the most assholeish among us, apologize for being in the way as we're shoved to the side...

I think perhaps I have to accept all people as human beings but not accept unacceptable behavior.

To accept right wingers as people who oppose everything that I value, while I likely oppose everything that they value, but to work against their unacceptable behavior (like voter intimidation, or buying elections, or misinformation) and my own (like wishing these people would just fuck off and never be heard from again).

Right wingers are human beings with human rights (even though they're opposed to the very concept of human rights) and that's something I need to internalize before I start speaking in any forum that includes them.

That said, yesterday was the first day of Winter.

As far as Nature is concerned it's a new year.

Propaganda Or Clip Art?

2011-12-22T06:26:00.001-05:00

Well, he does.

Two Unrelated Things

2011-12-20T22:08:00.003-05:00

Okay, first one, with Newt Gingrich's 15 minutes coming to an end it looks like the next Right Wing Freak of the Week is Ron Paul.

The John Bircher pretending to be Libertarian. (Both suck but in markedly different ways)

The other, I will be a dad in just a few days. Inside of a week.

These two things aren't totally unrelated, besides being a wacky Texas Congressman who thinks almost everything is illegal including paper money, Ron Paul is also an obstetrician who has delivered many babies over the years.

Thankfully our baby will be delivered by a sane person.

The Twist

2011-12-20T14:48:00.004-05:00

Ayn Rand is Chubby Checker.

Checker didn't invent The Twist, he just made it popular.

Ayn Rand didn't invent sociopathology, she just made ripping down society cool.

I was thinking about this reading about the John Birch Society.

A lot of evil people are Birchers but the JBS aren't a conspiracy in itself, they are just a component part of an anti-democracy movement.

Rand, the Birchers, the Austrian School of Economics, the Chicago School of Economics, Abram Vereide's Fellowship Foundation ("The Family"), the Tea Party and I'm sure plenty of others are the voices of discontent with a pluralistic democratic society.

They all say they're fighting against "collectivism" but what they're really against is a functioning society.

Functioning societies set up mechanisms (like representative governments) to protect themselves from predatory behavior.

The folks mentioned above want to rip out these defense mechanisms so that the most ruthless can more effectively prey on everybody else.

So far their cause is winning. It wasn't always this way.

For much of the 20th Century people put their faith in social democracy. Social democracy was demonstrating very well that representative government could serve the wants and needs of the governed.

The Social Contract was alive and well.

It was even wearing away at what I call the Vast_Web_of_Unequal_Privilege.

The social hierarchy where people of different races and ethnicities, different religions, different classes, sexual orientations and genders are accorded different levels of privilege or lack thereof.

This is how the 1% keep the 99% divided and conquered and that system was breaking down in the 20th Century.

The 1% (and those who wish they were) responded by painting the instruments of the people as the oppressors of the people.

They also bought the instruments of the people and got them to do the bidding of their new owners, including actually starting to oppress the little people.

Shifting the tax and regulatory burdens off the upper class and onto the lower class and the incredible shrinking middle class.

Remaking government into the negative thing that they want people to turn against to leave them at the tender mercies of the predators listed above.

It's amazing to me that in 2011 the destruction of organized society is on the table.

I don't remember that being on the table when I was growing up.

I'm hoping this is on a cycle and that the era of too_much_individualism will be replaced by an era of communitarianism.

The King Is Dead

2011-12-19T05:45:00.002-05:00

Since he was a hereditary autocrat, I think of the recently late Kim Jong Il as the second king of North Korea, rather than a Stalinist Communist dictator. (But then, I also figure Stalin to be an emperor.)

Anyway, Mr. Kim will be joining Mr. Gaddafi in the journalistic recaps of 2011 filed under dead dictators.

Fair enough.

Spectacle

2011-12-17T14:41:00.002-05:00

Look At These Dipshits

I do not know how to explain these people to folks who live in civilized countries.

I mean really, how does an American explain Sarah Fucking Palin to who's political movers and shakers are not both vindictive and deeply ignorant.

It's weird.

In the United States our current President, Barack Obama, is supposedly on the political left but in any other representative democracy he would be on the right or the far right.

(He is a micron or two to the left of Bill Clinton)

This is not a sane country.

Granted, wackiness is universal (see Conrad Black, Robert Mugabe, Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin...) but if you charted it on a graph, Sanity would be trending pretty well in the 20th Century until the bottom dropped out about a generation ago.

The six lower primates sharing the stage above with John Huntsman (right) wouldn't have made it as far as Precinct Captain in their political party forty years ago.

(Okay, they would quietly be making small fortunes in graft in state legislatures.)

What can I tell you, friends in foreign lands, a lot of Americans are both evil and fucking stupid.

Sorry folks.

Father Figure

2011-12-17T13:51:00.002-05:00

I know I'm about to be somebody's dad but I heard this song yesterday afternoon and I think it's just awesome!

I don't know if I've played this one before but it's my favorite Circle Jerks song.

Thank gawd for punk.

Hitchens

2011-12-16T06:13:00.003-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday.

He'd been a columnist for The Nation magazine, was a war hawk on the Middle East and in recent years was best known as a fiery Atheist.

He pissed off just about everybody.

Liberals for favoring the Iraq invasion, fundamentalist Christians for not shutting the fuck up.

He made little effort to hide his alcoholism and, yesterday he died of Cancer.

The Bob Ingersol of our day.

Feline Server Errors

2011-12-15T07:04:00.005-05:00

Closer

2011-12-15T07:00:00.002-05:00

Yesterday the Mrs. was released from work for the duration of her pregnancy.

Getting updates, I was more than a little bit tense yesterday.

We are this much closer to having a birthday.

As nervous as I was not on Monday, that's how nervous I am today.

Tyranny

2011-12-12T21:16:00.002-05:00

Been thinking about liberty and tyranny lately.

If you bought the pie that is constantly coming out of right wing pie holes about tyranny, you'd think that it is a phenomenon entirely restricted to acts of an elected government.

We are led to believe that the Tea Party (which is so last year) is was the guardian of liberty and the bane of tyrants, and this new Occupy Wall Street thing are a bunch of commies.

It bothers me that nobody is flipping this narrative over and looking at the actual truth of the matter.

The truth that oligarchy is tyranny. That it's the Occupy movement that's striking out against the tyranny of oligarchal corporations and financiers. That the Tea Partiers are little more in practice than the goons of oligarchs.

I'm not saying that elected governments are never guilty of tyranny (The USA PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, privatizing every public resource that can possibly be sold to a crony) or even that it's restricted to Republican governments.

The provision in last year's Affordable Care Act (~~Obamacare~~ health care reform) mandating Americans to buy private health insurance is in fact tyranny. It's our own elected state handing us over to the gangsters who fleece us in the name of insurance. A two-fer.

The right wing is authoritarian in nature. Even the ones who call themselves "Libertarians".

The only "tyranny" they're threatened by is the supposed "tyranny" of democracy.

Sure the right are going to continue pretending they're the defenders of liberty but I don't think the media need to play along in this outright lie.

Library Books

2011-12-11T22:23:00.005-05:00

Last week I finished Matt Taibbi's "Griftopia". It's sort of like Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" written from the other end.

"The Shock Doctrine" dealt with the fundamentalist capitalism as an ideology rolling around the world, "Griftopia" deals with the heist as a heist.

The robbery from the robber's perspective rather than from the perspective of the people abetting the robbery.

It's a good book and it'll piss you off if you're worth a damn.

"The Eliminationists" on the other hand is another product of Crooks and Liars blogger David Neiwert and it's more of a thinker for me.

It deals with hate and the power of the dissemination of hate.

I did sour on my Huff Post profile before I started this book but this book was the final nail.

Lots to think about.

The John Birch Society as the precursor of the modern "conservative" movement, how the JBS is just a cog in The Greed Machine like Ayn Rand and Abram Vereide and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (That connection is from me, not Neiwert's).

How a segment of society (or a few segments) have seceded from society and have no vested interest in the survival of our society.

Lots to think about.

(For free)

Huff

2011-12-11T07:56:00.002-05:00

My laptop can tell me which sites I visit the most.

Early on it was this site.

Later it was Facebook, where I have two profiles but only use one of them rarely.

A latecomer at the number one spot was my profile on Huffington Post.

At some point a couple of years ago I got a profile to comment on Huff Post stories.

I deleted that profile Friday afternoon and I feel better for it.

You see, with pending fatherhood I'm starting to think about the kind of energy I'm cultivating.

My vibe.

The Huff Post comments arena was not a healthy place for me.

It was a place where I was mean.

At one level I think the comments sections are great, a place for people to chime in.

But it's largely a place for liberals and conservatives to hate on eachother from the privacy of their Internet connection.

It could easily devolve into a giant fuck-you fest.

Ultimately I didn't think that anger and hatefulness was a good vibe for a person to have when he's raising a little kid.

As the kid is more important to me and I can't make the cons shut the fuck up, I decided to leave the cons alone.

They'll still be there and they'll still suck without my encouragement.

I've got better things to do.

So there.

Wherein

2011-12-09T05:46:00.003-05:00

Rick Perry raids wardrobe from Brokeback Mountain to bash gays

and somebody calls him on his bullshit.

This is entirely unrelated and intended to cleans my palate of this Culture War shenanigans.

The Power Of Satire

2011-12-08T08:21:00.003-05:00

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

The People's Judean Front

2011-12-06T21:15:00.003-05:00

This weekend I was walking the Diag and came across this 6'4" Arab guy handing out pamphlets with a literature table behind him.

He was with the Socialist Equality Party and was trying to ride the wave of Occupy Wall Street.

We talked a bit.

I mentioned my meeting the Socialist Party USA and he was not about the united front.

He did not dig these fellow socialists. Thought they were sellouts, coalition builders.

Last summer I met the People's Front of Judea and on this day I made contact with the Judean People's Front.

I picked up the booklet above and gave it a look.

I don't think the "Socialist Equality Party" is really Socialist. They're Communists.

Trotskyists to be precise.

From things I've read over the years, Trotsky is the Jesus of commies disillusioned by the Soviet Union.

Here's the thing, if I could offer anything to organized (or disorganized) socialists it would be this: Get past Marx and get over Trotsky.

If socialists want to do something meaningful in the 21st Century they need to get past 19th Century Marxism and it's offshoots.

If I were the Occupy movement I'd certainly try to ignore chuckleheads like these Trots and the baseball bat and spray paint wielding anarchists trying to glom on to the movement.

Not that the Trots aren't doing a little bit of good in the world here or there but I'd hate for anybody to confuse OWS with these guys.

An Ayn Rand Christmas

2011-12-06T08:55:00.004-05:00

The idea fascinated me, what if Ayn Rand's John Galt was the lead character in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol".

The biggest asshole in the history of fiction in the place of Ebenezer Scrooge, ~~who's heart grew three sizes that day~~ no, that's the Grinch, if John Galt were the Grinch we would just drill for natural gas right under Whoville and possibly evict all the Whos, the tall and the small.

But a Randian Scrooge...

Would he hire thugs to beat up the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future?

Would he fire Bob Cratchit?

Would he take on Tiny Tim as a protege?

Would a heartless Tiny Tim end the story not by saying "God bless us every one" but "Fuck off losers!"

In all seriousness, Ayn Rand despised religion in a way that would make Richard Dawkins sound like Mr. Rogers.

I'm pretty sure she thought Dickens was a commie.

Telegraph

2011-12-03T06:50:00.002-05:00

Okay, a while back I noticed that people on the radio, TV and the Internet were talking about Herman Cain shortly before his surge and stint as Mitt Romney's media human shield.

As more women were detailing some pretty heinous sexual harassment allegations about the Atlanta businessman there was also some trickles of talk about Newt Gingrich.

These media trends are being telegraphed.
Here's a couple of creepy ones I saw two days ago: "You're Going To Want To Have A Very Good Gun" and "Yeah, I Do Want More People With Guns".

I don't think these statements are credible threats or anything, I think they're a fit of bluster.

Right wingers like to talk about their guns when they think they're losing.

Voices on the far right are already preparing for electoral defeat next year.

The telegraphy makes sense.

That's how propaganda is disseminated.

You put your talking points out there and then lackeys in the press report that your talking points are out there.

Only they don't describe them as "talking points".

Irony Baked Right In

2011-12-02T19:16:00.003-05:00

This Can So Easily Be Misinterpreted

It feels almost unsportsmanlike to pick on Herman Cain any more but he did this one to himself.

Actually, Women For Cain is apparently his wife Gloria's creation.

But really, Women For Cain!

That's the last thing this guy needs is more women!

I especially like how one of the links is "Meet HERMAN".

Yeah, because that can't go wrong!

A Nigel Patel Christmas

2011-11-30T06:02:00.003-05:00

First snow of the year.

This was the most watchable content I could dig up. Although there is a set of the whole thing with the embed disabled.

If you want to be technical, Linus is right, this is the holiday commemorating the birth of the Christian god Jesus Christ.

As a young man Charles Schulz had been an evangelical and when he wrote the Christmas special he felt there would be no point in it if he did not have the true meaning of Christmas in it.

CBS were freaked out that their Christmas special would be quoting the King James Bible for about 40 seconds on prime time but it worked. The whole thing worked and was a critical and commercial hit.

Later in life Schulz would describe himself as a secular humanist, a term slippery enough to let a private person almost discuss his spiritual life (or lack thereof) and still maintain his/her privacy.

In America (even in 1965) Christmas is packaged as a kid's holiday all about shiny toys and playing outside in the snow. For adults, it follows Thanksgiving and precedes New Years as the middle length of the "Holiday Season".

With impending fatherhood I'm thinking about Christmas.

I do not, and never have celebrated what Linus states is the true meaning of Christmas.

But it can mean different things to different people.

Neuvo Disco

2011-11-28T17:30:00.003-05:00

It's been a little while and I don't know what to add.

This is one I've heard a couple of lives ago.

Heard this one today.

Because public radio is awesome.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T06:48:00.002-05:00

Not quite wee hours.

Happy Thanksgiving to all that celebrate it and anybody else that may or may not like turkey or pilgrims or American Indians or parades or football or whatever.

Sometimes I think about the world my son is going to grow up in.

It's a fun world. I like it.

It has it's quirks and problems but our goal was a more_perfect_union, not a perfect_union.

I've learned a new phrase this month: "Mic Check".

I love it!

It means that the Occupation is moving beyond the parks and slipping into the bloodstream of the country in a big way.

It should be harder for the police to assault them (us?) if they (we?) aren't lined up in one place.

Anyway, I think this is going to be a good day.

Shower

2011-11-22T07:33:00.001-05:00

Had a baby shower last weekend.

It was great.

Besides lots of loot to help with the baby it was awesome to have all the people from both of our lives there with us.

If it takes a village I'm good with that.

Camp

2011-11-17T07:44:00.004-05:00

Impending dadhood has me thinking about the boy scouts. (I'm having a son)

Once I got politics (in college 20 years ago) I had a problem with the Boy Scouts of America.

Because they're bigots.

They discriminate against gay people, atheists and even Unitarian Universalists because the UU have attitude about the Scouts homophobia.

I'm nominally atheist (I'm trying to flesh out a spiritual stand in Socialism. Occupy Religion?) and if I were to church-up it would be UU without hesitation.

The leadership of BSA are dicks.

But scouting isn't about the dicks in the leadership, it's about the kids.

Camp Quest was born out of opposition to the dicks in charge of BSA.

But Camp Quest isn't a scouting organization, it's a network of camps for humanist, atheist, agnostic kids. (kids with humanist, atheist, agnostic parents) A secularist resort.

But there is Spiral Scouts, which is a scouting organization for pagan/Wiccan kids. Because the BSA are dicks about them too.

Spiral Scouts strike me as deeply lame because paganism itself on it's face is a lot cooler than scouting. The overly specific scouting-for-us pose detracts from the natural cool of nature-based religion.

On the other side there is American Heritage Girls, a pose'y knockoff of Girl Scouts of America for girls with right wing parents.

See, everywhere the Boy Scouts are for exclusion, the Girl Scouts are for inclusion. It's like Lilith Fair with awesome cookies.

Phillis Schlafly of Eagle Forum (I'm sure she keeps a picture of Joe McCarthy in a treasured place in her home) thought the Girl Scouts weren't dickish enough so American Heritage Girls was her answer. Here's the thing about AHG though, I'm no art critic or anything but I am definitely a red and the AHG logo looks like a close relation to that of the Young Pioneers, an international scouting organization for actual red blooded commies. (there was a Young Pioneers of America in the 1930s)

Then there was the Campfire Girls. My sister was a Campfire Girl back in the seventies. I still remember her beret with a pixie emblem on it.

Now called Campfire USA, it's been a coed scouting organization since 1975. That seems pretty cool to me.

Here's the thing: I don't know, I just think it's kind of unfair to indoctrinate the little people. Let them work that out for themselves when they get bigger.

If my son wants to join the Boy Scouts or Campfire or something else that doesn't even exist yet, I'll support him.

One of the values I do want to instill in him though, don't be a dick.

What Goes Up

2011-11-13T21:30:00.005-05:00

Oh, how I do enjoy WCBN when I have to work in the middle of the night.

And, as a bonus...

You're welcome.

Logos

2011-11-13T19:38:00.005-05:00

Here we have two political party logos.

On the left the Socialist Party USA.

On the right, if you will, the Democratic Party.

In less than a year we will be having yet another Presidential election and it's got me thinking about politics and liberal politics in particular.

Where I am on the political spectrum, where I'll be voting.

I know ideologically I am not a Democrat. I'm a socialist. But am I a Socialist?

I'm still voting to reelect Barack Obama though.

I am really hard wired when it comes to third political parties.

I still think a vote for a liberal third party only helps the Republican and a vote for a "conservative" third party only helps the Democrat.

I understand that the choice we voters will be offered is not between Democrat Barack Obama and somebody better. It'll be Barack Obama or somebody much, much worse.

This situation is part of why Wall Street is being occupied right now.

We have the vote (because the Republicans haven't figured out how to take it away from us) but the oligarchs control who gets on the ballots in the primaries and the general election.

There won't be anymore Dennis Kucinich type candidates if the big money candidates can drown them out.

Short game: keep the right wingers out of office.

Long game: (this is where the Socialists can really get something done) don't leave the Democratic party, mold it in our own image.

The left (the Democratic Party is center/right) needs to communicate better.

They're already starting.

Occupy Wall Street is very popular right now. The public are connecting with them.

Now, the Socialist Party USA's logo was probably awesome in 1948 but it needs a real face lift.

"Workers of the World Unite" isn't a working tagline in 2012.

Something a little less... quoting Marx.

This is our left, we should really be defining our own terms, not using holdovers from 1848.

Anyway, over the last 40-45 years very far right elements took over the Republican Party, which was pretty far right before theocrats and Libertarians came along in the first place.

There's no reason why Socialist Party, Green Party folks can't take over the Democratic Party from the ground level.

So there it is, I'm a socialist voting for the Democrat because it's not like I really have a choice.

Center/right is better than far-right.

I'd rather block the enemy if I can than be right and be stuck with the enemy for another four years.

Immense Engine

2011-11-12T19:38:00.003-05:00

I just read that George Santayana called the universe an "immense engine".

An immense engine of both beauty and cruelty.

A universe provoking terror, amusement, bewilderment, confusion, it short, awe.

The universe doesn't care about me.

I think that's a good thing.

A tiger also doesn't care about me, so he/she isn't sizing me up as a meal.

The universe doesn't care about the 99%.

Our world, our society, is not the job of the universe.

The world of humans is and should be managed by humans.

It just should be managed by a lot more of them than it us currently.

The universe doesn't care about my son.

Again, that's good (tiger principal), I'd prefer the universe keep it's mitts off my not-yet-born child, and, like our society, it's not the universe's job.

I care about my son. His mother cares about him.

Lots of people do.

I think the universe is way too big by far to be our buddy.

So, here we are, human beings with our human doings and concerns, floating and spinning in this literally awesome, immense, incomprehensible universe.

It's too big for us to understand and we are too minute in it's grand scheme.

So we make our own petty schemes.

That's our lot.

Our responsibility.

I'm glad I read that.

I got a lot more out of it than some pithy aphorism about remembering history or the penalty of being doomed to repeat it.

Lighter Fare

2011-11-12T19:15:00.002-05:00

Night fell today around 6:30 PM.

Baby's room is coming together nicely. We'll really know where we are after the shower next weekend.

Worked a lot yesterday and a fair bit last night/this morning.

Washed lots of baby clothes last weekend, sorted them by size, put the bigger clothes in storage, bought a few more pieces to fill in gaps.

I heard this morning that the recording industry will stop making CDs.

This is appalling.

Music has become intangible, invisible, abstract. Insubstantial?

I'm a tactile person, the idea of E Books seems like blasphemy and not the fun kind.

If the battery dies and thus, you can't read it, it's not a fucking book!

Well, it isn't.

Slept during the day, this is my mid-morning. Noonish.

Will be driving tonight.

Assuming there are any calls.

Perspective: Vocational

2011-11-11T05:32:00.002-05:00

Some times I'm struck by just how blue collar my mindset can be.

Thinking about education I think things like: I love history, and the working side of my nature says: History isn't a job. Or: I love art, and the working side of my nature says: Art isn't a job.

Earlier this week I was skimming a book-length British article about the commodification of education, the making of higher education into a monetized product.

I noticed this myself in the eighties with other working class people a few years older all wanting to study "business" in community college.

"Business" as a field of study. I didn't even know exactly what that meant.

I think it essentially meant the study of I_want_a_job.

I can tell you that this was a proper working class field of study indeed.

That's where my mindset still lies.

Before considering a field of study I immediately ask myself if it is a job.

I think my actual interests and my criteria for justified study do not intersect.

Over It

2011-11-09T05:32:00.002-05:00

It's been a long time since I've been in a situation and asked "What would Nigel Patel do?".

There was a time when that name meant something more than simply My Stenographer.

It occurred to me upon waking up that I'm still not over not-finishing college in my early twenties.

(I'm turning forty in two months)

I don't think it's too big a stretch to say that I probably haven't forgiven my younger self for dropping out of college.

I've always had really harsh expectations when it comes to that guy.

Can a person forgive a previous version of himself for a past result?

Can a person forgive himself?

Is there power in doing this?

(Hey, if I'm putting myself on the couch I might as well be practical)

That the subject of college still drives me crazy suggests that it's still a fork in my road.

If I lay my own judgement aside, no matter which path I go down, I'll be passed the fork.

So much of this is about fear.

Fear I'll make a mistake and waste time and money.

Fear I'll have done something for nothing.

That is still how I view my previous college experience. (and truck driving school)

Yet, I don't see the nineteen years after I stopped going to college as a waste of time. Odd.

I did things in that time. Some of them difficult and painful. Some of them really good.

If I take classes or I don't, I feel like I have to separate that from my previous experience with post secondary education.

Got a lot to work through here.

Higher F#@&ing Learning

2011-11-08T21:11:00.004-05:00

I am not rational when it comes to the subject of college.

I mean, I understand that everybody thinks it's the thing to do but I have trouble seeing the positives in it.

I mean, I feel like I'd be walking into an office and asking "How about something that's too hard, costs too much and takes too long?".

Yet the subject keeps coming up.
It's not something I've dealt with, a closed subject.

Soup is a closed subject.

I'm not eating it and I'm fine with that.

Soup is dealt with.

I feel guilty for not having finished college.

But I have no fucking clue what would by my subject of study.

That, and the idea of owing money makes me really anxious.

I feel like borrowing money at interest is like feeding yourself to a bear.

Why won't this subject stop driving me crazy?

7

2011-11-05T16:53:00.004-04:00

Seven years ago I'd been blogging for less than half a year.

I'd spent a year or so pacing the floor of the cage and my adventures were beginning in earnest as I started changing jobs for the first time in ten and a half years.

Anyway, there's no way I could have guessed that seven years later I'd be living in Ypsi, working in Ann Arbor, married with a son about eight weeks away from being born.

I've been through the ringer and out the other side.

(Mostly in 2006-07)

I don't really know what to do with this space anymore.

Tell my story I guess, same as any other time.

It's not like it's getting any less interesting.

999

2011-11-04T15:38:00.008-04:00

(I didn't even have to come up with that image myself, "999 problems" already reaps results on a Google image search.)
First it was Michele Bachmann (R-MN), then it was Rick Perry (R-TX), now it's Herman Cain (R-AM Radio) taking the place of being Mitt Romney's (R-MA) human shield in the Republican polls.It ain't easy being a political false flag, so it looks like it's about time for somebody else to be the candidate that can help Republicans to pretend that Mitt Romney won't be their standard bearer next year. Herman Cain is embroiled in scandal right now because the scandal involves naughty bits or at least the possibility of them.
There's also a scandal involving money, which isn't nearly as interesting for journalists to titter about. Seems, even after the Supreme Court of the United States made it basically legal for people with tons of money to buy elections, the Cain campaign, a subsidiary of Americans for Prosperity, is in much less interesting trouble for money laundering.

Since most people really don't understand money laundering, and the media can't be bothered to explain it, but they do understand men being inappropriate in a sexual way, the financing scandal will do nothing but the sexual harassment scandal will do him in.

The Cain campaign (Americans for Prosperity) has blamed the Rick Perry campaign (Amuricins for Illiteracy) of being behind the revelations and there's no way Drunkie McCowboy is going right back to the front of the line, so if it won't be Huntsman, Gingrich or Santorum (and it won't), it's Michele Bachmann's turn back in front of the pack to shield Mitt Romney from the scrutiny of the press or the revulsion of the people who are going to have to hold their noses and vote for him a year from now.

2

2011-11-02T21:21:00.003-04:00

Revolt

As trivial as a $5 a month fee for using your debit card sounds, in a time of Dickensian inequality the public just would not have Bank of America charging them anything more to use their own money.

B of A announced the new fee (as a tantrum in the wake of new financial regulations passed over a year ago) right around the same time Zuccotti Park on Wall Street in New York City was being occupied by Americans fed up with the wrongdoings of the bankers/financiers who destroyed our economy, got bailed out with taxpayer money and walked away with major bank as the rest of the country was mired in, what I'd like to call "The Lesser Depression".

Today B of A announced that they're backing down and not charging the five dollar debit card usage fee.

As people are starting to move their money out of corporate banks, this is kind of like shutting the barn door after the horses have trotted off.

I've been using credit unions for years and am very happy with what I'm getting.

Referendum

The President of France and Prime Minister of Germany have summoned the summoned the Prime Minister of Greece to Cannes, France for a serious dressing down because the Greek PM, George Papandreou, put the very unpopular Greek bailout/austerity program up for a popular vote.

The French and Germans are livid but I think it's great.

Austerity is a recipe for Greece to never be able to raise any money much less pay back any debt.

If the Greeks have to suffer through this they'd damn well better have a vote in it.

As the Greeks voted for the Papandreou's Socialists in 2009 I don't think they were voting for austerity in the first place.

3

2011-10-31T05:54:00.003-04:00

Running For Vice President

Weeks back all the Whos in Right Wing Whoville were all a flutter about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

A different kind of right winger, the regular ones thrive in low-population-density locales, Christie is not a part of the Christian Right.

This guy's for the Ayn Rand fans in that audience. But cons of most stripes really liked him because of the quality one must naturally possess to be a righty in New Jersey: He's a dick.

Conservatives are psychotic about Barack Obama and they want nothing more than to punch the whole country in the face for electing him President three years ago.

So they're looking for the meanest asshole they can find to exorcise their frustration.

Much to their consternation, Christie won't run for President.

So, why is he still in the far right spotlight?

Because he's running for Vice President.

Football

A friend of mine has taken on the task of teaching me about football this year.

So, I've been watching, asking questions, and getting aquainted with the one-hour game that takes three hours to play.

I'm starting to understand how the game works but the Mrs. had to explain to me why the game is important.

I mean, I saw the local semi-retired punk band Borax the other night and that was a lot of fun for me but I also think punk is/was important to culture as a whole.

It's a story about dissent and creating your own art and soulless profiteers co-opting that art and turning "Dissent" into a commercial brand.

She explained to me why people like sports: because they think they are fun, and how important they are to local economies and macro economies in the form of beer sales, gym shoe sales, etc. and that sports are also a part of the broader cultural narrative.

I think how some people feel about their sports team is similar to how I feel about Occupy Wall Street.

My heart swells when I see the Occupiers. All those reds raising hell. My tribe.

Headgear

The other day I interviewed a daycare provider as, in about fifteen weeks, we will be needing the services of one.

She answered the door in a hijab (above right) and there was lots of art in the living room with Arabic writing on it.

I have been in the Catholic version of this very religions living room.

First response: mild freak-out.

Second response: secular piety.

It was very important for me to be a non-bigot, so I buried any apprehension and asked her a bevy of questions about her day care operation.

After our talk I had no apprehension about her child care bona fides and I walked away satisfied that this would probably be a good fit for our needs.

More secular piety: Honestly, I'm more bothered by Christian proselytisers getting at my son than Muslim ones.

The majority is always going to be more threatening to me than any minority.

Besides, daycare isn't supposed to be about religious indoctrination, but about feeding and changing infants, giving toddlers a safe place to play and learn, knowing first aid and how to handle scared or hungry or tired little ones, giving parents some time to earn money to care for said children.

A Proper Gander

2011-10-28T15:55:00.004-04:00

I think I'm really getting the hang of propaganda.

At three months into a National Basketball Association lockout, seeing the NBA logo it amused me to take the ball out of the player's hand.

I wonder if I'll ever be able to put this to use?

Primitive

2011-10-27T10:12:00.002-04:00

I have a friend who wants to become a Rabbi. (if you're reading this: Hi)

Apparently this is a massive undertaking.

To be fair, Judaism is the second oldest extant religion, perhaps it should be hard to get behind the controls.

But this is the part that gets me.

First, you have to have some kind of college degree and then you're open to start another arduous, expensive and time consuming leg in the journey.

Second, I don't know very much about gods but scholarship seems the wrong way to sidle up to them.

My gut reaction is that God is primitive.

Sophistication misses the mark.

Civilization is not God's accomplishment, it's Man's.

Mind you I'm not after becoming any kind of cleric, but if I were, I wouldn't be going the decade_of_paid_study route.

Although I don't think God_the_entity exists, God_the_concept surely does and I suspect today's Internet Imams are the sucessors of the child preachers of a century ago and are a lot closer to God_the_concept than any seminary can get a person.

I don't think the route to God goes through the head, but through the gut.

Maybe my good friend's God isn't like that.

Maybe an older god is more cerebral than primal.

I doubt it but how would I know?

Another Cheap Joke

2011-10-24T22:34:00.002-04:00

The other day an Ohioan told me that Joe The Plumber (who's name is actually Sam Wurzelbacher and he's not a licenses plumber) is running for Congress in the Toledo area.

My instinctual response: Republicans love plumbers, Nixon sure did.

I know some of you aren't Midwesterners and some of you aren't even Americans so I'll just say that Mr. The Plumber is a first rate douche bag.

Possibly Missing The Point

2011-10-21T10:56:00.003-04:00

This symbol-party reminds me of one I did a year or so ago.

Except that I think that this piece (and mine, clever as it was) misses the point.

This is why belief has worked so well in this country, a country that makes our own homespun religions like the Seventh Day Adventists, the Mormons, the Nation of Islam, Scientology..., the reason it works is that all can come but none of them get to be in charge.

The thing the Establishment Clause has done so well is to not allow any one of them supremacy.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

If you want to be technical, the first, fourth and seventh symbols (Islam, Judaism and Christianity respectively) have some absolutes that do clash with the things the other four symbols symbolize. (The two symbols at the very end are for Atheism and Humanism respectively. Each have their own logo and are building their brands.)

True as that is, it misses the point. None of the religions that do coexist in the United States enjoy the mandate of law.

Not a one of them can use the weight of law against any or all of the other ones.

I think that's a situation to celebrate.

I don't know how one would fit it on a bumper sticker though.

I Know You Are But What Am I

2011-10-20T12:03:00.004-04:00

Over the past few weeks I have been noticing tea baggers congregating in front of suburban post offices (dang gub'mint!!!!!!!!!!) protesting the current President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Two days ago while running an errand in one of these suburbs I saw two right wing creeps with a big poster of Mr. Obama with a Hitler moustache. {unlike my image above, which at least is odd} I had to pull over.

I pulled up to them, rolled down the window and said, quite audibly, "Fuck you tea bagger!".

"Grow up." was the tea bagger's clever response.

To be fair, this jackass was standing next to a big poster of the President with a Hitler moustache added to it.

Who the fuck is this guy to tell anybody to grow up?

The Early Riser

2011-10-18T09:00:00.003-04:00

Even though I worked into the evening last night I was still awake before sunrise. (not my picture)

I tried to go back to bed but I knew it was futile already so I quietly went back out into the rest of the apartment to kill time until I could get something useful done while I was awake (probably about 20 minutes from now).

Maybe it's anticipation.

Everybody talks about the sleep deprivation that comes with having a newborn.

Maybe I'm just an early riser.

The Tea Party Meets The Occupation

2011-10-17T08:01:00.004-04:00

I want to tell you all that I love, love, love Occupy Wall Street.

I saw a little bit on the Internet about it in the run up and now that it's happened, it's fantastic to see a good liberal movement with some actual traction.

By the second week (we're beginning week 5 now) pundits were calling it a liberal answer to the Tea Party. This offended a lefty coworker of mine, he wanted to know which oligarchs had bought the occupiers, but I think it's very useful to compare the two movements.

When I first caught wind of the Tea Party it was revulsion at first sight.

They stank of ignorance, bigotry and Ayn Rand novels.

They called themselves "real Americans" (from "real America"?) yet they road from town to town in posh tour buses like they were Bruno Mars' entourage.

They were so right wing it was like R. J. Rushdoony and the John Birch Society had spawned a horde of semi-literate idiot shock troops.

What's been really interesting is watching them in the wake of their opposite number.

After a week of almost completely ignoring the occupation and another week for the press to get their tee-hee-hee out, the occupiers started being taken seriously.

For the tea baggers it was HATE with a capital 8.

Some of the charges: Dirty hippies, pot heads, commies, anarchists, union thugs, lazy shiftless gimmies...

Aspersions that they were affiliated with George Soros (not offended by having our own billionaire as the other side has dozens), and unions (also not offended).

Interesting that the tea baggers never got their knickers twisted about Anonymous.

This was their gig.

The Guy Fawkes masks were off by the second day (apparently it's illegal to protest wearing a mask) and the occupation itself eclipsed Anonymous right away. Which was good because Anonymous had the image of shadowy instigators and people around the country very quickly identified with the occupiers or, as they sometimes call themselves, the 99%.

There's the rub.

The tea party is bankrolled by the top 1% (actually it's more like the top .02%) and their minions all want to be in that top 1% themselves one day.

The occupation is firmly in the 99%.

Both movements are aspirational.

One aspires to have a better life for themselves as individuals, the other aspires for a better life for everybody.

That's how to tell these two sociopolitical movements apart.

I certainly know which side I'm on.

Waiting For Superman

2011-10-16T19:06:00.003-04:00

I am somewhat fascinated by Herman Cain.

On the first year I voted for President wacky Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot ran as a third candidate. He never won any electoral votes but he was on the ballot in every state and his candidacy was huge.

If Perot was twenty years younger he would be a consummate tea bagger today.

I am convinced that Herman Cain is the Ross Perot of 2012 for whatever that's worth.

There are two things that make Mr. Cain different from the shower of idiots running for the Republican nomination for President.

He's a black man.

This is a big deal for conservatives who are probably weary of ducking charges of racism.

He's certainly not the first black conservative in this country. There's Alan Keyes, who served in the Reagan State Department. There's also Clarence Thomas, who served in the Reagan Justice Department and is now the Supreme Court Justice furthest to the right by a long stretch.

Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather's Pizza is very right wing.

He's an evangelical Christian and a free-marked ideologue. He's mixed up with the Koch brothers.

But the thing that makes him interesting to me, the thing that makes me almost like him for what it's worth, is the other thing that makes him different from the rest of the pack.

Herman Cain is a non-politician/businessman.

This is the first elected office Mr. Cain has ever run for.

He's H. Ross Perot.

It's almost elegant. The political party that worships business should be represented personally by a businessman.

Herman Cain, the Christian Capitalist, personifies the right wing Id. (A lot better than Sarah Palin did, he has a long record of hard, shrewd work, she has a fairly short record of behaving like a diva.)

For an explicitly anti-government political party it feels weird for their standard bearer should be a career office-holder like Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul or Michele Bachmann.

Herman Cain won't end up being the nominee.

Neither will Newt Gingrich, he's only in it for the money.

Neither will Rick Santorum, I think he's just in it to fix his embarrassing Google problem.

Neither will Ron Paul, Dr Paul is a far-far-right rock star but the party establishment would never get behind him.

The nominee with be the right wing's Ego, Willard Mitt Romney.

Romney was a money manager/investment banker and has only held one elected office, the top one in his state, Governor of Massachusetts.

The opposite of Cain, a brittle straight talker, Romney is a pathological suck-up.

His policies can be as far right as possible and neither side will believe he really means it.

It's odd that "conservatives" like businessman Cain as much as they thoroughly hate banker Romney.

A Romney candidacy could very well push movement conservatives to the point of breaking and backing a third candidate in 2012.

As I'm rooting for Obama as the lesser of so many evils, I hope that is how it plays out.

Also, it'll be a hoot.

Mrs Patel

2011-10-12T18:55:00.002-04:00

These past couple of days I have been struck by the steady calm of the person I married.

She has the level of calm of a person who defuses bombs.

I have the kind of calm of a person set upon by dogs.

I need to get back to meditation or something.

Still that level of serenity in the house is very comforting.

Irony

2011-10-10T23:10:00.003-04:00

Just realized today that the image from my dream looked something like this

Yes, it's one of mine.
n

Sleep Interrupted

2011-10-10T09:26:00.004-04:00

Dreamt that I was holding a poisonous snake by the throat, which is about the safest handle a poisonous snake has.

The problem being: How do you let go of a poisonous snake?

That's quite a quandary.

It only makes sense that once I woke up there was no going back to sleep after that.

Mona Lisa

2011-10-06T09:24:00.003-04:00

I've never been an acolyte of Apple products, though the Mac Books I've been around do their jobs quite well.

Steve Jobs came off as something of a control freak to me.

Looking at it in perspective though, I think if DaVinci were living in our day he might very well have been Steve Jobs.

He produced very interesting things and even named one of his computers after his daughter and I like that.

Now he's dead of pancreatic cancer.

We're all mortal.

Most of us are mortal quite suddenly.

2011-10-03T09:13:00.002-04:00

Was just reading several pages of Ubu (the link was out of order for quite some time) and I'll have to admit next to him I have very little art out there and little as neat as some of what he's produced.

But we've all got to start somewhere.

Last night I made this little love letter to local radio station WCBN.

I've been listening for about a month and a half and am thoroughly smitten.

I may not be a very talented artist yet but I think I'm a pretty good propagandist.

Tango/Limbo

2011-10-03T08:58:00.002-04:00

More Kristen Hersh, this time with Throwing Muses.

And one more just because it was there...

All from an album called "Limbo" that I like so much it's the only music I've stored on my phone.

Back To Overthinking

2011-10-02T09:29:00.003-04:00

What's with this empty speculation about a child not-yet-born?

Not because it's self-indulgent, the entire blog is self-indulgent, but because it's speculation.

I love to speculate, I have lots of head-space devoted to extrapolations, but I don't think that will help me get down to the business of parenting.

I'll need to be sharp and aware.

I'll need to nurture, I'm sure I can do that.

Perhaps I don't have to worry about not-replicating the parts of my life that I don't want my child to live.

He won't be me, he'll be him.

In-Store

2011-10-02T09:20:00.002-04:00

Saw Kristin Hersh doing an in-store performance in Ann Arbor long before I moved to Ann Arbor.

It was worth the trip.

Lurking

2011-10-02T09:01:00.003-04:00

There is something lurking in the shadows, scurrying around in the dark.

Something besides that damn clever mouse who refuses to get his neck snapped in one of my traps.

It's the fact that I am about to be the father of a son and that I myself grew up fatherless.

I can't project back and think "well, in this situation my dad did/said this or that".

I'm not even feeling sorry about it or anything like that (it was way too long ago for one thing), I just feel like I'm in a situation where I'll have to totally improvise.

Or to put it another way, any other situation where I'm breathing and awake.

I want my son to look at the world and feel a sense of ownership and belonging that I still don't feel.

When I was an adolescent I looked at the culture of the normals around me and was instinctively against it.

So, I don't want my son to be an automaton and I also don't want him to hate the automatons like I did.

I'm probably making too much out of this.

Nobody's an automaton.

I still think that some people do a convincing automaton-impression though.

The Crowd Went Crazy

2011-09-30T22:13:00.003-04:00

Just watched a biography on the hippie social movement and then saw Frank Schaeffer interviewed and the two bled together in my mind.
Schaeffer's father Francis Schaeffer was a counter culture theologian (with a big hippie following) living in Switzerland, after the legalization of abortion in the United States in 1973, became one of the seminal thinkers of the religious right and is still an inspiration for those who would theocracy to America.

Anyway, the hippie documentary was talking about the new culture's suspicion of reason and hearing recovering Christian-radical Frank Schaeffer made me think that the religious right are still stuck in the sixties.

They were born of opposition to the moral relativism of the hippie counter culture, became a counter culture themselves, one that-beyond questioning reason-has hard core irrationalism running through it's veins.

Irrationalism and The World don't go well together.

That's probably why some of the hippies who went "back to the land" back in the day, eventually came back to society and got jobs.

The Christian right aren't coming back to society.

Except to make war on it.

Watchismo

2011-09-29T23:10:00.004-04:00

Back in the 9th grade I had the Casio calculator watch and thinking about it today it occurred to me that the modern cell phone (at 14 I didn't even know that there was such a thing) how does everything we wanted our most ambitious watches to do and about 85% more on top of that.

Yet I still miss the watch.

I don't want it to do math or open web pages or play my favorite songs, I'd just like to know what time it is without getting my phone out.

Though, I do wonder if one day our tiny computers are going to end up back on our wrists.

The Devil

2011-09-29T09:16:00.003-04:00

Rush Limbaugh is The Devil

I guess being surrounded by chatty evangelical Christians (not only do they breed like rabbits but they also recruit) some of their devil-talk has sunk in.

The Devil, they say, is a tempter and a deceiver. For the purposes of this post I'm focusing mostly on temptation.

The job of talk radio host Limbaugh is to get into your ear and tempt you away from what Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature".

Before our present era there was actually a wide and long stretching egalitarian tradition in the United States.

When I was a small child the culture of liberation was still alive. And kicking.

To right wingers solidarity is a fundamental problem, one so naturally appealing that they need to convince people away from it.

They do this by making a person believe that equality will hold them back from their true potential.

Most people do believe that they are special and they are in that they are unique, but the idea here is to get them to turn on their fellow man (which includes women) and be out only for themselves.

'Forget about all those losers' Rush whispers in their ears in between advertisements, 'if you can grab it then you it belongs to you because nobody else had the moxie to grab it before you did'.

It's all about elevating privilege and denigrating rights.

Rights are universal. (at least their supposed to be) Privileges are made to divide people.

Do I think that Limbaugh invented the tactic? Hell no!

Reagan was imploring the worse angels of our nature back when Rush was just a rock band from Canada.

But of all the talkers on the right this one seems to be the one most aware of what he's doing.

Always on message Privileges _over_Rights.

I don't believe in a supernatural devil but I do understand temptation.

20 Years On The Other Side

2011-09-24T15:17:00.002-04:00

Just started reading "A Crate of Vodka", conversations about Russia going from the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 to 9/11/2001 by right wing political player Alfred (Alik) Kokh and journalist Igor Svinarenko.

I can't remember the last time I've actually written a book even partially penned by a right winger.

Kokh was a minor villain in "The Shock Doctrine", one of the Russian Chicago Boys. (Acolytes of the libertarian Chicago School of Economics)

From the North American perspective of myself or Naomi Klein and with hindsight it's easy to judge the Russians for missing an historic chance at democracy because they chose capitalism instead but I for one wasn't there.

Would I have chosen any better if I were raised in the Soviet Union?

Who knows.

Looks like an interesting read though.

I Could Be Totally Wrong On This...

2011-09-23T05:23:00.002-04:00

Like I was saying, I could be totally wrong about this but I suspect the "Tea Party" (the jihadi wing of the Republican Party) has a problem with women.

Even before the tea baggers started going around calling themselves a tea party and started calling people like me nasty things, their standard bearer was Alaska Governor (R retired) Sarah Palin.

To be fair, how were these wingers to know that she would turn out to be a flake with an ego the size of Alaska.

Skip ahead two years to the tea bagger election of 2010 and two of their breakout stars were Nevada Assembly member Sharon Angle running for US Senate and in Delaware, never-elected-to-anything Christine O'Donnell defeated shoe-in Mike Castle in the Republican primary only to be beaten by Democrat Chris Coons in the general election, a candidate selected basically to lose gracefully to Mike Castle.

Angle was the militia movement in makeup and a skirt and, for comedic value, O'Donnell nearly eclipsed former 1/2 term Governor Palin.

Skip ahead one year and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was riding high with her freaky far, far, far, far right bad self until being instantly upstaged by a no-necked peckerwood from Texas.

Here's the thing, it seems that women candidates are just as able and willing to express the right wing id in this tea bagger movement but the winners end up with names like Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker.

Is right wing sexism keeping out their own chosen candidates?

Three of these women are rabidly anti-feminist (Palin is just rabidly pro-Palin) and at the same time are running for elected office.

Is that too much irony for the far-right brain?

The Blind & The Elephant

2011-09-21T21:19:00.003-04:00

Just finished yet another close-up examination of the right wing elephant, Susan Jocoby's "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism".

Published in 2004 it's already a bit dated but hey, I got it for $3.00 at a Borders going out of business sale.

Here's why I think Naomi Klein's take on the elephant is a lot more valuable than Jacoby's.

Near the end of "Freethinkers" I got the flash that the right is actually out to kill modernism. To erase the last 300 years. And they're close.

Now, I understand that there is an atheist's explanation of the world and a socialist's explanation of the world the same as all the other explanations. I think the socialist's explanation is way more substantial. It's the cake, the atheist's explanation is just the icing.

What the religious right are doing in the Unites States and elsewhere is important (and destructive) but it's really just a moving part in a much bigger machine.

What's happening in the cultural arena is the pneumonia, what's happening in the economic arena is the three completely blocked pulmonary arteries.

Orthodox religion and orthodox capitalism both have it in for elected government because it's a real challenge to the power of both of them.

The tax strike that's been going on for the last three decades and the capital strike (look it up) that's been going on the last three years have starved our elected government nearly to death.

The Ayn Rand fantasy is being played out in slow motion.

It would never be so grandiose in real life.

One useful thing Jacoby contributes is the idea that non-believers need to build up their own culture beyond just not-believing in the spiritualities of others.

Atheist culture does exist today and sadly, a lot of it sounds to me like Richard Dawkins saying dickish things to people clearly less intelligent than he is.

Socialist culture would be a great idea.

Why not socialism as a cultural alternative?

If we can't have it as a political option (because of the part of the elephant that holds our political structures hostage to capitalism) it could really stretch out as a dissenting counter culture.

Anyway, that's what I got out of the book I just finished.

Odd Fatherhood Art

2011-09-16T09:56:00.002-04:00

Thank you BoingBoing.net.

Holy Rolled

2011-09-16T08:14:00.002-04:00

Okay, so I was at work on a break and standing outside reading this book (above) in public.

A cowboy on his cellphone can be heard giving chapter & verse notations about ten feet away from me.

He gets off the phone and then Mr.Nobody_Asked_You starts talking to me about "pharaohs and slaves" and ancient Egypt and talking about "freethinkers" in a way that clearly indicates he doesn't know it was a 19th Century term for atheists & agnostics and we go around and around which is fine because I have about forty minutes before I have to get back to work and listing to this jackoff is nearly as interesting as reading this book two hundred years of people like me coping with living around jackoffs like him.

His strategy never worked-he failed to reprogram me for Jesus-but his agenda overrode his ability to have a pleasant conversation.

It was like I was being talked-at by Ted Haggard without the meth amphetamines or the male prostitutes.

I did get to tell him that if I had any spirituality at all it was socialist.

That was fun.

A Word And It's Definitions

2011-09-15T08:38:00.003-04:00

My meeting with the Socialist Party of Michigan folks left me thinking that I do not have the power to convince.

They were working on things like getting the party on the state ballot and protecting the party structure from interlopers and that seemed wrongheaded to me.

The secretary of the meeting actually held elected office, a minor community office in Detroit, and I felt that is where they should be putting their energy.

Into places where the Republicans are not competitive and they can be the second party.

Small local offices would be a perfect starting point in that direction.

I said this but I don't think it went over.

What I didn't say was even more true. "Socialism". People are afraid of that word.

I don't know what they could do about that, but if you're going to have that word in the name of your party you have a serious problem until you can find a way to rehabilitate that word.

Although, in the last decade or so, the capitalists have been doing a great deal to rehabilitate our word and discredit their own.

Moon

2011-09-14T06:53:00.004-04:00

MoonBlue Moon

Because It Is Wrong

2011-09-10T23:11:00.003-04:00

A Call For Uncivil Discourse

1992, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton (D) is running for President.

Not only is this Democratic Governor pro-capital punishment, he's had a convict with a cognitive disability executed on his watch.

I don't want to sound shrill here but where were the Democrats back then saying that this was wrong.

As liberals we weren't against execution because it was politically convenient to stand against them. We stood against them once upon a time because they were/are wrong.

The further we move to the right, the further we'll be expected to move to the right.

Why not?

If capital punishment is no longer so immoral that we're against it on principal, what else can we cave in on in the misguided hope that "conservatives" will finally like us or at least stop being mean to us.

I feel like there was once a day when liberals and Democrats had a pair and that day is long gone by.

When we've become too afraid to stand up for the right to a safe and legal abortion or Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public education, labor rights the right wing won't suddenly want to be our friends and we'll have nothing left to defend.

Instead of pleading and wishing that the right would play nice, I think it's time that the left got rude.

Saturday Serenade

2011-09-10T20:12:00.002-04:00

The Queers.

Saw them twice, had a great time. Wimpy (singer/non-guitarist) wasn't part of either show.

Joe Queer (singer/guitar) did all the singing on the tours I saw.

It's well worth 15 1/2 minutes of a Saturday.

9/12

2011-09-08T08:08:00.003-04:00

As we run up to the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks I can't help but think about Glenn Beck's 9/12 project-thing.

Granted Mr. Beck isn't even on TV anymore, so how much does it matter, but I wanted to shed a little light on the supposed unity he was talking about on the day after September 11, 2001.

It certainly wasn't that partisanship went away. I remember, I was a partisan and I never went away.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 liberals were expected to just shut the fuck up.

We weren't supposed to be offended by islamophobia or jingoism.

Weren't supposed to object to the USA PATRIOT Act, a second war in an unrelated country, a second round of tax cuts for the rich, the Surveillance State. The Corporate Surveillance State.

So when Glenn Beck was on about reviving the spirit of September 12th, telling his audience "we surround them" (I'm among those "them"), having his highly televised/sparsely attended TV special/rallies in the capital, what he was really saying is that he wished liberals would shut the fuck up again.

Liberals are polite to a fault but thankfully not that polite.

This Is Not A Pipe

2011-09-02T05:59:00.004-04:00

[This is not a pipe.]

This is not a bank on fire, it's a painting of a bank on fire.

Still, a concerned passerby called the LAPD on the artist.

Makes me wonder what the cops would have done to the people who brought us Godzilla.

"Do you hate Tokyo?"

"Do you want to do that to Tokyo Harbor?"

Reality Putting The Onion Out Of Business

2011-08-31T07:13:00.001-04:00

They have got to be fucking kidding me.

Burnt Over District

2011-08-30T22:06:00.003-04:00

Started a new book, "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" by Susan Jacoby.

It's a bit dated (2004) but during year four of the Dubya regime, it was very apt.

Perhaps because I'm reading about the post-revolutionary period, it brings to mind "Occult America", the book about seekers, seers, table rappers, charlatans and flim flam men and woman in and out of America.

So, right now (right now being 1790s-1820s in New England and New York) Unitarians and Universalists are gaining ground at the same time as the Second Great Awakening at the same time as Spiritualism is moving from Europe to North America (by way of Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer {hence the term "Mesmerize})

The Unitarians and Universalists were the religious left of their day as much as ours and they acted as the religious face of secularism/deism.

The "Burned Over District" was a philosophical free-fire zone.

You could hold revival meetings in rural tents or Manhattan halls, contact the dead with a medium and a table , go to a church where all of humanity is "saved" no matter what or question the very idea of the supernatural.

I've always loved weird history.

Mischaracterization

2011-08-30T07:03:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I heard former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate (he was Nixon's handpicked opponent) George McGovern

doing a radio interview and in passing said something that was so wrong I got off his train of thought.

He was comparing/contrasting Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, pointing out that bin Laden would have considered the dictator too secular and an enemy, when McGovern described Hussein as "an atheist".

If there was a prize for being wrong, this statement would be a contender.

I heard Saddam Hussein die, anybody listening to the BBC could have.

His last words were a prayer.

His executioners didn't even let him finish before they mocked him and hanged him.

Made the hair stand up on back of my head. To hear a murder.

On the topics he was actually invited on the radio show for, McGovern had some good points, but this little aside was complete bullshit.

People's Histories/Owner's Histories

2011-08-29T07:02:00.004-04:00

The people who want to pave the world in right wing books are terribly threatened by Noam Chomsky and especially the late Howard Zinn.

You can tell this by the repeated refutations (right) of his "A People's History of The United States".

I've been rereading his People's History for the last year or so and I can see why they're threatened. It's a powerful book.

Chris Harman's "A People's History of The World" is nearly as good but, the book is a lot more academic and, as the author is British, the Socialist perspective in the book is easier to caste as foreign and not the apple-pie-American style of Zinn.

Larry Schweikart & Michael Allen's "A Patriot's History of The United States" is Fox News in book form.

It's poorly written, full of falsehoods/errors and omissions but, like Fox, is justified because it adds "balance".

It doesn't matter if the other side of the story is a load of shit (but you better not call it out as one) as long as it's represented, cheapening actual scholarship.

Bill Bennett's books are a business in themselves.

A former Reagan cabinet minister, Bennett puts out a few hundred pages of moralistic mad libs at regular intervals and is guaranteed shelf space.

Money talks and it's determined to have the last word.

The Personhood Of Money

2011-08-29T06:39:00.003-04:00

Book Publishing Edition

When I walk into a book store (one that sells new books) I get the distinct impression that the John Birch Society has gotten into the book publishing business.

Now, I do understand that publishing is cyclical and liberal and left wing books still get published but not at the sheer volume of of right wing books.

Browsing in a book store it's like any dick who can hold a pen and endorse 180-350 pages of right wing word salad has his/her book printed, bound and shelved as if they're churning them out in the back.

This is just a piece of the right wing strategy I call The Personhood of Money.

Money can deliver right wing activists in tour buses ($) in front of TV cameras ($) to be broadcast over their own media outlets ($) as if it was a genuine mass movement.

It can also flood the bookshelves with enough propaganda to make you think you're surrounded by Tea Baggers when you're actually in the most liberal enclave in the state.

The Magic Of Belief

2011-08-28T10:32:00.010-04:00

This bumper sticker drives me nuts. (it's supposed to)

Let's break this shit down.

"The Liberal Media(!)" is only as "liberal" as the corporations that own media outlets are. You will never hear business questioned by an outlet that is a business. However, they can call the "liberal" media liberal because they don't go totally brownshirt on gays, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, people in unions, etc... Giving legitimacy or media organs that should be called out and discredited for going brownshirt on gays, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, people in unions, etc...

"I don't Believe" is the much more interesting part of the proposition. Sort of a you-create-your-own-reality construction. A person can say that they don't believe in Gravity and they're not going to just float away or something. Gravity is still in effect but they would be saying "Fuck you, I still don't believe in it!"

Is belief knowledge?

Had belief supplanted knowledge?

Am I guilty of this stuff too?

I know a person who seems to think having an opinion on an issue impeaches a person on that issue.

That would disqualify everybody but the ignorant.

It's not that I'm ignorant of the other side's argument, I'm very well aware of it and I think it's often evil and wrong.

I don't think having an opinion necessarily means ignoring facts.

In fact I think being aware of the facts is a responsibility of having an opinion.

What makes me different from the chucklehead with this bumper sticker?

I'm not saying I don't believe the "conservative" media (which is legion-money will do that), I don't think it's a thing to be believed or not, it's a tool. It's propaganda to give cover to an agenda.

"Lets give the little people some talking points to help us get rid of pollution regulations so that we'll save a bundle while we crud-up the air, water and soil of our stooges."

The talking points are lies but I think it's much more important to get to the bottom of why people are paying to get them out there than to simply not-believe them.

Lattice Of Coincidence

2011-08-25T23:07:00.002-04:00

Plate of Shrimp

I've Been Waiting In Line For This

2011-08-22T22:51:00.000-04:00

If It Takes Me Forever I Insist

"Forklifts That Drive Themselves"

2011-08-22T22:47:00.003-04:00

I am a forklift driver,

But I have no forklift to drive.

If memory serves,

I drove them quite well.

Lucky me,

I can do other things as well.

Arab Spring

2011-08-22T22:13:00.003-04:00

Some seven-eight months later the Arab Spring's spirit of democracy is devouring the Qaddafi dictatorship.

Syria, the whole world is watching.

Corporate America: do I have to wear a funny mask to let you know that the whole world is watching you too?

Go Find...

2011-08-22T20:34:00.004-04:00

The Sacred is not the Universal.

What means all to you could mean fuck-all to somebody else.

It's always been that way.

Captive nations have rarely worshiped the gods of their captors.

Sacred is subjective, universal... !as much as I'd hate to admit it, is probably subjective too.

Here's the deal: One night, I think it was in the earliest weeks in this apartment, I had a dream, probably the most spiritual dream I can remember, it involved the Hindu God Ganesh.

Lisa and I were in his presence and I woke up feeling... loved. I woke up feeling the love of an intangible creature.

What does that mean?

Probably nothing. I'm sentimental.

But---whatever it might mean to me, it doesn't mean much of anything to anybody else.

Because, in a pluralistic society like this one, the sacred is not universal.

Thank Gawd!

Camera Phone

2011-08-22T09:14:00.004-04:00

A couple of things taken on my phone.
Arranged this one myself at Crazy Wisdom in Ann Arbor, the kind of shop where you can find a dozen Ganeshes hanging around for a group portrait.
Last Supper with Buddhas happened all on it's own at Gibraltar Trade Center in Taylor.

It's inspired.

Verdigris

2011-08-19T18:59:00.004-04:00

(Came up on an image search for "Verdigris")

I am a married man with a baby in the fifth month of pregnancy.

Yesterday I was at the home of a dear friend. Today is her birthday.

It occurred to me on the way home yesterday that if it were not for the friendship of Stella Magdalen I would not be married today and my not-yet-born son would be waaaaaaaaay less ready to be born.

I am terribly grateful for my lot in life. It's quite a lot.

Happy birthday Stella, you are absolutely aces!

Penn

2011-08-17T21:47:00.003-04:00

The thing I liked least about organized Atheism was all the goddamn Libertarians.

In fact I can say that the more time I stay away from Libertarians the less I want to punch people.

Penn Jillette (half the comedy/magician duo Penn & Teller) is an outspoken big "A" Atheist and a less-outspoken Libertarian.

I don't think he's not-writing provocative books promoting Libertarianism because he's worried about offending other Atheists. Probably a third of them are Libertarians too and probably way less than a third are straight-up Socialists like me.

I do think Libertarians like Whole Foods founder John Mackey are careful what they say to outsiders because the Libertarian worldview can come off as pretty heartless to a person with a heart.

So here I am wearing my bias on my sleeve.

I am not very interested in anything Penn Jillette has to say about Atheism because I know he's also an evil fucking Libertarian.

Perhaps I am being small.

But "evil" is a serious word and I mean it when I say it.