Strange
Day

On March 9th, I sent the following email to my families listserv:

I have a very hard time with the argument that we’re going after Iraq for freedom and democracy for it’s people.
“It’s been over 12 years since their most heinous attacks on their own
people. It’s been over 10 years since the first gulf war. In this
country, those were the most prosperous times in our history. So we had over a decade and amazing resources, but didn’t feel the need to spread democracy.
“If what we want is for people not to have to live in fear, about half
the countries in Africa live in conditions that make Iraq look like the
Crowne Plaza. People starve to death in Zaire (DROC) because the food trucks get hijacked as soon as they hit the road. The Lord’s Resistance Army forces prepubescent children to fight each other to the death. How about the recent killings by police and military during protests in Venezuela and Bolivia. And women’s rights around the world are still for the most part a joke… and I’m not talking about voting or wearing veils.
“We want everyone to have the rights and freedoms we have? The next time you complain about Hillary Clinton, enjoy it… I don’t get a voting
representation in Congress. DC has half a million residents, more than
some states, but it is the only place in the country (including the
territories), where we must pay taxes, but have no say in how they’re
used. That wonderful right to protest? I don’t know if the 300 people
protesting in Farrauget Park last fall will agree. Despite doing
nothing illegal, they were arrested in order to prevent it from
developing into something that might cause disturbances. (This isn’t
the protesters point of view… this is what the police state).
“I wish I knew why we were doing it. If we’re going to improve life for
everyone, we have a lot more work ahead of us.
“Some of our plans to free Iraq include launching 800 missiles into
Bagdad in the first 24 hours. The rough equivalent of a plane into a
building every 2 minutes. But I’m sure we won’t hit any of the several
million civilians living there.”

The speech from the soapbox came after some brief discussion about the potential war, and one of my aunts supposing that at least we might “bring freedom to those people”.
But at least she was thinking about it then. No one in our government would mention “peace-bringing” for another two months, well into the war.
We certainly brought peace to some people. As of today, the Iraq Body Count site lists between 6,000 and 7,800 reported civilian deaths since the start of hostilities. The last estimate of US Military deaths was in the range of 180. And since the Pentagon refuses to release death estimates for the Iraqi military… heaven knows how many left there.
In case Kobe Bryant’s libido has distracted you, we still haven’t found a single weapon of mass destruction. As far as I know, we have only found one violation at all of the restrictions on Iraq. (That being the previously mentioned missiles that went 30 miles too far. A very serious threat to…. nobody new).
And for those of you who don’t follow online news closely and may have only recently heard about it in mainstream news outlets, it has been months now that we’ve known the evidence of Iraq trying to buy Uranium was bullshit.
But give the Shrub credit. Facts don’t get in his way. This *cough* man recently said that we had to attack Iraq “because Iraq did not admit inspectors”. Anyone with a memory longer than the last time they took a piss will recall that Saddam Hussein was more openly accepting of inspects at the beginning of this year than any time in the past decade. They were even admitted into the presidential compounds. It was actually the U.S. who told the inspectors to get out, because we were coming in.
While in country, the inspectors were suspicious of their interviews with Iraqi scientists. They felt the scientists may have been pressured for their own or their families safeties if they revealed any weapons programs. What was a little less widely broadcast was that even now, with Saddam Hussein in hiding and Iraq in a state of organized anarchy, the scientists are still telling us that there were no weapons programs.
But at this point I can’t remember the last time a major announcement came out of the West Wing concerning Iraq that didn’t turn out to be wrong, (or as some of us might call them — lies). It looked for a while like the CIA director would soon be falling on his own knife to protect the President, until it was pointed out that the CIA had warned the White House BEFORE the state of the union about misstatements (again, lies) in the speech concerning the uranium gathering.
A month or two ago, there was a poll from some major newspaper that showed that 77 percent of those surveyed believed that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks on the US, and that was one major reason we should wipe out the Iraqi government. These people have been sniffing a little too much fertilizer, of course, because none of the hijackers were from Iraq and no connection has ever been proven with Iraq.
You have two choices.
Either the Shrub (as the personification of the executive branch of the US government), blatantly lied to the world about the was in Iraq. Or else they were insanely, criminally, outrageously negligent in performing their jobs.
Their only initial stated reason for the attacks was WMDs. Where are they?
They later claim they seek peace and democracy for Iraqis. When are we leaving the country? And how many soldiers helped dig those 7,000 civilian graves.
They say they didn’t have all the information when they were making decisions. Oh wait… yes they did.
They said the inspectors were not able to do their jobs. Have we found anything the inspectors didn’t?
Iraq was a brutal military regime who threatened the entire middle east. Except of course that they essentially rolled over to an admittedly weak US force.
There were no weapons. There was no threat. Saddam Hussein and Iraq WERE living up to their restrictions and requirements.
Yes. Iraq was not a safe place to live. Imagine… a country were you could be detained without trial, denied your official rights and protections, threatened and punished beyond all reasonable limits…
oh…
wait.

Oh, complete fucking shit.
They ACTUALLY broke into The West Wing to announce Shwarzenneger is running for governor. And it wasn’t even a Fox network.
Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.
It’s a good thing handguns are banned in DC or Sara wouldn’t be the only one in need of a new TV.

Fucking hell.
Someone brought back the full table covers at the mall food court advertising Coke.
On the subway, in bright red, white, and blue, is a sign in Helvetica Condensed Bold, shouting “VOTE ATT FOR CHANGE”.
I just noticed that those new commercials that talk about empowering women to do whatever they want and be unique are actually for MickeyDs, the posterchild for the monoculture.
I wanna go back to being a customer. Being a consumer makes me feel like I should be bedbound by my massive bulk, with someone wheeling in carts of sweet foods and new sneakers.
If you haven’t yet, or haven’t recently, please go and browse through “A Product“.

Watch out. They just used the term ‘regime’ to refer to the leaders of Syria.
Fucking hell. You know somebody is holding a pro-war rally here tomorrow? How fucked up is that shit?
Just how mentally diseased and thoroughly mind-fucked do you have to be to be pro-war? I don’t personally know any soldiers who are pro-war. Most military people I’ve talked to say that war is the result of a failure. They don’t like having to do the job, but they do it because someone has to.
Some old man was on NPR this afternoon saying that he was very impressed with modern warfare. That unlike when he served, the weapons are much more precise. The body counts are much lower. Compared to 30 years ago? Maybe. Fewer soldiers, better equipped.
But modern warfare really sucks for the audience. Battles used to involve a couple groups of pissed off people throwing shit at each other in the middle of a field or forest. The only civilians killed were the dumb-asses who climbed the hill to watch the battle. But in the last fifty years, war has gotten to be very personal. Battles have moved into our cities and homes. That precision bomb strike to take out the foreign leader ONLY takes out maybe 10 civilians.
In the spirit of the oh so popular reality TV shows, I think we should get to vote a few celebrities into the army. I wanna send DCs police chief. The only time you see this man in the news is when he’s talking tough about taking on Protesters. Especially when they’re teenagers. He keeps his mouth shut during the real national rallies. But if it’s a bunch of high school kids pissed off at the world bank, he becomes dirty harry.
Fucking dickless wonder. Forget the friggin’ kids and do something about the increasing crime rates. About the increasing gang violence. About the police neglect and mistreatment. About the insane burglary rates and car thefts.
Why is it when some kid wants to yell at a businessman and stick a bumper-sticker on his window, I find no shortage of jack-booted, armor-plated, baton and shotgun wielding stormtroopers. But when five guys decided to do a dance on my head in the middle of the street, I waited an hour and a half for two patrol officers who wanted to search my apartment for signs of me abusing my nonexistent wife.

Have you seen the front page of today’s Washington Post? Color picture, above the fold, 3/10ths of a page:

By itself, this is a moving image, though not unexpected during an invasion.
But it immediately occurred to me, this is Baghdad. While all the news reports might show you pictures of jeeps and tanks rolling through open deserts or ramshackle villages, those are not Baghdad.
Baghdad is a city of over 5 million people. There are over a thousand grade schools, three major universities. Baghdad was arguably the cultural center of Iraq, and most of the arab middle east, until the late 80s. The city itself is almost 1,300 years old.

This is a city entire orders of magnitude larger than most of you have ever lived in. Modern and huge. And yesterday we rolled through there with a column of tanks. In and out. And judging from pictures like this, leaving a trail or wreckage in our wake.
Man… I am such an American; because I just cannot imagine what it would be like to live through that.

In tried. I really tried to write something up that explained what I thought of the Protesters and the Counter-protesters. I really tried to sound fair.
But for fuck’s sake, there’s some blind, ignorant, obnoxious people out there.
We protest.
The simplest fact is, we can. We are allowed to. The very foundation of the country is the right to hold contrary beliefs, and express them as you see fit. And so long as we’re not doing physical harm to anyone or thing, you can damn well live with it.
We are not protesting against the soldiers. We are not even protesting against the military. More often than not, Protesters will independently share their concern for our troops. We are protesting against the Shrub, and everything he represents in this war.
This is a man with no experience in international relations, but an entire lifetimes experience in corporate affairs. This entire argument with Iraq has been based upon a pissing contest between our respective leaders. And Saddam Hussein has come out as the more mature.
How fucked up do you have to be to come across as a lesser man than Hussein? He is a blatant dictator who has a history of open aggression and nightmarish mistreatment. And he’s still behaving more civilized.
We have not yet turned up a single weapon of mass destruction. We have not turned up any evidence, more substantial than seven missiles which go thirty too far, that Iraq has not lived up to it’s requirements. At the same time, Iraq has accepted every increasingly ridiculous demand made by the US and the UN, right up until we simply told Hussein to go away.
We feel we have good reason to protest military actions being taken at this point. I already said this has nothing to do with not supporting troops. The very freedom those troops claim to be fighting for is what allows us, even now, to voice our concerns. You expect people violently opposed to an action to simply go away because that action has finally commenced? If that is what you would do, you are truly sad.
The neo-nazis can protest here. The religious fruitcakes can protest here. People can drive through the District with 6-foot tall pictures of aborted fetuses on the sides of their vehicles. Anti-nuke protesters have had a permanent station outside the White House for over ten years.
We are the people from the supermarket. We’re every age, every color, and every faith. And we can damn well gather here to say we don’t like the President.
A couple years ago, I lived with a girl from Tanjikistan, formerly part of the Soviet Union. She really wasn’t too happy with any part of the world. Americans were loud and garish and too proud of their “freedoms”. And for the sake of supposed freedom, people in her own country were having a hard time even getting food to eat. She said people had freedom to say what they wanted in Tanjikistan before the collapse of the USSR; they simply said it in their own homes.
It’s seductive — the idea that people should simply keep their concerns amongst their close associates.
But, we’re Americans. We’re loud and garish, and proud of our freedoms. We’re going to stand on the corner and yell and scream just because we’re pissed off.

Someone in Iraq died tonight. If they even saw it coming, they had but a second’s notice.
Someone’s child is dead. Someone’s friend is dead. Someone’s coworker is dead.
They didn’t threaten violence. They didn’t attempt to injure anyone. They just went to work.
There is nothing patriotic about this. And there is nothing good about this. One person is dead, and multiple people are grieving for someone they can never get back.
It has, as always, begun on the crumpled body of one dead person.

This man was angry. He wore the uniform of the neglected vet, but his fatigues are too new. His boots still shine. He picked through the trash with his left arm while his right hand held a 6-string guitar. The case was leaning against the bus stop bench.
This building has been under deconstruction since I’ve been here. It used to stand out like a cartoon, in an otherwise grayscale city, with it’s fat curves and small windows. You could see the smell of india food emanating from it. Two years ago someone started gutting the building. I wasn’t sure what you could put in someplace that looked like that. But you gotta admire the character. So I was a little depressed last month when it was obvious they had trimmed the curves and straightened the walls. They were making more like everything else. But today, … today they apparently have chopped out half the building. The top floor and a half are totally gone. Gaps in the plywood barricades show a building gutted to the walls. And a sign hangs on the front saying “space for rent”.
They erected a new crane across the street, this morning. I knew they would — I had seen the plans at work a couple months ago. I live so on the edge that I don’t know if it will be an apartment building or an office building. We really don’t need either. Office space is plentiful right now, and no one in this neighborhood could afford new apartment rates. This is one of those cranes that goes up in stages. A small, five-story crane is used to erect a fifteen-story crane. The fifteen story crane is then used to assemble the stationary crane. These things are colossal, immobile towers, 20 stories high, with a spinning arm at their head. The building goes up right around them. I’ve never been around to see how they extract them from the structure after the floors are all up. I guess I will soon, since there are two of them within a block of me now. These cranes are like zits. They appear for a while, all greasy and loud. And when they go, they leave a nasty scar of a building behind. Another grayscale building.

Why do we do stupid shit?
Why do I buy a bath tub mat? Because my bath tub is made out of a material that stains too easily. If we have the ability to make a silky shirt that is essentially bullet proof, I don’t believe for a second they can’t make a bathtub that won’t stain if I don’t scrub it every week.
I buy one more thing, cause something else I’m already paying for doesn’t do what it probably should, but I accept that.
It’s true that my landlord would probably be upset if i ripped out my shower. And I probably ought to be thrilled that they’re replacing the beautiful granite lobby with a beautiful marble lobby.
But it’s one more stone in the foundation of me wanting to be…
different.
It’s not self hatred or self improvement. I am already pretty damn good, thank you. And I’m getting better all the time.
Consider it a loathing of humanity in general. You’re average participant in my view of life couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag. One too many times, I’ve walked down the left side of a nearly empty 20-foot-wide sidewalk only to have the person coming from the opposite direction step into the street to ensure they could pass me on their right. Because my feet were essentially frozen in place yesterday, I was forced to listen to an activist explain how the funds we intend to use for war should be spent on helping our enemies instead; that these problems would go away if only we’d improve their education and help them develop their cultures. (If you ain’t got Tivo, you ain’t nothin’). Please, get your world view from someplace other than reruns of M*A*S*H. I stood in a crowd yesterday that literally stretched for , but the Post told me today there were “tens of thousands” of people there.
You are all diseased and inbred. If not physically, then intellectually. Not only do you all read and listen to the same sound-bite news-stories, but you don’t even care how often they are revealed to be lying to you.
If you haven’t asked “why?” to anything in as long as you can remember, then please, get out of my way because I trying to evolve.

to the fine gentleman driving the black sedan earlier tonight…
no, I wasn’t watching the green light in front of you. mainly because I was on the sidewalk, and pedestrians aren’t governed by the streetlights.
Even if I was, which I normally do, the light was with me, and I being on foot, must have started into the intersection much sooner than you to meet you there. Which, of course, makes me think of that whole “pedestrians have the right of way” thing.
but boy did you put me in my place when you stopped traffic behind you in rush hour to yell some sarcastic, half intelligent insult at me.
Sadly, it was frickin cold out and you just weren’t worth the trip back to your car to spit in your face through the window.
Kiss my ass, you accidental-ejaculation.
I feel better now.

okay…who the fuck goes shopping for their engagement ring at Walmart?

That’s it.
The next person who’s within five years of my age that refers to me as “Sir” is getting bitch-slapped.

Neo-Nazi
White Supremacy
White Power
Aryan Brotherhood
These people are all proud of their heritage, of their ‘race’, of their skin color.
Do you realize how stupid that is?
The way you’re born; wether you’re white or black or gray; wether you’re born to a Jewish mother or a Italian immigrant. These are among the only things in your life you have no control over.
And this is what people choose to be proud of.
Have you never done or accomplished a single thing in your life which you can claim to be proud of? Have you not even learned to wipe your own ass after taking a shit?
No, I’m not being particularly one-sided. Black pride is just as stupid. But they haven’t posted comment’s on my web site promoting their cause.
The comment will stay up there because these thoughts are open for public discussion. But that doesn’t mean I have to like you. So in case the headline on the last Nazi post didn’t make it clear enough for you:
You suck.

okay. for those of you who are still confused about this, the United States will attack Iraq. Just like we always would attack Afghanistan. We were never coalition-building, We were wasting time while our aircraft carriers got into the area to equip our soldiers. The same thing we’re doing now in Iraq,
American troops were recently shot while performing “exercises” in Kuwait. Such a load of crap. Exercises with live ammo, apparently, since they chased down and shot the Kuwaitis to death.
Keep track of the soldiers. As soon as we hit a 10 to 1 ratio of troops in our favor, be prepared for an assault. We’re going in.

I have coworkers who can’t grasp the concept of an intellectual thought coming anywhere but from their own mouths (though that isn’t the orafice I would guess). I have a boss who wouldn’t know a business decision if it bit him on the ass. I have a computer that just ate all my email… 26 plus unread messages. And my mother tells me the closest thing I have to an Ex lately is running around accusing me of being a cheap slut.
There are those days when it doesn’t pay to even open your eyes.

Dear Protester,
You have met the enemy, and he is you.
For a few shining moments in Seattle, you stunned the world and made people believe revolution was possible.
Enjoy the warmth of that moment, because reality is cold and harsh.
Not only do you no longer make a difference. You have become a tool, and an excuse. And you are allowing yourselves to become the story. Do you want the atrocious actions and records of the World Bank to be common knowledge? When was the last time the story of any of these meetings was anything but some high schoolers getting arrested?
You’re methods are ridiculous.
You sit back and let them tell you you’re not allowed to protest on public sidewalks. You erect web site for the police to find out your every plan and locale. You give them an opportunity and excuse to make public fools and examples of you. You’re playing by their rules.
Protests alone never change anything. To truly effect change, you must sway the body of people. The prototypical marches in the 60s and 70s were accompanied by entire social revolutions.
Change does not come in one weekend a year. Be here every month… every week, every other day. Set up a cell system for passing information on, which makes it much more difficult for your plans to be leaked or communications infiltrated. Poster the cities, and distribute educational information to the public. Use that web site for education and training, activities it does the police no good to watch.
Be intelligent. Keep the issue in front of peoples faces. And make sure it is your issue, not your oppositions. Ambition and urgency should not outweigh or negate intelligent and decisive action.

JaxxRoxx
I really wanted to go see Meg Lee Chin‘s show last night at Jaxx. I could get out there via cab and subway. But the subway closes down long before most clubs.
The owner was a great guy though. Offered to get me a ride back into town after the show, with one of his employees.
So I went out there last night.
The pigfucker didn’t even show up for work. None of his employees had anything good to say about him. (He has missed two appointments with Washington Post photographers this week alone).
So I hopped in a cab to catch the subway just as meg was setting up on stage.
JaxxSuxx.

Call your congressman and tell him to pull his head out of his ass.
The big tech issues and concerns at the moment involve congress passing laws that would either outlaw standard practices, or require new regulations or inhibitors that would effectively give one organization or industry control over an entire range of media.
Ain’t nothing but a business thang.
There is no way — no way — this is anything but beneficial in the purely economic sense for big businesses. At no time in history, has the strict control over the manufacture of any item been in the end beneficial to that business. Inevitably, either the product stagnates, or the rest of the world will move on without you.
Look at my beloved Macintosh computer. You may think that right now they are relatively well off. But in 1979, they had a 81 percent market share. 8 out of every ten personal computers sold was made by Apple, who has almost always maintained a monopoly on the manufacture of their equipment. Two years later, IBM introduced their first PC and licensed it to all interested parties, and every consecutive year after that Apple’s sales have declined by half.
These bills before congress are all form an economic standpoint of what is best for a specific industry at this exact moment. But no major societal advancement has ever come from a product or good.
Despite what you were told in history class, the invention of the printing press did very little by itself. You could print all the materials you wanted at the time, but they were all in Latin; a language totally illegible to the majority of people alive at that time. It wasn’t until several people, at the risk of their very lives, translated the Bible and other major church documents into the common tongue of the area, that substantial amounts of people realized they had been lied to all their lives by elders and ministers.
The Internet existed for decades without critical acclaim, before a group of scientists decided they wanted it to be easier for each other to have access to their research and papers. This desire to improve access to their educational information spawned the World Wide Web, and with it, an entry point to global communication for every redneck with an income tax refund check.
The current crop of lobbyists, if they’re anything like their predecessors, are shooting themselves in the foot with all their demands. The movie industry has lobbied against TV, against movies on TV, against movies on VHS and on DVD. Every single time, they luckily lost, and proceeded to make more money than anyone ever imagined in that new field.
Even when a industry group manages to be one step ahead, they will use that advantage to trip up the person (I will not use the term consumer). When it became obvious that CD burners would become widely available, and people would be able to aggregate whatever content they wished, many countries granted the music industries a tax on the price of blank CDs, to offset what was bound to be a loss due to people copying music from one CD to another. (Since so many people photocopy the work I do, does that mean I should collect money on every sheet of paper sold?) But now the RIAA is claiming that music sales are unexpectedly suffering due to the exchange of music via the digital medium.
They are trying to screw you with a 12-incher. But take heart. While corporations are legally considered living beings, they must be George Bush’s dumber half brother. They are continually blind to emerging trends. They are continually outsmarted by 12 year old children with a little creativity. They take years to introduce anything different, and even then, it is never new.
Advancement does not mean that a new product cycle is coming. Choice doesn’t mean I have to pay you or you. And the next time someone tells me they use a particular computer or listen to certain music because everyone does, I am going to shoot them between the eyeballs and cleanse the gene-pool just slightly.

Planned Sept. 11 Restrictions On Foreign Flights Canceled
Does anyone else remember that every plane used last September was part of an American fleet?

There are ignorant people and there are manipulative people in this city. Normally the bullshit doesn’t get this deep until congress is in session.
For now I simply refer you to what I wrote a couple months ago. Yeah I trailed off at the end, but you get the idea.