Dreams of a lego spaceman...

My blog will be changing very soon

2010-04-08T06:52:00.000-07:00

I've been kind of ignoring the little messages at the top of the screen for the last few weeks (could have been months, and I might not have even noticed), but Blogger, which is owned by Google, is removing ftp access for its blogger service. What this means might not make a lot of sense to people who aren't all into the hardware side of blogging, but for someone like me, it's HUGE. For the longest time, I've really enjoyed using Blogger to make my blog. I was able to configure it to be exactly what I wanted, which meant having to hack the code a bit (all legal, of course), but I got it to be exactly what I wanted. What was most important to me was that the blog was actually hosted on my own website's server. I learned a long time ago that when you don't do that, you are at the mercy of some other company and how good its service is. I used to use Xanga some years back, and they constantly had hardware problems, so Blogger was my solution.

Well, they're ending ftp service for Blogger, which means I have to look for a different service. Oh, I can stay with Blogger if I want, but basically what it wants me to do (in order to use littlesarbonn.com) is to do a DNS change to my system so that THEY host my blog, and that my web site is now completely pointing over to the service provided by Google. In other words, my web site will be completely hosted by Google, which means that at any moment, Google can completely cut me off if for some reason it doesn't like my content.

Unfortunately, Google has been known to do that. Oh, they don't advertise it, but I know a number of controversial people who have had their Google GMAIL accounts completely deleted on them for no reason they can fathom, other than someone didn't like who they were and what they were saying. Or it could be a technical glitch. Either way, that's not the kind of organization I want to entrust my daily writings to.

Unfortunately, this leaves me with two options. Go to another service, or pay more money to my own service provider to add a blogger service from it. Pair.com, which is my provider, uses Moveable Type, and I'm not really all that enamored with it. It has a bit of a learning curve I really don't want to try to figure out any time soon. I then looked at Word Press, but the only service they really offer that I would want is almost as bad as going to Moveable Type. So, I may end up just using their free service, which I've established already some months back at http://sarbonn.wordpress.com. It's not really a solution to my problem, but I don't really trust Google all that much, so I'm going to be moving my blog over to Word Press's free service and see if that works out for me.

I might change things as I look further at Moveable Type. I just don't feel like spending hours learning and configuring something that might just not be worth the expense.

For the most part, those who follow my blog on Facebook shouldn't see any difference. I'm pretty sure I can use the same linkage anyway. But for those who follow the site itself, it might be more difficult. The fortunate thing is that The Adventures of Stickman and the Legospaceman comic is hosted directly on my server, so it doesn't need a blog service in order to make it work.

Either way, I'll keep you informed.

If You Want To Save Money, Don't Spend Money....

2010-04-07T06:59:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article today on CNN Money's page about three ways you can save money. The link to the article was "Save Money Now! Three Great Deals!"

Let's examine the three deals first and then I'd like to make a small comment.

1. Fly At A Deep Discount
2. Get Cash For Appliance Clunkers
3. Tee Off For Less

Okay, the first one says that you can save money by using special promotion codes to book air travel. Um, okay. That's nothing new. And the deals aren't always THAT great, even though they want to hype the thought they might be BECAUSE PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO FLY ON LOUSY AIRLINES THAT ARE NOW CHARGING YOU FOR CHECKED LUGGAGE.

The second one says you can save money by using promotions for appliances to replace your older equipment. Now, this could be a good thing if the incentive was to get rid of resource using clunkers, but not everyone really has that need, and you kind of have to decide if the price you're going to be paying overall is really going to garner a savings down the line, or just make back the money you spent buying the new appliance.

The third one is to save money on golf courses by calling and asking if there are any discounts available. Duh. Okay.

Having read that article, I'll put forth three alternative ways to save money:

1. Don't fly anywhere. Don't travel unless you absolutely have to.
2. Use the mediocre appliances you already have if they're not consuming more energy than necessary.
3. Don't golf. It's a stupid sport anyway, kind of like NASCAR is a sport. Whenever a sport involves people who can perform it while drinking beer, it's not really a sport. It's a diversion.

The point is: If you really are trying to save money, don't spend more money than you have to spend on entertainment. If you really like golfing, then make sure you allocate a certain amount of money to golf, and all will be fine. It's a luxury, so treat it as such. If you're having trouble paying the rent, golf needs to take a backburner to paying the rent, the car payment, the loan shark or whatever Maslowian need that needs to be fulfilled.

This goes back to one of my biggest pet peeves, and that's department stores where a clerk will ring me up and automatically say: "You saved $50 today by buying this coat" right after I just handed her $150 for a coat that was originally marked up for $200. No, I did NOT save $50; I lost $150 in the transaction. A savings means that I GAINED money, not spent it. Whenever I hear that statement, I want to pull out my glock (which I should point out that I saved $33 on by buying it on sale at Walmart) and open fire on every cash register in the joint. But instead, I smile, thank her, and go dump my head into a barrel of water.

Anyway, just saying....

Pirates Hijack Duane's Novel off Somali Coast

2010-04-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

Today, the writing of Duane Gundrum was hijacked by pirates in international waters near Somalia, the European Naval Force reported this morning.

Somali pirates attacked Duane’s latest novel approximately 600 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia. He was completing an intense scene involving a complicated, triangular romance between his protagonist, a nice Southern girl, and a mysterious woman known only as the Klaw. Complete details on their complicated relationship is unknown at this time, as the author was deep in the middle of a plot variation that could have resulted in either a twisted relationship, involving a previous lover or some kind of plot twist that might have introduced yet another character who has not yet been identified.

Why Duane and his writing was traveling so close to the Somali border is unknown at this time, although it is believed that his journey may have been influenced by the concept known in certain circles as Writer’s Block.

The Somali pirates are believed to have kidnapped numerous passengers on Duane’s cruiser, although sources have yet to reveal any names. However, a recent communiqué from the Somali pirates indicates that they are holding a plot point prisoner and are demanding $13 million dollars (US) in ransom. They threaten to “delete the hard drive” if they are not paid off as demanded.

European Naval Force commanders have indicated that they have no intentions of launching a rescue attempt at this time. Admiral Franz Heckler of the British Command Vessel Trinity stated, “We do not know anything at this time, and to be honest, Duane is kind of an unknown writer pretty much everywhere, so I’m really not sure anyone cares.”

An image of the pirate leader who Duane would REALLY like to find

Duane was contacted by email, to which he responded, “How did you get this email? Did my girlfriend put you up to this?” There is no indication at this time if his response was sincere, or if it was, in fact, some type of code that really means, “I can’t talk right now because Somali pirates have kidnapped my hard drive with my latest novel on it, but I really like your news program and recommend everyone watch it every hour that it airs.”

The US Navy responded to our request for information with a simple dispatch: “If we see pirates, we blow them out of the water. What was the question again?”

Former literary victim of Somali pirates, Elric Longfellow commented on this story with the following: “If only these pirates would target one of those stupid vampire novels. Just once….”

We will continue to report on this story as more information develops.

Caring about Acedia

2010-04-06T07:20:00.000-07:00

As a writer, I would have to say that words are my bread and nuance is my butter, or is it nuance is my bread and words are my butter, or is it butter is my bread and....

Okay, I stole a bit of a joke from Woody Allen, but the point still sticks. As a writer, I love words, especially really poignant ones that have very unusual, nuanced meanings. The words "acedia" is one, in particular. It means to be extremely apathetic, to not care about anything to the point of not even caring about not caring. It was used in older days, but was eventually replaced when it was collapsed into "sloth" which took over as one of the deadly sins.

But we don't think about acedia that much these days, and it's not just because we don't know the word. We don't know the sense of its perspective.

I discovered this when I was teaching college students in the introductory class of political science. I used to assign a daily newspaper culling assignment where students were required to bring in one story from the news. What I discovered is how many lazy college students there are. They just don't seem to have the ability to do it. Of the ones that did actually do the assignment (which came after many days of prodding), I started to realize that very few of the students really cared what was going on in the world around them. I mean, they really didn't care.

And that seems to be the case in most circles. On some subjects, we tend to pay attention, but mostly we just don't care that much. International subjects are ignored, mainly because they involve people we don't know or ever intend to know. This is why when atrocities take place in some foreign land, there is a sense of "that's really sad" but very rarely does anyone want to get involved. The subject usually falls really fast on the interest level of most people.

Then we come to more local issues. A fire might cause someone to watch for the visual effect, but rarely because of concern. If you know someone in that fire, or close to it, then you might pay closer attention, but even that is on a case by case basis. Generally, we don't even care that much unless it seems exciting in some way.

Look at the news that gets played every day. I was watching responses to specific stories some time ago, and I noticed that people were concerned when the story involved celebrities they would never meet, but if some homeless person was killed in their area, the interest would be very lacking. In other words, if some movie star in Hollywood was going through a relationship crisis, people in Michigan might care, but if some vagrant was stabbed down the street from where they live, then the concern really wouldn't arise all that much.

I think this is why we can have a war go on for nearly a decade now, and no one really seems to care. Even though Americans have been dying, and many other people from those countries have been dying nonstop, we don't have much of a concern. Its a sidebar story that gets played right before the local weather and sports.

It also has to do with how the media covers the story as well. If I showed a personal interest story of someone suffering, people are going to pay attention. If I show you the same situation but explode it so that thousands are affected, and I use statistics to explain it, generally people aren't going to care. People can't wrap their emotions around statistics, which is why a lot of our national stories are so hard for us to wrap our heads around. We just don't care.

Which brings me back to my word of the day: Acedia. We just don't seem to care, but even worse, we don't care that we don't seem to care. Instead, we focus on minor, unimportant things while others are dealing with mortality issues on a daily basis.

Words can be interesting sometimes.

Your Friends May Not Be Your Friends: The Dark Side of Recent Trends in Facebook

2010-04-05T05:23:00.000-07:00

This has been bugging me for awhile now. I wasn't really sure how to word it, or even if anyone else was noticing it, but I was certain there was something bad going on. Turns out, I was right.

For the last while, I was getting numerous Facebook friend requests from people I'd never heard of before. I'd look at their included profile (or what little of it I could see) and there would be even less information included. In other words, I was getting friend invites from people who I didn't know, and I suspect that none of their other "friends" knew them either.

Turns out, these aren't just lonely people trying to make friends. They're spammers who realize that they can no longer get through your spam filters, so they are now trying to friend you and then open a new door to send you lots of information about products you don't want to hear about. Whatever other motives they might have, like trying to get personal information about you so they can use it to steal your identity and make your life a living hell, well, I'm sure no one would ever do that. Especially some anonymous stranger who has sent you an invite and "wants" to be your friend.

Technology Review has an article about this. Which means, if you've seen the article in the trade press, then the issue is already HUGE, which also means that you're probably already a victim. When CNN picks up the story, which is probably tomorrow or the day after, then you can be assured that if you weren't already informed, you will be informed by your bank when they ask you what all these charges in Arumba are for.

Spammers are getting very good at what they're doing, and they have to be, because there are too many programs designed to circumvent their attempts. I have a friend request I put on hold last week from a very attractive young woman who wants to be my friend. She lives in Georgia, and she has about forty other friends, none of whom I know. Her profile picture shows her with half of her shirt missing (on purpose), which I'm sure is quite useful in getting your average male to think to himself, "hey, she wants to be my friend, so maybe I have a shot at that hot chick" or some other stupid thought process. And that's how someone who is a spammer is going to get onto someone's friends list.

But then it gets even more interesting. Because I'm some horny guy that wants to make it with some hot girl half my age who lives on the other side of the continent, I'll probably be stupid enough to accept her friend request. I mean, what can I lost? Well, then she decides she wants to be friends with a lot of my other friends, which she now does by sending out a mass request to everyone on my friends' list. Then they look at it, realize that she's a friend of a friend, so they click yes when they get her request. They figure that by association (she's "my" friend), she must be safe and quite possibly a forgotten friend of theirs. So, she uses this to continue to break her way into the associations that we have amongst our friend networks, until she has managed to exhaust all avenues of connections. But now she has a huge list of people to spam for her products.

Let's now revisit "her", because odds are pretty good that she's not really a she, nor is she actually a person, but a spammer network that is interested in exploiting connective networks. Without any work at all, they let the previous connections of networks do the work for them, and next thing you know, we're all starting to receive strange correspondences. What you will also NOT notice is that her connection to you seems to disappear, going underground. Oh, she's still your friend, but she doesn't make status updates, so you don't remember she's your friend. She's like a sleeper agent waiting for the right moment to strike. And when she does, you'll never even know she did.

This is the type of thing that will probably bring down the usefulness of a site like Facebook because once people realize they're being scammed and targeted by people in their own networks, they'll do what comes natural: Leave. Why stick around an invite future attacks and continued exploitation?

There is much more to this than these basic points, but I'll leave it at that so people can get back to informing me of how many sheep they've found on their farms.

Stickman Will Be Returning Soon!

2010-04-02T11:01:00.001-07:00

My comic strip, The Adventures of Stickman and the Unemployed Lego Spaceman, will be returning soon. I just finished the conception story and art for the first few new entries. As soon as I can hook up a scanner, I will be producing these and adding them to the site. The new stories will begin with the introduction of Stickman's new pets, and then I'll be slowly integrating the introduction of the third main character, the lego spaceman.

People Are Still Not Clear on How to Do an April Fool's Joke

2010-04-01T10:28:00.000-07:00

I've talked about humor here before, and unfortunately I'm revisiting the concept because people still don't get it. Not that they read my blog anyway, but they still don't get it. I'll say it again: A joke is not funny if people end up pissed off after you tell the joke. If they're hurt in the process of telling the joke, you really need to relearn the concept of humor.

An example is the Republican Party. Just because you insulted the Democratic president on April 1st does NOT make it an April Fool's joke. It just means you chose an appropriate day to be inappropriate. Here's what they did: Obama Insult. Basically, for those not going to the article's site, the Republicans thought it would be a hoot to pretend to like Obama's ideas, and then they end their spot by talking about how they're joking and Obama is still essentially the anti-Christ (or something like that). Their actual joke is that they liked Obama's plan to cure global warming by:

"by replacing cars with low-emission unicorns” and achieving an unemployment rate of "negative 39 percent," among other “accomplishments."

I'm sorry, but insulting the person you're trying to punk doesn't come off as humorous. It comes off as insulting.

Google thought it was being clever this morning by changing its name to Topeka. On the surface, it might be kind of funny that Google decided to change its name to a town, but there's a darker joke being played here, and that's a direct slap at Topeka, which is trying very hard to become a site for a Google project (which playfully changed its name to Google for the chance of being recognized by Google). Well, here's where that joke turns really sour: If Topeka doesn't get the project it's vying for, then Google's little April Fool's joke goes from being playful to being straight out insulting, because it shows that it used Topeka as a brunt of its humor and had no intentions of actually awarding Topeka for actually going out of its way to honor Google in the first place. Instead, they would have made a grandiose gesure for nothing and got punk'd instead by Google.

That's not to say that some companies haven't got into the spirit of the day with just straight out fun. A couple of good examples are Starbucks and Blizzard.

Starbucks announced that it has two new coffee sizes: Plenta and Micra. Plenta is so big that it can be used as a rain hat or a lampshade, while Micra is only two ounces big. Fun all around cause it's a quick, one shot joke.

Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, had two announcements on its main page. The first is somewhat cruel, but playful, because it pokes fun at players who are obsessed with equipment in the game (often referred to as Gearscore, from the site that tracks this in game). They announced a new tracking system that will be part of the game that is essentially a vertical line that continues to grow larger as your "e.p.e.e.n." continues to increase in the game. It plays on the Internet term "e-peen", which is kind of risque to explain otherwise. The verbage used to explain the article is filled with euphemisms and double entendres that are all sexually related, and it reads more like a Viagra commercial.

Their second ad was just fun. It advertises a new virtual reality visor you can buy that can be used to totally immerse yourself into the game. When it comes to ordering it, it retails for $14,999.00, and takes you directly to their store site, where it lists the product as "Sold Out". There appears to now be a new message on their site that indicates they are now advertising a new World of Warcraft "matchmaking service", which gives me the impression their Devs are going to be playing at this joke all day long.

Well, that's all for now. Nothing impacting, but just something to share for the day.

The Solution to School Bullies: People Who Actually Care

2010-03-31T11:47:00.001-07:00

We've been hearing a lot about the events in January that led to 15 year old Phoebe Prince committing suicide because of school bullying. Not surprising is the people coming out of the woodwork, convinced they have the answers, some of whom hope to sell you a book or have you pay money to attend their conference to show you what they know. CNN has been going nuts at the end of March, three months after it happened, to indicate how much they care about what happened, including this article on how parents should handle their kids being bullied. What often isn't covered is those parents of bullies, who are quite often ignored until the bully does something criminal, and then everyone goes nuts, talking about how the parents are responsible for such atrocities. I'd show you a link to that kind of story, but I'm a few days ahead of that (those should start up in a few days from now).

But what isn't really discussed, or at least not at the length it should be, is the responsibility the rest of us have for making this kind of activity stop. Let's not pretend that bullying is a new crisis. It's been going on as long as a bunch of cave man kids figured out that if you hit Grokk over the head with a club, it would cause Grokk to feel bad and be laughed at by the other cave kids. And the cave kid who hit Grokk over the head would become really popular.

It was no different in my day (a few years after Grokk graduated and went to MIT, or the Paleolithic Era equivalent of MIT). Tougher kids targeted weaker kids. Popular girls shunned less popular girls. The "in" kids treated the "out" kids like crap. The "out" kids grew up to make web browsers and sell their companies for billions of dollars, often putting the former "in" kids out of work, forcing them to move out of their trailer park homes. Or something like that.

So, yes, at one point, I was a young kid at school, and there were bullies all around me as well. Some bullied me, some left me alone, and others continued on their self-directed tours of social environments that inhabit such worlds. But I'm thinking of one kid named Roger (for lack of any other name and not to embarrass anyone who might actually be this person). He was kind of insane. Everyone shunned him and stayed away from him because he was generally perceived to be nuts.

Unlike others, I actually found his strange antics to be somewhat fascinating. He used to have laser battles in his head, and he would act them out in public, with everyone just shaking their heads at him and looking around at everyone else to make sure they all realized they were in on the joke, and Roger was just being Roger.

At one point, I actually found myself in a situation where I was having a general conversation with Roger. I should point out that it was very difficult to speak to him because he suffered from all sorts of deficiencies, including an early form of ADHD, and he would just yell out random things at times. But every now and then, you could get him to stop, calm down and actually hold a normal conversation.

And he was brilliant. I was working on a prototype model of a water run, hydrogen enhanced engine at the time (it was the early years of high school, so I was aiming high). He took a look at my crude drawing, sketched over it and showed me exactly where it needed to be fixed in order to work. He then drew in an oxygen to hydrogen consumption matrix that took me several months to eventually figure out was meant to compensate for the loss of thermal energy. He was brilliant at ideas; he wasn't always that great at explaining them.

So, in coherent moments, Roger and I would have long conversations about really fascinating subjects. I then found out about his home life as well, which was one of the more dysfunctional family environments I'd ever heard about, causing me to wonder if it was as imagined as most of his out loud ramblings. And then, one day, he and I discovered we walked the same area going home, so he invited me over for no apparent reason, other than it was just something to do.

I met his family, and it was both very normal, and really bizarre. The father was somewhat insane as well, and the mother was someone who would just ramble on and on with incoherent sentences, before switching to normal "mom" mode and ask if everyone wanted lemonaide. His sister seemed the most normal, right up until the point she started talking about her future as a high class call girl in Beverly Hills. I had numerous conversations with her (she was in junior high school at the time), and I could never get over the feeling that I think she was just putting me on the entire time, not wanting to be outdone by her strange family, almost as if she was being crazy in hopes of fitting in, but was secretly sane and just taking notes for her future tell-all book.

At school, I'd run across Roger all of the time, and he was slowly moving from "out there" to outright, no turning back, insane. He was constantly picked on by other kids, because he was such an easy target, and all I kept noticing was that no one ever bothered to hold a conversation with him longer than an insult session, because they were missing what appeared to be a really interesting guy. But they were never interested in a conversation to begin with; they were looking for a victim, and what better victim can be found than someone who really has little grasp of reality and little ability to interact in that environment?

All I remember is that Roger was so much more interesting to talk to than 90 percent of the rest of those students in that environment. He really had something to say, but he just had little way of communicating it. But all it really took was a desire to listen, and a whole world of fascinating information was available to a potential listener.

When I think about this whole episode with Phoebe Prince, I think about the so many victims who have been targeted by stupid bullies, and it's painful. I think many of us have been victims of such Neanderthals in that past, but we all managed to make it (better or worse). I wonder how many others didn't make it because no one cared enough to step in and realize there was an actual person being targeted, not a punch line to someone's joke.

Why I Write

2010-03-30T11:28:00.000-07:00

I know some of those who read my stuff aren't real science fiction fans, so hang in there with me for a second cause I have to go all geek like to make this point. There's a scene in Star Trek: First Contact where Picard is having a conversation with the actress Alfre Woodard (a stellar actress in her own right), right before he goes into one of the greatest monologues of all Star Trek history, and he starts it off by stating: "I have a certain perspective when it comes to the Borg." And those who were fans of the show know that he was once kidnapped, turned into one of them, forced to destroy many of his friends and comrades while helpless to do anything to stop himself from doing so. Yes, a certain "perspective". So whenever I'm asked why I write, I think back at that moment, and I say that I have a certain perspective when it comes to writing.

What that means is that I've lived a life that's very different than most others. That doesn't mean it was better, more introspective or whatever. It just means that my whole life seems to have been designed around giving me a different perspective on the way of seeing life and the world around me. So, when I write, I like to think that my third eye, as some writers, specifically Stephen King, have pointed out, sees things differently than most other people. And as a result, I like to share that perspective with others, because I often fear that no one else will ever have that perspective to share with the rest of the world, because my perspective is strange, and thus, I think needed.

But I'm sure most people feel that way about themselves, so I don't purport to be superior to others, or to be more significant in my knowledge. I just happen to be a certain kind of information sponge who grabs many things, puts it through a really bizarre blender and then spits it back out as "perspective".

And I've always felt that way, even though my background hasn't always been so varied. I felt this way before I went to West Point. I thought I had a pretty strong handle on the world back then. I hadn't experienced ANYTHING, but I sure felt I had. Then there was West Point. Then there was my time in the service, which has given me a seriously distorted background that has added all sorts of nuance to that perspective. There were things you do in the military that automatically give you a different sense. There were things people don't normally do in the military that I did in the military that add to that sense. Then there were the places I went, and the experiences I had with the many people of those places. It seemed like most of my life was designed around exposing me to things other people don't see. Things from burnt out villages, abandoned ghost towns, roming Roma families, shysters, scammers, brilliant scientists, murderers, treasonous villains who would sell out their mothers (some who did), people who would look me in the eye and lie to me even as I knew they were lying to me, world-traveling doogooders who no one would ever know because they never sought out notoriety for what they were doing, crazy nutcases that had more power and responsibility than anyone should ever have, mysterious strangers who would fade in and out of my life at times (sometimes reappearing at odd times, and other times never being seen again), and all sorts of others that I can honestly say have helped me to see the world as such a different place with so many different perspectives.

And when I was a kid, living a very unimportant life, realizing that I was probably never going to do anything to make a difference anywhere or to anyone, teachers started to tell me that I had a gift of writing, that it was something I should pursue and continue to do. And then people kept telling me this, until I realized that it wasn't just something people say to kids, but they were serious about it. And then I started to sell my writing, and I realized that I loved to communicate with people. That sort of put me on a path that I've been traveling ever since.

What I discovered with writing is that I began to love the process as much as the communicating. There are all sorts of nuances that make it so much more interesting and fascinating as a process. In the beginning, I was writing just to communicate a message, but these days I explore each new story with the perspective of challenging myself to write differently to provide the story that needs to be provided in whatever fashion that best fits the process. And while it may not seem that way, it opens up a whole world of possibilities when it comes to writing. Even the name of a character can have massive symbolic, intuitive value. Sometimes, you can even create a sense of writing that hides a whole fabric of writing within its world, so that someone would have to actually be very introspective and careful to make sure that he or she found exactly what was really being written. I got to do that with a humorous novel I wrote, and it was so much fun because I was challenged the entire time I was writing it, and at the same time I got to really stretch the limits of what I was capable of, realizing that I couldn't have written that same book ten years ago. Which puts forth the possibility that there are novels waiting to be written by me that I'm not even capable of writing today, just because I haen't learned what is necessary to bring the writing to that level yet.

That is why I write. It is for me both a process and an ultimate challenge. It's the only challenge that I am capable of putting forth for myself, completely aware that any laziness on my part leads to complete failure, but complete effort leads to results I can't even yet begin to imagine. Again, that is why I write.

I guess you could say it gives me a certain perspective when it comes to the activity. Picard would be so proud.

The Art of Nuanced Titles

2010-03-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

This is another writing topic, for those who are keeping track. But I seem to be on a roll these days.

My topic today is nuanced titles and the art of creating them. What I mean by this is best explained by a series of plays I wrote as Nigel Cross (written with Allen Amundsen...who at one time actually was reading my blog, so who knows, maybe I'll get a shout out from him). One of the titles we created was called Without A Net, a play about two guys who meet on the Golden Gate Bridge while one is contemplating "hurling himself into a watery death". The title was nuanced because as the story goes on, the character who wants to jump keeps saying, "I'm jumping because I'm without a net." You find out later that what he is really saying is "I'm jumping because I realize I'm without Annette." Annette was the woman who dumped him, causing him to finally decide to end his life.

We revisited the nuanced title thing again and again, like our story "Be the Monkey", which is about two actors putting on a play called Monkey Boy. The nuance is a little more subtle this time around, but I won't go into the particulars, other than to say that it works out that the name is important to the story. Later on, we wrote "Splitting Adam", which is about two brothers who haven't spoken in years. I based the title off of the nuclear family, which then leads to the thought of "Splitting Atom(s)", which leads to the nuance I'm talking about.

Later titles I played around with came in other plays, like "Hostage Play", where a group of previous characters take over the play until the playwright decides to "end" the stories they were in previously, thus taking the play hostage. It seems that I've had a lot of fun with titles over the years because nuance really seems to be almost as important as the story itself. My latest short story that was published was titled "Buried Memories", and it had as much to do with memories as a tree that was planted that contained the memories of an important event shared between the two main characters of the story.

Recently, I've been updating a story I wrote years ago called "Killing Robert Shaw", which is probably one of the most powerful stories I've ever written about a doctor who administers the final lethal injections on death row and sees the actor Robert Shaw each time he kills a patient (because you later find out the actor looked identical to the man who killed his wife and daughter and got away with it).

I don't think a lot of people think enough about nuanced titles anymore, but sometimes they can be really powerful. I've seen it used recently in some great movies, such as Babel. After you watch the movie, you can probably sit for about an hour and ruminate on the title alone.

Anyway, my latest novel is called Plato's Perspective, and I'm sure you can imagine it is filled with all sorts of nuance in the title alone. I'll pretty much leave it at that for now.

The Struggles of Writing Humor

2010-03-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

In the many writing books I have read over the years, one of the toughest writing processes is often considered to be that of humor. Part of the problem is that it can sometimes be considered difficult to do humor due to numerous reasons, ranging from the author not being funny to not being able to translate humor to the averge person.

I've been writing humor most of my life, starting off with many short stories I wrote, up until one of my latest novels. In almost all of my writing, there has been a sense of "duane", or humor to the writing. My characters were always known for having little asides that add laughter to what can sometimes be a very serious subject matter. It takes nuance to be able to do this, but over the years I've managed to craft this part of my, well, craft.

Part of the problem of writing humor is the perception that it's not "real" writing. And that's one of the things that has bothered me for many years. My very first submission of a short story to an editor was "The Ides of March", which was my send up on horror, which involved writing myself into the story itself (the writer, not me as a character). At one point, the writer becomes involved in the story, and the characters throw a fit because I didn't belong, and like most jokes, it becomes one of those "you'd have to read it to understand it". But the response I received from the first editor I ever sent it to was something I remember word for word: "A series of jokes, alas, does not make a story". But it was a story. And it was funny.

What I discovered is that because I wrote humor, I was shown a different part of the writer's business market. Quite often, an editor feels he or she doesn't have to take you seriously or even treat you with respect, because you write humor rather than "something serious". Over the years, some of my humor writing has received some of the harshest responses from editors. Some of it has been published. But sometimes, out of nowhere, I'll get really obnoxious, mean-spirited responses from editors who I really feel think that because there's humor involved, they don't have to be as professional with the writer as they would someone who sent something "serious".

Now, humor isn't all that I do. It's just something I like to do. And I have discovered over the years that I can be quite successful at it. Some of my strongest published writing has been humor, and the responses I've received from readers has been really great.

But having said that, I wanted to talk about honing the craft when it comes to humor writing, because a lot of people don't understand how to do it. I honestly believe that a lot of people think a bunch of jokes does substitute for story. It doesn't. That should be obvious, but quite often it is not. I once mentored a young woman in writing some years back who was trying her hand at writing. She couldn't get it down on paper. She was a very funny person, in person, but she just couldn't convey that humor when she tried to write it down. She would constantly fall back on trying to point out that she was trying to be funny. I kept trying to tell her that what I perceived as her conflict was that she wasn't sure enough of her own humor to be able to convince anyone else. We never really got over that hurdle. She went back to romance fiction, and that's what she writes to this day.

For me, I did a lot of stories and articles that helped me figure out how to deliver a humorous story. But something else came along for me that I never suspected would help, and that was speech and debate (Forensics). I wrote a lot of stories during this time, for both myself and other people who were competing. I did a lot of humor during this time because it was just so much fun to be able to get an immediate reaction from your humor. You don't normally get that as a writer; you just have to hope that somewhere out there someone is reading your writing and laughing, and for the right reasons. With Forensics, I was able to craft a funny story and have people laughing right in front of me. It helped me to figure out timing, something that Steve Martin has pointed out is one of the hardest features for a comedian to nail down in a routine. He uses humor to explain it, but he makes his point well. Since then, I often think about my audience in front of me while writing humor; I figure that if I can see them laughing, then I know I've achieved my goal. If it doesn't work, and I know when it doesn't, I rework it.

My latest big project was The Ameriad, a novel written in the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The difference was, I wrote it in character, as the worst translator in history, who was good at getting the words right, but just not that good at nuance and understanding what he was really translating. This allowed me to write a novel on several levels, something I always wanted to do. I was writing metaphor, allusion, symbolism, slapstick humor, and nuanced humor. It was designed so that both a scholar and a novice could both read it and get something out of it with neither the scholar feeling that he or she was being talked up to nor the novice feeling that he or she was being talked down to. It made the writing of this novel very difficult, but in the end, it helped me reach the next rung of writing, something I think a lot of writers don't understand.

Because what happens with a lot of writers is that they spend decades trying to put out writing, but spend less effort on honing the craft, even though they say they are, not realizing the significance of the act. Good writers stretch themselves each time they write so that they are not writing the same thing over and over again. An example of an author who stopped doing this a long time ago is Clive Cussler, who is arguably one of my favorite authors of all time. But he doesn't reinvent himself every time he writes a novel. You can read Raise the Titanic and get the same sense of writing you get from his latest novel. That doesn't make him any less of a great writer. It just means he stopped trying to better himself a long time ago. Take an author like Doris Lessing, and this is someone who pushes the envelope every time she puts pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard...don't know how she really writes).

That was the sense I had when I went into the process of writing The Ameriad. It was meant to be funny, but it was also meant to be seriously socially relevant. And that's what makes it a struggle to write humor. You can't just tell a bunch of jokes and hope people laugh. You have to be challenging your readers as well as yourself so that the humor means something. I don't think a lot of writers get that. Some do, and it's wonderful whenever you come across one that does it well. I can't claim to be a success at it, but I'll certainly admit that I try each and every time the next story is begun.

The Categories of Great Television

2010-03-24T09:58:00.000-07:00

It is not often that you hear the words "great" and "television" used in the same sentence. But there have been some great series out there, and believe it or not, there are a few that are wonderful even today. Unfortunately, the majority of what's one television is avoidable, at best, and even more unforunate is that sometimes it's hard to figure that out until it's too late.

It's no secret that television stations are famous for destroying great television shows, either through cancellation or through inner destruction by ruining them on screen. A good example is the classic example of the original Star Trek. This was a show way ahead of its time, and it was taken off the air before its time. Then put back on the air, and then shut down for good. (well, until it was reinvented decades later as a brand new set of franchises that served to fall down again before reinventing itself in movies again). But that being said, television networks constantly destroy great shows, and we're the victims each time, and there's really nothing we can do about it.

But I thought I'd talk about some of the great shows, and to do so I'd like to point out some of the categories I've created for how I like to distinguish television shows.

1. Great Television Series
1b. Good TV Series, But Not Great
2. Good Series That Were Destroyed By the Networks
3. Great Shows That Wore Themselves Out
4. One Season Wonders That Destroyed Themselves
5. One Season Wonders That Networks Cut Off Life Support in Their Infancy
6. Fun Shows That Were Good At Times But Didn't Always Do It
6. Everything Else That Sucks

Great Television Series
There are some great shows that fit into this category, and unlike a lot of critics, I will argue that the actual listings that fit in here vary from person to person. But for me, I would have to say that there are some brilliant shows that have existed and were done so well that they will forever be the ones to be compared to. Here are some examples.

LOST: One of the few shows that has been strong from start to finish. It even had a mid series few seasons that people said they didn't like, but after rewatching those shows, you realize how important those particular seasons were. People didn't know enough to realize what was being done during those seasons, and now on its own, the whole series is probably the one to compare to forever. We're about 7 episodes from a series completion, and the show has never been as strong as it is now.

Battlestar Galactica (the remake): They took a hokey 70s show and turned it into something powerful, ground-breaking and so dramatic that normal television dramas don't even hold a candle to it. Sure, there were a few hit and miss episodes, but the writings was brilliant, and the acting was dead-on. Unlike LOST, it suffered from its closing up of the series, but that's because it seemed like they were making it up as they went along, not realizing how they were going to tie up all of the loose ends. LOST never seems to have had that problem as everything (or practically everything) tied itself into the final season.

Babylon 5: The series was designed from start to finish to play out exactly as it did. Sure, there were a few episodes that were hit and miss, but it went over a 5 year period. The last season was a bit weaker as it didn't have the overarching nemesis of the Shadows to act as the enemy, but it was still done very well. Their attempt to spin off a new series after it (Crusade) failed miserably, but fortunately that other series doesn't have to be looked at as a condemnation of the original material.

M*A*S*H: One of the few non-science fiction series to reach the top point of television presentation. A comedy, it was different from other shows because it also had some of the most powerful dramatic moments in television history (including the first usage of swear words in a TV series; Alan Alda called someone "a son of a bitch", which back then was HUGE). Later generations tend to see the show as more of an old show that isn't that funny but for its time, it was ground-breaking, and it served as a direct condemnation of the Vietnam War, even though it was really about the Korean War. It's somewhat ironic that the show ran longer than Korean War by several times.

Get Smart: Another great old comedy with Don Adams as the clueless Maxwell Smart (later played by Steve Carrell in the latest movie adaptation). Most people don't realize the show was created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, two of the greatest comedic geniuses of the 20th century.

These are just a few of the great shows that existed. Here's a list of others I think belong here, although not always were they as spot-on as the previous few I mentioned.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Angel
Hillstreet Blues
Monk
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Deadwood
Stargate SG1

Again, as previously mentioned, there are many others that others might want to include with their lists. But this brings me to a secondary category, and that's where things start to fall apart for television. There are a lot of shows that were really good, but they didn't always produce great episodes. A lot of times they were hit and miss, even if their shows ended on a great note (and some haven't ended yet), like:

The Sopranos
Weeds
The Tudors
Dr. Who (the new one)
Stargate Atlantis
Stargate Universe
V (the new one...the old one was atrociously bad)
Magnum, PI (great fun, very hit and miss)
Ghost Whisperer
Roswell
Smallville
Veronica Mars

Again, there are probably a dozen more, but it's hard to remember them all.

But that brings us to another category, and that's the shows that wore themselves out. We all know the "jumping the shark" reference that comes from Happy Days when Fonzie jumped a shark with his motorcycle. For bad journalists, what this serves is as a vehicle to say that a show has hit a moment where it is no longer the show it used to be. But that just shows that most of them lost touch with the metaphor, because what was happening to Happy Days at that time was that it was once a great show, but people stopped watching it. So this HUGE media event was created where it was advertised day and night that Fonzie was going to be jumping a shark on Happy Days. THAT was the "jumping the shark" moment. The network was so desperate to get its fan base back that it overhyped an event that was really stupid. THAT is jumping the shark. Anyway.

Other shows that started out great but died out were like Heroes, which had a great first season, and then it has been nothing but an attempt to appear relevant again. It's not. The show sucks now. It's never coming back.

Part of the problem with these types of shows is specifically in the vision and in the writing. The writers fall in love with themselves, and they think they're being really hip and cool, but they're being corny and cliched. They do stupid writing techniques (like the old writing cliche of writing a serial story where you always end with the hero falling into an endless pit and then start the next episode with him "leaping out of the pit"). The vision of the story suffers here as well, as the producers and directors want to make the show seem visually relevant and hip, but it ends up being worthless a trite. An example of this is with a show that was never hip to begin with, and that's Flashforward. They started with a great visual premise, but had nothing to add to it. So the show was on autopilot until they decided to "pull a LOST" and take the show off for half a season and then come back like they were planning the hiatus all along. People aren't going to watch a show when you do that, and you didn't hook them the first time.

One season wonders are caused by two problems. One problem is the show itself, as in it really has nowhere to go after its first season. Like Heroes. The other problem is when the studio has no confidence in the show and makes attempts to pull it off the air because of ratings. Quite often, the show doesn't last (or just disappears). A good example of a great show that could have continued but suffered from network ailment was Jericho. The show had great promise, but the studio pulled it, then allowed it to continue for a bit, then pulled it. So it ended, but it seemed really forced, turning a great first season into a hurried finish through half of a second season. They're doing that with a lot of other shows as well. People like conclusions, but it really needs to make sense. Otherwise, the show dies a stupid death.

The last category is unfortunately the norm for most television shows. There are so many bad shows on the air that actually do better than the good shows that people just don't watch them anymore. Grey's Anatomy is a good example. I wanted to like the show because I was a Katherine Heigl fan (from Roswell). I stopped being a fan after Grey's Anatomy. What a bad show. I tried watching it but it tried so hard to be Scrubs with relevance. An ER with a laugh track (or needing a laugh track). It was a horrible show. Please let it die.

Other shows are just as bad. Reality shows are even worse. I understand that people will do anything for their few minutes of fame and don't want to actually work for a real living but be famous for being famous. I don't care. I don't want to watch them. I won't watch them. I don't care that some girl got a boob job because she wants to be seen as relevant in the real world of her reality show existence that no one cares about except her and a few thousand of her wannabe Facebook friends. Reality shows have completely destroyed television. For every good American Idol (which I don't personally watch, but recognize its relevance and good attributes) there are so many crappy reality shows that are essentially attempts to popularize bad social science with spot assessments of little merit. I don't care how many times people think the world will turn into a Hobbesian dystopia once controls are removed, I don't buy it, and I still think the only reason people become such assholes is because there's a money pay off at the end of those shows. Man, those shows bug the crap out of me.

Anyway, that's my quick assessment on television that everyone has been waiting for. Okay, just my stuffed animals were waiting. Okay, even they didn't want it. But it's my blog, dammit!

The Problem With Health Care Legislation May Actually Not Have Anything to Do With Health Care

2010-03-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

I'm going to go out on a limb and say something most people aren't thinking about, and most people probably don't want to admit (or will admit). The problem right now in today's political environment isn't health care, even though it does seem to be the main focus. Like most major issues, health care is serving as a metaphor for what is really wrong. What's wrong is not health care. What's wrong is that our country is stuck in at a nexus, and NO ONE has a clue where to take it next.

Think about it. The United States has been rudderless for decades now. We've been going on autopilot towards...well, to be honest, no one really knows where we're heading. All we know is that we seem to be reactive against things that we don't want. We don't want terrorists. We don't want unemployment. We don't want wars. We don't want cars speeding up and crashing into walls. We don't want crime. We don't want taxes, bad health care, mean people, too many commercials, men kissing on television (okay, some people don't want that, and others REALLY want that), pirates, high prices, corruption, evil banks, Wall Street profiteers and, well, the list seems somewhat endless, although I'd go on a limb and say we don't want long lists that seem to go on forever.

What we don't seem to know is what we do want. Oh, I don't mean intangibles. I know we all want "peace", money and Megan Fox (okay, some people want that and others REALLY don't want that). But we really don't have a grasp on what we really want and need. Throughout most of the US's history, we were at war with someone, or were fearing a war with someone. I'm sorry, but Iraq, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Osama Bin Ladin, and terrorism is NOT a war. Almost all of those are intangibles that really have no substance. Iraq is a war we didn't want or need that is now a mess we have to clean up. Afghanistan is a cesspool that has needed cleaning for several centuries now and has been a failure of numerous administrations, hegemonies and various dictators. The Taliban is another metaphor that has no substance to most normal Americans anymore than Team America: World Police was an accurate depiction of US Foreign Policy. Osama Bin Ladin is a spectre of an entity that we keep bringing back to scare little children who happen to be Republicans, live in Texas and vote for Sarah Palin. Terrorism? Um, a state of being is not a process of war. Terrorism is something you do to scare governments; it's not a thing you fight anymore than a War on Fear makes sense.

We need direction. And we need some where to actually go with that direction. Once, we needed to go to the Moon. So did Ralph Kramden, but we got there (he didn't). We elected a man who claimed he had a vision for America, but so far, that vision has been more like a new pair of glasses. Yes, it helps us see better, but it doesn't make the picture any more palatable. The kind of direction we need is the kind that leads us to a positive future of tangible benefits, not a potential esoteric plane of existence where we might feel better.

In the process, we have people out of work who need jobs. We have people without health care who need long term care. We have cities that cannot afford to put police officers in the streets, and even when they do, we have populations of people who don't even trust them, teamed up with populations of people who have been fending for themselves for so long that they've given up the Hobbesian perspective of trusting the gatekeepers.

The United States needs a vision of an actual future where tangible things can be worked for. People can work together towards an ideal if that ideal makes sense, but there seems to be way too much "trust me and all will be okay" in current day policy decisions. There is also way too much corruption in the ranks of the people who are supposed to be leading us towards that type of future.

Do I have an actual answer? No. I'm not the person who needs to be doing that in the first place. I never claimed to be a politician, nor do I even claim to have the best interests of the greater good at heart. I just know that listening to self-motivated individuals talk about how they know best about health care is not leading us to answers that will help the rest of us. Obama had one thing right during the election, and that was the concept of town halls. What he's not getting right is how they should be used. We need leaders that stop talking to us with great speeches about how they're going to continue doing the status quo in hopes of making things better. What we need are for those leaders to put together town halls and listen to the people. Listen to those constituents who put them in office in the first place.

Unfortunately, listening in this country involves money and lobbyists. As long as that continues, the cesspool is all we have available to us for future development.

The Struggles of Being a Professional Writer in the 21st Century

2010-03-11T10:39:00.000-08:00

It doesn't seem all that long ago that being a professional writer was not all that difficult. Yes, it was still a difficult field to break into, but once you did, you were pretty much a part of publishing's bigger picture. I kind of grew up a bit too late to be part of the Maltese Falconish era of writing with the Sam Spades and gumshoe detective novels, but I put forth a lot of effort during this period and was starting to make a name for myself.

That was about 20 years ago. Then I just kind of went into a retrospin and stopped writing. Well, I didn't stop writing exactly. I just stopped trying to be published.

The funny thing is: I almost made it 20 years ago. I was highly published, and even editors recognized my name when I sent in my stuff. Fast-forward twenty years, and I'm an unknown just like every other wannabe writer under the sun.

Something happened during the last twenty years that has completely changed writing, and it's actually made being a professional writer almost impossible. Back in the early days, it was kind of cute when someone told you he or she was going to be a writer, because the majority of them never followed through, and you knew there was always this belief that someone who was intelligent also thought of himself/herself as a potential writer. I dated a woman some years ago who because of her education was convinced she would make a great writer, but she had never written anything, so we kind of know how that ends up. But back to the point, something has changed.

What changed was that becoming a writer has become much easier. In the old days, companies used to prey on potential writers by trying to sell them into vanity presses (which were pretend publishing houses that would charge you to publish your book and then pretend like you "made it" even though all you did was pay for a bunch of books to be published and then have no way to sell them). Other companies came along that did something similar, but instead of charge you to publish your book, they would publish your book for free, but they would only print as many as were sold, effectively setting up that same thing the vanity presses did because the only market for your book was YOU, and they expected you to pay for copies of your own book. It was vanity without the vanity name.

What this has done is make any potential writer automatically claim to be a professional writer, even though that's not what they are. The old model used to filter them out of the picture because the process took so much work and effort that a lazy writer was never going to go through the work. Now, everyone can be a writer, and because there's no longer any work (they'll publish anything), more and more crappy books are being published, making it that much more difficult for dedicated writers.

This has brought about another thread in the writing market that is even more dubious. For the longest time, writers could supplement their income by writing articles. You didn't make a lot of money doing it, but you made enough money that you could survive quite comfortably. The idea was quality work of select titles, not volume of crappy work. Now, a bunch of for profit schemes have appeared on the scene and have practically destroyed the freelance writing market by pushing it out to the common demoninator writers and those who are willing to bargain their way to a writing career. Some examples:

1. Guru.com. This organization has appeared and turned the normal writing market into something of a joke. In the old days, someone wanting their memoirs written would have to shop for a quality writer, often finding someone who had some experience in the memoir market. Guru serves a really bizarre function for this market in that it now offers a place for people who want writing done, but the writers all try to low bid each other for the assignment. The job no longer goes to the best writer; the job goes to the one who offered to do an assignment for the lowest price. Talk about a business destroying mechanism.

2. Demand studios (demandstudios.com). This organization gets people to write articles for $7.50 to $15.00 an assignment. Yes, you can probably survive by using this process to write, but it is completely serving to destroy the freelance writer market because people used to get paid $200-500 for a writing assignment. Why pay them $300 when you can pay them $15.00? Yet, many writers seem willing to do this in order to get both income and a byline. I've been kind of hovering on the edge of this organization for a while because I'm torn between the fact that I hate what they're doing, and I realize that I need to survive in order to consider myself a professional writer. My personal jury is still out on this one, even though it's not all that happy about it.

The problem with writing today is that everyone can be a writer because there are so many ways to get your writing published. But there's still no way to get anyone to read what you write. To do that, you still need to break through with the big publishing companies, but it's getting harder and harder to do it because there is so much trash out there that is competing with the serious writing as well. Publishing companies are going with safe products, like already famous authors or celebrities who pretend to write books. A book by a controversial figure like Sarah Palin can guarantee sales, but a book by a serious author may never even get published, unless that author chooses to become published through an almost vanity publishing house.

It makes the whole field very depressing. I'd leave it completely and focus on something more useful, like fishing in Azeroth (World of Warcraft) if I wasn't addicted to writing. I'm one of those "need to write" people, and that makes it even worse. I was born to do this as my calling, yet I can't seem to get anywhere with what I was born to do.

It's depressing. Almost enough to write a book about it. Maybe I can get Sarah Palin to pen it. I hear she has a really strong writing career these days.

It's Just a Joke...really

2010-02-24T05:24:00.000-08:00

ESPN has made a politically correct move and suspended one of its reporters for statements he made about a female colleague on the air. Supposedly, he made negative comments about the outfit she was wearing, and after that the heads at ESPN went nuts. The commentary has been all over the place since then, with people either saying it's much ado about nothing, ESPN overreacted, or Kornheiser should be fired, skewed and napalmed with extreme prejudice.

Why am I talking about this? Well, because it brings up a subject I've wanted to talk about for awhile, and that's the whole idea of comedy and humor.

Years ago, when I was in the service and out of the Academy, I was required to attend a basic training unit (I attended a lot of them as part of my assignments while working for CID and CI). I remembered I was in this battle of wits with this really stupid PFC. He was trying to insult me, and my response was to take every insult he waged, agree and then use an additive process to show how he was now contradicting himself. By the time I was done, he looked really foolish, wanted to fight, and let's just say that the situation did not end well for him.

BUT right after that, and because of that, it got me to thinking about humor. I was a very flippant young man at the time. I was quick to use a cynical response to unarm an opponent, and much of my humor was directly insulting in some way. At the time, I thought that was what constituted "funny".

Well, at that time, I made a decision because I felt really dirty after that conversation because even though EVERYONE was laughing with me, they were all laughing AT HIM, and something didn't seem right about that. I began to see humor as something that could be very negative. After that day, I made a vow to avoid ever using negative humor that hurt someone else. I no longer found it funny, and therefore, I would no longer try to gain favor for using that style of humor.

What I discovered is that there are very many people who ONLY know that type of humor as "funny". As I was reading through the responses to the Kornheiser story (the guy who made the stupid comments about his female colleague), I started to notice how many people would say something like: "you people don't understand humor, so leave him alone", and all I could think was that perhaps a lot of people don't understand humor. The ability to poke fun at someone else's expense should never be considered funny to an enlightened community, yet there is so much of that type of behavior in our society. From political pundits to late night talk show hosts, negative humor is used so much at the expense of other people. Oh, we justify it by using such comments as "he's a public person" or "he or she should have known better". But in the end, it's humor that comes at the expense of another individual.

One solution to this problem for me back then was to think through each attempt at making a joke. How I used to do this was think to myself, "would everyone find this funny, including the subject of the humor itself?" If the answer was no, then it wasn't funny to me. It took me many years to cement this into my psyche, but it was something that had to be done because I was no longer finding insults or negative commentary to be funny. I don't even find it funny when it is done by very good comedy folk; I tend to be the only one in the room who doesn't laugh, and I have come to a comfortable understanding that I'd rather be that person than the one who joins in with them.

Unfortunately, very few people agree with me. Or they agree, but in the end they practice a different processing when it comes to such humor, no matter how much they claim otherwise.

What I'd like to add to the interesting part of this observation is that I do succeed in creating a lot of humor on a daily basis, both in my writings and in person. But it's never negative towards an individual. Oh, it may still by cynical and biting at times, but there's never a person sitting in the next cubicle, thinking "I wish he wouldn't use me as the brunt of his jokes all of the time."

The Problem is Simple: Lawmakers don't know how to stop spending our money

2010-02-19T10:18:00.001-08:00

It seems almost as if lawmakers in this country have no clue that to fix the problems in front of them, they have to stop trying to fix the problems caused by them. An example: Grand Rapids. On May 4th, Grand Rapids is going to ask taxpayers to increase city taxes to solve the budget problems of Grand Rapids. Before that, the city government asked the people of the city to come up with "ideas" to solve the problems of the budget, OR they would have to start cutting essential services. A lot of the comments that were entered by citizens were mainly "stop spending our money on stupid stuff" but that's the problem. The government NEVER sees any of the money it spends as problematic. The problem is always that there's not enough money to spend. So it asks for more.

Well, taxpayers aren't really excited about picking up the additional tab. Here's a story of taxpayers saying just that, in the Grand Rapids Press. You see, the average citizen is being asked to tighten his or her belt but the government doesn't believe it should be held to the same standard. Instead, it believes it needs more money to do the things it needs to be done.

To anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation, or the government, it is not hard to see how this waste accumulates. First off, whenever there is excess money, there is NEVER an attempt to put that money back into the system. Instead, that money is seen as extra, and it spent as part of the extra fund capacity. If you don't believe me, it might be interesting to ask what has happened to the money that was paid back to the federal government from the loans that were made to the national banks. Was that money added back to the national coffers, or was it treated as "already spent" so it because excess? I'd like to think it's the former, but I'm willing to bet a government free lunch on the latter.

The Grand Rapids tax thing is really interesting because it is asking for an increase from 1.3 percent to 1.5 percent tax for those who live in Grand Rapids, and from 0.65 to 0.75 percent tax for those who don't live in Grand Rapids, but work here. What's interesting about that last category is that it increases a tax rate on people who have absolutely no input on the decision whatsoever. They don't live in Grand Rapids, so they don't get to vote here. Ever hear of taxation without representation? Apparently not.

But even so, the city of Grand Rapids is asking for more money to do what it is already supposed to be doing. If it doesn't get it, it threatens to cut off vital services. It's interesting how they never threaten to cut off non-vital services, which is usually the salaries of people who don't really have much of an impact on the city itself, like people who make budget decisions. Sorry, but you're not as essential as you think you are. A cop is essential. A firefighter is essential. A bean counter? Not to essential. But as you are the ones who make the decisions, of course you're never going to cut yourselves.

So the answer is to ask the taxpayers to give them more money. Governments all over the place are doing this, and it's actually pissing off taxpayers all over the place. What they are discovering (and California is my favorite example of this) is that the taxpayers, when asked, say no. They're not interested in more taxes, special levies, or any other legalese wordings that cause them to pay more money. Especially when they feel they are being threatened by their government if they don't pay up.

What government never seems to understand is that it's not really all that essential other than the immediate services. As more and more government gets involved, it entrenches itself and makes itself believe it is even higher on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs than it really is. And people don't tend to support them.

Instead, what seem to see most of the time is the absurd amount of corruption that is taking place in government. In Michigan alone, the amount corruption in the news is astouding. Here's a small sample of just recent stuff:

Grand Rapids school board has no plans for nepotism policy despite member's son Kenneth D. Hoskins' conviction for sex crimes with students

DTE Energy, MichCon suspend energy-saving rebates, but customers still pay surcharge

Grand Haven school board member Brandon Hall found guilty of larceny

Holland Councilman Jerome Thomas-Kobes arraigned on drinking-and-driving charge

Kenneth D. Hoskins sentenced to three to 15 years behind bars for sex with Grand Rapids students

There are a ton more stories, but you get the idea from that little smattering of stories from the last two days. I don't even need to get into the cesspool of government that has been Detroit (although arguably it is supposedly getting better, according to feel good reports coming out of the Detroit Free Press).

The point being: At what point does government feel it is doing a solid enough job to ask for more money? Really. At what point?

The Philosophical Concept of Suicide as a Process Improvement Strategy

2010-02-09T11:58:00.000-08:00

Before I begin to start talking about this, I already know there are some immediate responses to this that I'll hopefully get out of the way by addressing them first. It seems that no matter how hard you try to broach this subject, it always seems to fall into the same kind of responses, and honestly that's not really where I wanted to go with this. So let me get through some disclaimers right off the start to move this thought process forward.

First, this isn't a call for help or a warning or anything ridiculous like that. I don't need counseling or even "a friend". It's more a thought process that I've been analyzing for some time now, and honestly I haven't been able to figure out how to even attempt talking about it without someone turning it into an "issue" rather than a discussion.

I'll put the elephant right on the table, and the question to be asked is whether or not suicide can be seen as an actual positive mechanism for one's imposing choices for the future. I've been thinking about this for some time, and I honestly haven't come up with a lot of rationale for deciding against it. What I have discovered is that every time I have attempted to talk about it, I end up in a situation where either a therapist wants to commit you, or I find the responses to be somewhat hostile. (Bring it up on the Internet on a message board or in a chat area of a computer game, and you're likely to get a whole lot of people answering in an angry tone, actually goading you on to do it because somehow you've "bothered" them by bringing it up).

But here I am. My life really isn't going anywhere. I have a few friends, but that's about it. I don't date and haven't dated longer than...well, to be honest, I don't remember when the last time was. My job is really unimportant, and to be honest, I get the feeling sometimes that it's probably not going to last that long anyway with all the budget cuts and subsequent "need to justify positions" that goes on. I was hired on at the lowest pay grade I should have received, and I'm pretty much stuck there because I get the impression that HR thinks that people are lucky to be working, so why should they care? My writing careers is nonexistent, and I'm to the point now where I don't think it's ever going to happen. It's pretty much the only passion in my life, and when you have to treat your life goal as a "hobby" and people give you condescending smiles when you talk about your "career", well, you might get the idea of how that feels.

I'm not rich, but I'm not poor either. I'm just kind of not much of anything. I'm not important to anything or pretty much anybody. Nothing I do or don't do really makes a difference to anyone. If I was gone, no one would really be affected all that much, other than to think "oh yeah, him. Yeah, too bad he's gone. Wonder what's on TV tonight?"

To be honest, my life really doesn't have that much of a purpose. Oh sure, I could go the whole empowerment route and FIND a purpose, but that's never really worked for me. Living life has made me pretty cynical, and the more I've done things the more cynical I've become as more people have taken advantage of me, and I feel that my only real contribution to this planet is as a consumer of stuff to help enrich people who will get rich regardless of whether or not I'm here.

It's almost to the point where I'm more concerned with how and when I do it than whether or not I do it. Nothing's really worked to talk me out of it, and to be honest, nothing has really even tried. I keep thinking that there's going to be some significant moment where I walk outside and see the perfect sunrise and say, "okay, that makes sense now" but that never happens. I did see a really good movie once, but that just isn't the same.

Lately, I've been feeling like I'm the protagonist in Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes where I live in a world of sand that I can't escape, and even though the world around me looks like it might be interesting and fun, I just can't get there. I'm always stuck in the sand. Hell, I can't even get a car right now, which leaves me to having to rely on a very unreliable bus system just to get to work or the store, but of course, the bus doesn't go to the store, so I have to take a taxi just to get groceries, which then serves to knock down what little money I have even faster than it normally would.

So it leaves me wondering: Why not? I actually find myself looking more forward to sleeping at night than I do waking in the morning or doing anything else during the day. Someone once said that "the unexamined life is not worth living" but never really did analyze what happens after you examine that life and realize that there's really not anything there. Unfortunately, that Socrates never really did think all his arguments through. No wonder we don't hear much about him anymore these days.

Spammers Will Spam You, No Matter How Nicely You Ask Them Not To

2010-02-09T06:05:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I made the foolish gesture of creating a Craigslist ad in the personal relationships section. I didn't really expect to make a "love connection" but at the same time, I was curious at what type of response I would get. I got lots of responses, but very few of them were actually productive. I had included, as most people tend to do, a desire disclaimer, practically begging scammers to leave me alone, that I was not looking for someone to make me rich, or whatever, but sure enough here's the break down of what I received:

37 Responses
18 Wanting to provide me with sex (requiring me to contact them at their special site)
10 Very interested in my ad, but needing me to register at some sex site for verification (they've gotten tired of "fake people" and "scammers")
4 People who felt they could help me find "love" if I joined some pay site they knew of
2 Actual people who were interested in talking more (neither responded further...must have been the picture I sent them of me in my Disco Suit)
1 Married person who was interested (as long as we didn't tell her husband)
1 Woman with children who seemed interested, but just wasn't sure I felt comfortable with someone else's children just yet
1 Woman who claimed "I know who you are but am not telling you who I am"

That was my response from my personal ad. My stuffed animals have more success at this sort of thing than I do. Hmm, maybe having stuffed animals is WHY I'm not more successful at it than I am. Must reconsider this while playing more World of Warcraft and shopping for a new slide rule before returning to my job at Best Buy.

So, who really owns the computer games people play?

2010-02-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

One thing I've always found fascinating about online games with persistent worlds (games where the world doesn't change, but lots of people can interact together in the same world) is the concept of who actually owns the content. I don't mean the overall game itself, because that is obviously owned by a company that made the game, but the specific property that each character owns within the game.

Think of it this way: If you're an elf who owns a +5 Sword of Death (I'm sure some game has something named like that), and you log out, that sword is still in your in game inventory somewhere. When you sign back on, that sword is still there with your character. Some other player doesn't get to just go into your private inventory and steal it (unless you're playing some twisted game where you can do just that, but I have yet to see a successful one that has survived longer than a few hours with that kind of play style). So, do you really own that sword, or is it the property of the company that makes the game?

That's an issue that has been argued back and forth since the creation of games like Ultima Online, long before World of Warcraft and the latest Star Trek Online. The game companies will always argue that THEY own the property within the game, and that you are just playing in THEIR world (Sony Online Entertainment used to make that argument of "You're in OUR world now" on their marketing materials for Everquest). But that's an easy argument to make before getting into the nitty gritty. A customer IS paying money for the experience of playing the game, and there is a somewhat legal precedent that as long as the company honors its commitments (meaning all of your stuff is there after you leave and return to the game), your business arrangement remains. There are any number of customers who have ended their business arrangement with a company when the company has lost their equipment (thus, they have felt a breach of unwritten contract was reached). Therefore, in legal terms alone, a company that runs a computer game may have been making the accepted agreement of honoring that unwritten contract by continuing to take money for services. The challenge is convincing a judge of exactly what those "services" actually were.

But that's going further than I wanted with this post. What I was really wanting to talk about are these people who sell their accounts, convinced that the property within the game is theirs. I actually find myself somewhat fascinated by the advertisements they make on Craigslist and other such places. A lot of these ads involve the most popular game on the block, World of Warcraft, and way too often someone tries to sell his or her account for hundreds of dollars. What caused me to want to write about it was how someone actually had the nerve to write: "You are paying me for the time I put into making this character." In other ads, I've seen words such as: "I wanted to get something back for all of the time I put into building this character."

Now, I play World of Warcraft, and I have a lot of fun playing the game, as I believe many other people do as well. Not once have I ever thought that I was producing work, that my tribulations were actually part of the process I must endure before I have a commodity that I can now sell back to another customer who will value the time I've have endured in this game. No, I had fun doing what you do when you play a game, and never was it thought of as work. Oh sure, the quests might have been difficult, and I might have been frustrated from time to time, but it's not a job, and trying to convince someone that he needs to pay me hundreds of dollars for my account because of my "work" is just ridiculous.

But I see it all of the time. What is even more interesting is that selling one's WoW account is not authorized by the Blizzard, the company that owns the game. Nor is buying or selling of gold, the currency used in the game. Yet people still do it.

And I've often laughed at the arguments people make to justify it. Here are some of my favorites:

1. It takes a lot of time to accumulate money in the game. I work hard in my regular job, so I should be able to use that money to save time in the game because unlike the kids who play this game, I don't have as much time to waste on the game.

If it's wasted time, then don't play the game. Part of the challenge of the game is being able to accumulate wealth in the time that you're actually playing it. Being a CEO of a company OUTSIDE of the game shouldn't suddenly make you a god in the game. Cheating in the game is cheating in the game.

2. Buying gold (or a character) doesn't hurt anyone else, so why should they care?

Buying gold actually causes massive inflation in the game so that those who play the game must pay outrageous prices for items they buy from other players. Essentially, that CEO with his outside money is making it impossible for anyone to play the game without investing outside money into the game to bring the game back to an even playing field. It does affect other players, and it ruins the experience of the game. Also, Blizzard has pointed out that people who partake in the gold selling community also contribute to illegal programs in the game that are used to accumulate money through exploits. It also causes a lot more hackers to play the game who go after legitimate players and take over their accounts, selling their goods when they take over their accounts and then going onto the next victim.

There are a lot more points to make about this, but the main point is that virtual worlds are living worlds of their own that do much better without outside stimulation that brings outside forces into the inner dynamic. While some games welcome microtransactions that benefit the game making company, virtual economies do not benefit from profiteers who try to link outside money with internal money economies. Even the microtransaction models of some games out there ruin the experiences for normal players. This type of behavior practically destroyed the Ultima Online housing market because you couldn't get a home unless you were able to buy it through Ebay, back during the hey day of UO. When new housing opened up, that Ebay market died almost overnight. People who used to make $150 for a keep (large house) could no longer get that, so they let those properties just collapse, and then players were able to place homes for the price of housing that existed within the game. It practically changed the market within the game overnight, which was a great thing.

Anyway, that's my rant for this topic today.

This Blog Post Proves How Cool I'm Not

2010-02-04T06:33:00.000-08:00

Turns out that social networking scientists have finally discovered that teens don't think blogging is cool. The article is here. According to PC Magazine, only adults seem to blog these days, and unfortunately, teens don't think we're cool for doing it.

Um, when have teens ever thought adults were cool anyway? And why is it we're all concerned about what teens think? Honestly, are we all sitting around at the mall, waiting on the next issue of Teen Magazine to discover what teens think are cool so we can all go ahead and do that "thing"? At what point did adult coolness (yes, it does exist) revolve around the coolness of kids who aren't old enough to vote. Of course, it should go without saying that voting isn't cool, but that's another issue, and we won't get into that here.

I'm completely at a loss to understand how the gauging of coolness somehow came down to what teens think. When did we suddenly care what children think before deciding what to do? It's almost as if someone did a corollary study that went something like: Harry Potter is popular = Teens like Harry Potter = People who like Harry Potter are cool. I don't buy that.

Yes, marketers are interested in what teens like because teens buy products. That's about as far as it goes. But guess what? Adults buy things, too. And quite often, they buy them without a single thought about what teens want or care about. It's like the argument about music where somehow we have to believe that a music group is cool because young kids like the music. Well, that model is killing the music industry because guess what? Young people are more likely to illegally download music. It's not because they're evil. Okay, young people are evil, but that's beside the point. The reason they are more likely to download music illegally is because they have grown up within a culture that has seen music as a free commodity due to the growing online presence of music (that is easy to download without paying for it). Older people grew up with record albums and then CDs where they mostly paid for the music. So, they tend to continue to pay for music.

Well, the music industry has historically tried to appeal to the younger crowd because that's the crowd that paid for the music. But that younger crowd grew up and no longer likes the hip, cool music that gets put out as brand new (some do, most don't). So, newer bands that appear might appeal to younger people, but they're going to make less money because fewer people are willing to pay money for it. Therefore, if a band really wants to make money, it needs to appeal to an older crowd (not teens). But because so few new artists do appeal to the older crowd (and the industry keeps wanting to sell us compilation CDs of old groups), we're not buying as much music anymore. So, of course, the music industry is convinced that everyone is illegally downloading music because no one wants to buy the new stuff (that appeals to the audience that doesn't like to pay for music).

Again, the music industry cares more about a demographic that doesn't buy their music than it does the demographic that might buy its music. Kind of a ridiculous revelation, isn't it? Well, this is because they aren't paying attention to the bigger picture, which is that they need to appeal to an older crowd that is not seen as "cool", which is pretty much the revelation that is being shown in the original article. We're so concerned about a group of kids that are so insignificant to the grand scheme of things that we're willing to call ourselves not cool, even within our own social circles, where teens don't belong.

It's kind of crazy on that level.

So, I'll continue blogging, even though it's not cool to teens, who wouldn't read what I had to write anyway. But if you are reading, I guess that makes us both not cool. But I'm okay with that. I gave up trying to be cool back when I was a teen, a time ironically when I was supposed to be cool.

Toyota's Response to Pedal Problem? A cute, apologetic girl

2010-02-02T05:54:00.001-08:00

The Reuter's article is here.

I talked about the Toyota recall situation yesterday. What I find interesting is that the Reuter's article the next day shows a picture with an apologetic looking Japanese girl in front of the Toyota sign. This might give one the impression that Toyota might actually have some female leadership. It doesn't. As a matter of fact, when doing a google search for Toyota leadership (and women), what I kept coming up with is women suing Toyota because of discrimination in the workplace.

It does seem odd that the face of an apologetic Toyota is an apologizing woman, when none of the executives of Toyota are actually women. I guess apologizing is for women. The real men drink saki and do men things. Or something like that. What's next? Manga cartoon girls with samurai swords fixing cars? That might at least be interesting.

Toyota's Gas Pedal Problem and Ostrich-thinking Behavior of Auto Companies

2010-02-01T06:39:00.000-08:00

I was reading a very scary story of a woman who was driving her Toyota when suddenly she started accelerating and could not slow down her car. She ended up in an accident, and the rest of the article was how this was becoming a somewhat frequent occurrence with Toyota vehicles. Then the article went on to explain how Toyota was wrong for trying to avoid dealing with the horrific situation until finally the public outcry has forced them to do so. Now, Toyota is going through a PR campaign to somehow save its US business, something that might be difficult, as happened back in the days when Pintos were discovered to explode when you rammed them from behind. Pinto never really recovered, and it is wondered if Toyota ever will either.

Some information is important to add here because there's a difference between Toyota and Pinto. First, Toyota has a stellar reputation in the US, and over the decades, it has grown to be a very reliable maker of cars in this country. Pinto didn't have that history, at least not the decades that it needed.

There's a second piece of information that is important to add as well. This isn't the first time this situation has happened, and I'm going to let you in on a little secret: It's happened to me with at least two different cars. Neither one of them were Toyotas.

My first occurrence of this happening was with a Chevrolet Chevette. I was on the freeway, having a normal day, when suddenly my car started to accelerate. I couldn't stop it. I was going faster and faster, and I started to panic. I tried turning off my engine, but the car was now just revving so fast that it was practically burning my engine. I then discovered that when you turn off your car, if you don't put the key into the right slot, now you can't turn your steering wheel either. Discovering that while in the middle of a panic usually doesn't lead to very good results. Common sense doesn't really come to the forefront when you're not sure what to do and are in unfamiliar circumstances. Fortunately, I somehow managed to slow down the car to a stop (using the emergency brake in quick spurts).

The second time this happened to me, I was driving a Ford Escort wagon. Same exact situation, except this time it was not new, and I managed to slow down to the side of the freeway and stop the car. Both times were very scary.

Both times I tried to contact the dealership where I bought the car. My result: No one cared. No one even offered to fix the car or look at it. It was seen as MY fault, and I was pretty much left to fend for myself. I had to take my car to a mechanic and pay for the entire repairs to my car. Neither Ford nor Chevrolet cared one iota that I almost died.

So, my point is: The American car companies are going to be trying really hard to capitalize on this bad media opportunity against Toyota; they'd be stupid not to. But at the same time, at least when push came to shove, Toyota acknowledged its problem. But it's not the first car company to ever have this problem. It's just one of the first to actually do something about it.

You should think about that as this crisis continues. Personally, I've never owned a Toyota, but that's because my ex-girlfriend had one, and I loved her so much that I've never been able to step foot inside a Toyota since. But it was never because of their customer service or their PR campaign. I've bought American cars since my two fiascos with their cars, and I probably will again in the future. I just don't have a rosy feeling about the people who run those companies, because when push came to shove, I was seen as an inconvenience and ignored. I'll always remember that when it comes to specific circumstances because once you've been treated like crap by a company, it sours ever interaction you have with that company in the future.

iPad announced but most likely AT&T will be its demise

2010-01-29T09:38:00.000-08:00

The big announcement of the iPad was made yesterday (or day before...kind of lose track of days in this wintery wonderland). I've been waiting on this announcement, not because I want one, but for weeks I've been wondering what the hell it was. I kept hearing all sorts of undocumented speculation, but no one really knew what the thing was. Well, it turns out it's not an oversized iPhone (although Apple haters are trying to make it seem as if that's what it is...or an oversized iPod). It's not that. It's basically Apple's attempt to monopolize on the ebook future.

For awhile now, the claims of a new frontier in reading has been on the horizon, most often discussed in the mentioning of the Kindle by Amazon. But the Kindle was just too expensive for a product that requires you to buy more junk from Amazon. At prices dictated by Amazon. So I was holding off. The iPad is essentially Apple's attempt to jump into this market.

And jump it will. But it will also bring about the creation of the iBookstore, which is going to be Apple's attempt to monopolize the book market like iTunes monopolized the music market. And then the movie market. And then the television weekly program market. But the difference is: People already have a foot in the bookstore market, so Apple isn't inventing the wheel here; it's trying to reinvent the wheel and then pretending that the car wasn't already invented before it.

But even with that jibe, Apple can still do it. So what can stop this from happening?

Well, AT&T to be honest. It almost destroyed the iPhone the last time because when the iPhone was released, AT&T did everything it could to screw up this wet dream of a marketing opportunity. It dropped tons of calls. It forced you into two year contracts that were ridiculous. It had lousy coverage areas. It had crappy 3G service. Its customer service consisted of two cavemen in Delhi who had to use Verizon phones to communicate with you because AT&T kept dropping their calls. Basically, it was AT&T being AT&T.

Well, it can happen again. Over time, AT&T actually fixed a lot of its problems with the iPhone, although it never could change the fact that AT&T is still AT&T (an example is a conversation I had with AT&T recently over my Internet service that went very much like this:

AT&T: Hello, welcome to AT&T, which has the fastest Internet connection in your area. How can I help you?
Me: Hi. The tech recently came out here to install my AT&T dsl but he couldn't install the fast service, so he had to drop me to the slowest service you had due to some weird line problem you guys have. I was adding AT&T because my other service was kind of crappy, and AT&T promised to be a lot faster.
AT&T: I'm sorry you had a problem. How can I help you?
Me: Um, you're still charging me for the fastest service, but you can't provide it.
AT&T: Are you saying you want to subscribe to the slower service instead?
Me: Um, no, I'd love the fast service, but your tech couldn't provide it. You're ONLY giving me the slow service.
AT&T: So you want to downgrade?
Me: No, I don't want to pay for the fast service if you're not providing it.
AT&T: (silence for a moment) Unfortunately, I don't show that your area has access to the slower service. I can only offer the faster service.
Me: Um, that's not physically possible. Your tech--
AT&T: One moment, let me put you on hold.
(insert endless silence on the line as minutes pass)
AT&T: Welcome to AT&T, which has the fastest Internet connection in your area. How can I help you?)

Anyway, so the point is, even with all of this, AT&T can actually capitalize big time on this announcement. ALL THEY HAVE TO DO is inform the current iPhone users that they can use their already paid for 3G coverage on an iPad as well as the iPhone. This will cause more sales of iPads and continuous business for AT&T rather than more continuous jumped ships of people who give up on their iPhones and switch to Verizon. Instead, what is going to happen is that AT&T will demand that you pay for 3G coverage twice at $30 a shot to cover two separate items from the same company. If you want to sour a relationship with a customer, this is exactly how they can do it.

But mark my words, they will. Because remember, this is AT&T. They can do the smart thing, take a dip in new sales of service (but not in current business) or they can melt their market share they already have. Basic economic theory says to go for the quick profit. Sound economic theory says to do what I'm suggesting. Stupid people in business will do the former; brilliant ones will do the latter. Guess which one they'll take. We'll leave that to the future so we can laugh at them when the obvious happens.

Howard Zinn dies

2010-01-28T06:44:00.000-08:00

The article

He died at 87 years old (although the article mistakes his age as 89). He wrote a history book called A People's History of the United States, which may not seem like an important book based on the title, but it was. It wasn't important just because of the subject, but because of the approach. And that's why I'm taking a moment from my day to write about it, even though I'm still contemplating ending this blog anyway.

One of the problems with scholarship and knowledge is that there are too few people willing to take a different path than the ones everyone else takes. Social science is filled with that problem. To even get published in many social science fields, you have to pretty much do exactly what everyone else is doing, and then try to pretend that what you're doing is different enough to warrant attention. It's very dysfunctional.

Zinn went against the grain by focusing on the common person rather than on world leaders. Up until his ground-breaking book, history taught us about great leaders and how they impacted the world. Not on the common guy or gal. No one cared about the laborer or the shopkeeper. Instead, it was always about the one person, or few people, who made the big decisions, as if there was nothing else to history. When we hear about an era, we hear about the Chang Dynasty (named after a leader) but we never hear about the Farmer Bob Period of History. What this used to mean to me is that no matter what contributions I make to the world, I'll never be remembered because my chances of being president or someone of that stature are so minimal that it's not even worth trying. Most people will be forever forgotten and forever insigificant. Zinn showed that may not be the case. Even if they don't remember your name, they might remember what you accomplished, or what you were doing, even if they don't remember you by name. Great people lived in castles, but unknown important people built those castles, and it is sad at how we still don't pay attention to those secondary actors.

Some years ago, when I was attending West Point, I was in a history class where it was our assignment to reenact the French Revolution. The teacher saw me as an unimportant member of the class (I came from a poor family, and I was never seen at the Academy as one of the ground-breakers because I didn't have a senator or a general for a father, something two of my colleagues did), so he gave me the unimportant position as "shopkeeper" whereas the rest of my colleagues were given the "important" positions that would take place during the French Revolution. Well, one of the important characters was playing a general who was put in disfavor with the monarchy, and there was a trial for his life. I, as a citizen, was the deciding member of the jury that outlined his future fate. The king wanted "death"; I voted for banishment (with his army). The general and I were actually seeing eye to eye on where this might go in the future. Anyway, the scenario played out, and in the end, the general came back and took charge of France with his army (after everything fell apart, and all the political actors played out their politics to their ultimate demise). When the general came back, he remembered my action and made me king of France. It was a token position (he was still the power behind the throne), but this little shopkeeper became king of France.

Well, the teacher was actually kind of angry because a shopkeeper should NEVER have become king, and he didn't like how I used his political paradigm to become the victor, even though I was a non-entity in his planned scenario. Even though other students kept bringing up how fascinating it was that a shopkeeper became king, he refused to even discuss that part of the scenario as the review and tried to instill "other" lessons from the exercise. I don't think he ever forgave me for "winning" his game.

The point is: Sometimes the lowest peasant can make the biggest impact, yet we refuse to acknowledge any such contributions. And that's what Zinn was pointing out.

I can only hope that if I ever do contribute anything to history or science, it is something of this nature, something that causes people to think outside of the box. Running stats on crap we already know is beneficial for limited purposes; it's the stuff that questions our very foundation that will change our perspectives. Unfortunately, getting people to listen is equally as challenging as seeing things differently.

But at least Zinn showed us how.

The audience as shadow

2010-01-14T07:42:00.000-08:00

You might say I've come to a conclusion of sorts. I realized that the whole online thing isn't really working for me. I have a blog, but no one really reads it. I have a Facebook account, but no one really communicates with me on there, and all I end up receiving are notifications of how someone is having a bad day or how someone found a lost turtle in Farmville or something stupid like that.

For me, the whole online thing never worked out. Never found a girlfriend online. Never found conversations. Never got into online gaming, aside from MMORPGs. Really nothing on the social fabric has been my thing through online.

Yeah, I play World of Warcraft. And I still will. I'm just going to take a different direction on everything else.

I'm not leaving online. I'm just dumping everything social networking that's online. Never worked for me. Adds more frustration than anything else.

I shut down my facebook account yesterday. Figure no one will really notice. Or care.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to start to shed my web site as well. I've been paying $10 a month for YEARS to a company that has been getting my business that amounts to me talking to myself. Sure, I have a friend or two who reads the blog, but honestly, I can hold a coversation with those people in person. I don't need a blog to communicate with them.

The website was an experiment in beta for me because it was how I was going to keep in touch with my writing fans. They never materialized. Neither did my career as a writer. I've been writing for vanity alone, and I'm the only one pretty much reading it. What's the use in that? It's like keeping a diary and leaving it out all of the time in hopes that someone will accidentally read it. What kind of game is that?

So, I'm going to be shutting down my web site over the next few weeks. I might blog here and there much as a smoker still tokes up every now and then but knows that he shouldn't, even though he swears he quit the habit a long time ago.

I've found the whole social networking experiment to be interesting, mainly because it works for some people, but it didn't work for me. I'm a writer, not a blogger. I need an audience. It's never been about me or about writing for myself. Without an audience, well, I'm nothing. It's like being in the 1991 August coup in the Soviet Union, being Boris Yeltsin and then trying to stop the coup by talking to yourself in the shower. It might make you feel better at the time, but if there's no one listening, it doesn't do any good. If Yeltsin never had his audience, all we'd know about him and those days in August was that some fat Russian guy danced on a tank. But then, we'd probably not even know that. He'd just be some fat guy with a lot of things to say and no one to hear him.

That's what I feel like. I have a lot to say, and no one ever bothered to listen. Oh sure, a few did, but they were just being polite. And I reciprocated by listening to them. That's social networking, not writing. Never been my thing. It's like small talk. Never did it, and it's probably why I don't handle dates well. I hate small talk. It leads to nothing and is irrelevant. I hate irrelevancy, which is exactly what my web page has been all of this time.

I stared this web site with the idea that the audience would eventually come around. It never did. I thought I had a lot to say about politics, being a strange, anarchist political scientist. No one ever bothered to listen. You have to be someone with media clout. That's not me. I write humor. People find that irrelevant. So nothing comes of it. I thought I had a lot to say about writing, but no one cares, and everyone else ia a writer. Just ask them. They think they are. So who cares about what another one has to say? I thought I had a lot to say about communication theory, but again, no one cares.

And like the Pearls Before Swine cartoon where the pig is constantly being reminded by the rat that his blog is irrelevant, I'm tired of pretending it's ever going to change.

So, if you have any final comments, please do so soon, because soon there may not be a place to do so. It's okay if you don't comment, however. I'm kind of used to it. I can go off into the sunset without the attention. I'm kind of used to it.

If this ends up being my last post (which is probably not the case), I wish you all well and hope you find what you're seeking in whatever venue you seek it out. I'm saving myself $10 a month and going back to realizing that only my stuffed animals ever really cared what I had to say. And sometimes I suspect they're just being kind because they have to live with me.

Stuffed animals can be that way sometimes....

Dreams that get in the way of sleeping

2010-01-12T10:28:00.000-08:00

I had one of those dreams last night. You know those dreams, the ones that cause you to wake up and question whether or not you were really dreaming. It was really bizarre, one of those circumstances where a whole story was being crafted in my head, and even when I went back to sleep, the story continued from before.

I woke up several times, convinced that I need to remember this story, and even tried to edit it in my head during the moments I was awake. And then I went back to sleep and continued dreaming it again.

I don't often have dreams like this. Most of my creative writing is designed in the conscious world, where I am completely aware of what I'm doing when I do it. This was different. It was a story that was trying to create itself, and I even found myself editing it while I was dreaming it, telling myself that it needed to change in one way or another.

It was an interesting story. I'm still thinking about it today. It was one of those dystopian types of stories, something I've been writing a lot of in the last few years, but it took a really interesting direction, something I wouldn't have done if I was crafting this story myself from scratch.

I wonder if the subconscious world tries to write its own stories sometimes and has to do it in this sort of manner because my reality based writing won't let that subconscious take over like it did while I was dreaming. For all asides, it was an interesting story, and I'll probably revisit it at some point when I'm not involved in any writing projects already.

The race is on, but Chuck didn't even get out of the gate

2010-01-11T09:15:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of the television show Chuck. It seemed to do all things right, including some of the best writing I've seen on television in ages. Its first season was somewhat ho-hum, but oh my god, the second season was phenomenal. It's like they put the kids to bed and then brought out the real writers.

So, I've been anticipating the third season, even though the show was almost cancelled after Season 2 because of ratings. Well, sadly, the show is like we're watching Season 1 over again.

They took an innovative show about a real fish out of water, a computer tech nerd who works for the television version of Best Buy (the Buy More) as one of the Nerd Herd (Geek Squad in Best Buy), but who accidentally has a CIA database dumped into his brain so he now must be protected by secret agents and go on missions himself. They teamed him with one of the hottest actresses to ever play on a television show, and she became his unlikely girlfriend (which made the show even funnier because he had no chance whatsoever with her, yet slowly was winning her over).

Now, he's gone from being the nerd with tons of information in his head to an upgrade where he also has secret agent skills, like Kung Fu and all sorts of other abilities that flash when he needs them. Bad idea. It was cute when he was stuck in hopeless situations and trying to fend for himself (like anyone of us might do), but making him into James Bond was stupid.

And then the writing...I don't know what to say other than I've seen some of the worst plot turns I've seen in a television show yet. The infamous unwritten backstory where he chose the job for the girl (yeah, right) that slowly gets filled in so you have to somehow feel for him because he dumped her when she was giving up everything for him to help him out of this life he was trying to escape. Doesn't work. The "we're getting the band back together" plot line of the hero getting the CIA group back together so everything's just like it used to be (except he's now a superhero superspy) was the main plot behind the last few seasons for Stargate SG1. It worked for Stargate because, well, that was Stargate. But it doesn't work every time you try to pull it off. Especially when it was just done in an earlier series.

So they relied on the "let's get the geek with a supermodel and it will by funny" schtick. Yeah, that was great for Season 1, but not Season 3. It was essentially a set up for a punch line they delivered at the end of the episode (it was Chuck's best friend hooking up with a superspy supermodel). It doesn't work when you're trying to make the show seem a bit more serious, which is the direction they took in Season 2. In Season 3, it just seems like bad writing.

There was a lot of bad writing done in this show, mainly because the creators don't know what they're doing with the show. All of the Buy More scenes are jokes, which is the way the show was designed. Then they kill off a main character by having him murdered in the parking lot of the Buy More. I can see the attempt to show the "it's now going to be serious" but then goes right back to zany comedy bits at the Buy More. Either do it, or don't do it. Killing off that character was like having an episode of SAW take place on Sesame Street. It can happen, but it doesn't belong. Sure, I'd love to see Elmo chasing people with a chainsaw, but let's be serious here.

I really hope this doesn't bode badly for the future of Chuck. I want this show to succeed so much, but this first outing of two episodes in a row is scary because it shows such a bad direction for such a great show to go. It continues tomorrow, followed by another episode of Heroes, which is another one of those shows that just can never seem to figure out what kind of show it wants to be.

But that's for another entry.

LOST vs. President of the United States: LOST wins

2010-01-10T17:20:00.000-08:00

Turns out that President Obama was going to give a state of the union on February 2, which in case you don't know, also happens to be the date that LOST is going to premiere its first episode of the final season. I think he finally realized that when it comes down to it, the people wanted LOST a lot more than it wanted a speech from the president. So, he decided not to go up against LOST.

There's a much bigger issue here that's not being addressed, and that's the fact that the President of the United States had to change the date of his speech because people actually believe the network premiere of LOST is more significant than his speech. Kind of tells you something, doesn't it? In the beginning, I was going to make this big criticism of the American people about this, but then it also got me thinking. Why would LOST be more important to them than the president giving a speech? Perhaps it has more to do with the realization that the affairs of state are becoming less relevant to the common person so that such a thing might actually happen. I mean, I think about myself, and honestly, I don't really care all that much about what's happening nationally these days, when I used to care a lot. And the reason I don't? Because it really doesn't have anything to do with me, and if you really think about it, it probably never will. Oh, we can make arguments that somehow it's significant, but it's about as significant as the wars of Louis XIV were important to the common person of France. Yeah, it's important, but it's not really.

And that's my thought for today. All I can say is that I'm glad that LOST isn't going to be postponed because of this speech. I'd rather watch the show. Sorry. That's just how it is.

After all this time, I'm still convinced Bank of America sucks

2010-01-09T20:42:00.000-08:00

When I moved back to Michigan, I opened up a new Bank of America checking account. I did it because my old account was with a bank that was bought out by another bank, and at least BofA was kind of local to my needs.

I guess some history should be included, because it's kind of important. Years ago, I had a roommate who used to be a middle manager at BofA in California. She once told me, when I was talking about why I liked my bank at the time (not BofA) that didn't charge me fees for my checking account, that the reason Bank of America SHOULD charge fees for its checking accounts AND savings accounts is that BofA is providing a "service", and thus, I should pay for that service. I said that if my money is in their bank, then they're getting free use of my money to invest, so the service is really from me. She said I just didn't understand banking. Thus, I realized that if that's how they teach their managers, I didn't want anything to do with BofA.

Then some months later, for reasons that still escape me, I actually had a BofA account, and one day when using the ATM, I made a deposit of my payroll check, which was actually an emergency check (the first one had been lost by my employer), so I was in dire need of this money. Well, the BofA ATM ate my deposit, and I mean ATE my deposit. I saw the machine literally rip my envelope to shreds as it pulled it into the machine. Never saw anything like it before. Then it proceeded to put itself out of order. It also did not credit my account.

Well, then BofA turned around and added a hefty fine to my account for a "false" deposit in which no deposit actually occurred. It didn't matter that they didn't credit a deposit in the first place. Now they were adding a finance charge on me for doing something "unauthorized". I tried talking to their people, and the clerk actually treated me like I was some sleazoid that had walked in off the street and asked for spare change.

I closed my account back then, and thought nothing of BofA again until just recently.

I had opened this account because a colleague who started at work with me said that she was offered $100 for opening a brand new checking account. So I went there and thought I'd do the same. It should have been a warning to me when they only offered me $50 (same branch she went to...bonus was for working at Spectrum Health, the place we BOTH work).

The only stipulation was that I had to have direct deposit started with my paycheck. So I did it, practically the next day. It took some time to initiate, but once it did, my direct deposits have gone directly into my BofA account.

Well, the $50 never showed up. So I went in a few weeks ago and inquired about this, and the clerk said she'd check on it, and someone told her on the phone they'd get right on it. Today, I received a letter in the mail stating that I took too long to initiate my direct deposit, so I did not qualify for the bonus. Keep in mind, I started it the next day (after receiving it). It took weeks to get started, which I can't even imagine how a time frame that doesn't fit that makes any sense.

So, they're pretty much telling me "screw you, duane" like they did so many years ago. Bank of America has not changed. A bit. They suck, and let's just say that I am very stupid for having given them yet another chance.

Won't happen again.

How far have we come?

2010-01-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

While in the process of reading Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell”, it has become apparent that one of the recurrent themes throughout the book is not just the negative perceptions that lead to abusive behavior, but a certain socialist perspective she has in pointing out that the major abuses come not from evil people, but from altruistic-appearing, powerful entities who use their stature and power to push their own status quo agenda upon those who might act against them, even if that is just their perception rather than reality.

The San Francisco earthquake example is the first she uses, but what was very obvious throughout this entire section of the book is that all of the major abuses that took place were power play operations that were designed to maintain a certain status quo of power, not necessarily of status quo circumstances. The military responded with force not because of a need to suppress looters and evil happenings, but because of a desire of the local post commander to keep a certain state of power in operation, something that could only be done by having soldiers act with violent actions towards victimized citizens, often as a prelude to perceived threats that were probably never going to occur.

She follows this up by showing that some of the major political figures who existed in San Francisco at the turn of the century were individuals who were already caught up in class politics with challengers, and that the reaction to the earthquake was used as further leverage in long-running battles. The acts of political figures against Universal Railroad and other union suffragists were waged as preemptive strikes to keep power from changing hands, even though much of the power in question was economic, rather than political and military. The political forces in place used the opportunities presented to them from the earthquake to make sure that such economic forces did not act against them, and that when the emergencies were over, that they would not have the chance to rise up again.

The military’s cooperation in this whole mess is scary, because often it is discussed how the dichotomy of the military and civilization power structure serves to keep the United States in its state of citizen-first separation. In her reporting, it is observed that the military often acted with the mindset that the citizens were to be feared and subjected to violence rather than protected. In history books, and especially in the words of the military, the reaction of the US armed services during this period was exemplary, saving the people, but in reality the reaction of the US military was one of violence, where citizens were seen as secondary citizens, subject to the whims of individual soldiers who had little problem with opening fire on citizens seen in the ruins, treating them as looters, thieves and criminals before ever considering why they might be there in the first place. This sort of mentality still exists within the military, and no one ever really questions it, because it is the exact type of wording we receive when we hear that the US military has attacked “insurgents” whenever an air strike takes place where the victims are often unknown because strikes of that nature are not known for their exactness. Quite often, our military treats any skirmish and death as “us versus them” where those who make up the “them” have to prove themselves to be worthy of victim status, or they are forever considered enemy combatants who are casualties of war. That is the exact approach the military took towards San Francisco after the earthquake. Today, many citizens who were shot and killed by soldiers, acting on their own decisions, are still seen as the guilty party. What no one bothers to point out is that soldiers in the United States, even back then, were not authorized to open fire on citizens unless they were acting in the interests of an actual martial law situation. There was no official martial law declared in San Francisco back then; the military acted on its own, taking its orders from a military general who declared martial law in theory alone. The president, the governor, and even the mayor (the last two not actually having the power to do so) never instigated martial law in that emergency. The deaths that were caused happened as a result of soldiers taking the law into their own hands. No, that fact has never really been discussed all that much. It’s not really just a footnote in history, but it doesn’t even get treated as that.

The book, although somewhat condemning in its style of writing, does present a pretty strong case for why we really should be paying more attention to these sorts of things. It took only an unannounced emergency to turn a civilized city into a stomping ground for injustice. When it finally ended, no one was really held accountable, and to this day, we don’t even teach what really happened.

If anything should come out of a book like this, that should be the lesson. We’re still the victims of “the winner writes the text books” philosophies in this country. We haven’t moved that much further than such barbaric actions. Unfortunately, every time we try to take a step back and pretend that we’re some enlightened society that is so distanced from the bad days, we should remember that we’re really only a disaster away from falling down that rabbit hole again, even in the greatest, freedom loving societies all around us.

One of my biggest criticisms of modern name America is that I don’t believe we’re all that as enlightened as we like to think we are. It was only a century ago when we enslaved a great deal of the population, actually arguing that it was the “right” thing to do. It was less than four decades ago that we were quite willing to separate parts of the population from drinking from the same water fountain, convinced that there was some morality involved in such decisions. Every day, we find ourselves facing our own selves in the fact that we do not believe we could ever be like that again, yet everywhere around us, someone is still acting in that type of interest. Granted, the victims keep changing, but the attitudes do not. And the reasoning still exists just as much as it always did. We always claim morality, either through religious grounds or through some other equally mundane process of whatever makes us feel better.

Some day, we’ll get it right. We’re just not there yet.

What cable companies don't want to face about their future

2010-01-06T05:28:00.000-08:00

A recent article on CNN.money stated that cable companies are going to be raising their prices over the next few years, to where people are paying about $95 for cable per household. The article goes on to state that the reason cable companies have to do this is because a lot of their clients have switched over to Web programming and cable offerings that can be obtained through such sites as Hulu.com, so their only option is to raise the prices on the subscribers that they have left.

As one of the many people who have left paying cable behind, I can say without a doubt that cable companies have a much worse time ahead of them than they want to admit. Granted, I still get cable because it's lumped in with my current housing package, but to be honest, if it wasn't, I wouldn't be paying for it because there's not enough on television that I want to pay to watch. I used to love watching certain television shows on the Sci Fi channel (which for some mysterious reason has changed its name to SyFy, or something stupid like that). Most of those shows are gone, or on hiatus, or in mid-season disappearance mode, or whatever. Most shows on other channels have either ended their run (Monk) or got cancelled by the networks (Firefly, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Veronica Mars, etc.). Honestly, there aren't enough shows left worth watching. I'm not a fan of reality programming, or the latest version of American Dancing With the Idols, or whatever those shows are. So, I have really zero desire to subscribe to cable. I watch about the average of three or four shows now, if that (trying to think: Lost, Chuck, Stargate Universe....), so I'm not really missing much. I even missed those shows when they played because they have the strangest broadcast scheduling (kept getting put on hiatus in the middle of their seasons as if this would entice me to watch the other garbage they put in its place).

This is the problem cable companies have with the rest of the country. They don't offer enough quality programming that people are really excited about subscribing to. What they have is an audience of people who turn on the tube for companionship, or as a talking night light. With other diversions like World of Warcraft (for me), dvds (Netflix), the Internet (I can't even begin to point out the opportunities available here), and whatnot, cable companies really aren't the "necessity" that they want people to expect. There's an old marketing aside about how most of the things we have today weren't really considered necessities in the past. Someone had to convince us that we really needed them. That includes the telephone, the radio, the television, the microwave and then the computer. In the beginning of all of these technologies, ad men had to convince us we needed them. Now, we expect them, so we now think of them almost as if they're part of Maslow's Heirarchy. They're not. The radio is almost nonexistent these days, the telephone moved to the cell phone, and each thing reaches a point to where it is replaced with something else. Cable is that way, too, because television has slowly been replaced by so many other items that occupy our time and attention. Cable companies aren't going to want to face that anymore than record companies wanted to face that their business model was irrelevant ten years ago, and they were about to be surpassed by file sharing sites. Come to think of it, they still haven't gotten over that, nor have they come to realize it either.

So, cable companies are going to slowly realize they've become somewhat irrelevant. Or that they should be irrelevant. The only thing they have in their favor is the complacent viewer who will continue to buy their content. But that can only last so long. The dvd was out for quite some time before the last vinyl record buyer finally switched to cds and dvds; some never did. But a huge company can't survive on the nostalgia factor.

At least, that's what they're going to discover.

Criminal nabbed through World of Warcraft account

2010-01-05T05:40:00.000-08:00

The story is here.

Turns out that police sent a subpoena to Blizzard, which runs World of Warcraft to track down a fugitive who was trying to escape justice. Now, I'd be all for this particular turn of events if the fugitive had actually done something OTHER than a drug crime. His crime was dealing in multiple controlled substances.

I'm not into drugs, nor have I even dabbled in it. Been against them personally for my entire adult life. But I am not a fan of criminalizing drugs; always felt the solution was to treat the addicted rather than put them in jail.

Unfortunately, way too many resources are spent chasing drug crimes, so that other things are left behind. And even worse, drugs are so visual in our society that it gives avenues of criminal behavior the go, rather than treats it as a symptom to be cured. If gangs are going to do bad things, I'd prefer they stuck to actual crimes so that police went after that sort of stuff. Unfortunately, in this society, that's never going to happen.

Too many careers are made on the enforcement of drug crimes, and that's not a boon for an enlightened society.

People with too much knowledge to ever read a book and why we keep on rewarding mediocrity

2009-12-31T10:44:00.000-08:00

One of my pet peeves in talking to other people about books and knowledge is when I find myself dealing with someone who claims a little (or a lot of) knowledge about a subject in which they really know nothing. It usually starts when I'm talking about a particular book, and the person I'm talking to will discount pretty much everything I say and then interject with "common knowledge" about a subject of which he or she has no knowledge nor is the subject all that common. Take educations as a subject. I was having a conversation with someone about teaching in high schools and community colleges. The person I was talking to went on a rant about how he knew so much about the subject because he had an aunt that was a teacher, and boy, could he tell me stories. I remembered conversations I had with other person who used their knowledge of having been in high school once to pass on their "brilliant" insights about teaching at high schools. This reminded me of a book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrificies and Small Salaries of America's Teachers by Daniel Moultrop, Ninive Clements Calegari and Dave Eggars. It's one of those books with brilliant insights and exhaustive research, but every time I brought it up in conversation, I was rebuked by someone who had "better" information, and would never, ever, in a million years, read that book because they already knew everything they needed to know about the subject.

I used to run into this type of attitude while in graduate school. A student would respond to a conversation about a book with a diatribe on the subject, but not once would actual evidence ever be brought up. I even had one student talk about a movie she saw on the weekend as "evidence" once. Such conversations become very tiring, very fast, and people often wonder why I've come this close to giving up on the institutions of education these days.

An interesting area of study is that of ethnic and racial studies because the area is filled with such misinformation based on stereotypes and beliefs fueled by race politics. I was in a course that was studying poverty once when the students each went off on a rant about their knowledge of poverty based on personal experiences ("I was an undergraduate who once could not afford to buy a CD for months because of how little money I was making from financial aid" as the type of example). I'm not a real fan of comparative studies as a process of explanation, but having been through poverty, such circumstances really irritated me when it was politically incorrect to stand up and say: "You don't know anything about poverty because you've NEVER BEEN POOR!"

But when it comes to studying race, it's a very interesting dilemma because there are so many people in higher levels of education who rely on their race as their only foundation for their level of scholarship. I remember an African-American woman in one of my classes who received no small amount of scholarships and endowments, mainly because she signed her name to forms stating that she was African-American. I think I was one of the only other graduate students to read what she was writing (something she made a habit of keeping from other students), and I was astounded at how little research she conducted nor how her "conclusions" consisted of making some of the weakest arguments I'd ever experienced. Had I ever submitted anything like I read from the several awarded papers she had written, I would have received a red comment on the paper from a professor stating, "yeah, but who cares?" But the interesting thing is that there was no way in the world anyone would ever DARE say that out loud back then, because not only was it important to award everything you could to someone who was doing no work whatsoever in her educational process, it would have been career suicide to have even hinted that one suspected the work of being as weak as it really was. This person went onto achieve a PhD in her field, and in my many conversations with her over the years, I came to realize this whole pursuit was really a walk in the park for her, because no one ever challenged her, nor did anyone ever put her through any length of criticism for producing nothing but shoddy work. That, in a nutshell, is one of the serious problems with our educational system these days.

Which brings me back to lazy research and those who refuse to engage themselves in exploring deeper analysis. There's an interesting book that few people have read but many have seen called The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient by Sheridon Prasso. In this book, the author explores western stereotypes that we keep reinforcing over and over again. Having been someone who has been swept up in the same stereotypes myself (an infatuation with Lucy Liu when she first appeared), it helped to understand why such things affect the psyche. When talking the book over with others, most people just don't get it, and when I've tried to explain it to people, I discover it's not their ability to understand it that's the problem but it's their perspective about Asia, Asian people and other such matters that make it almost impossible to explain. Until you read it yourself, you really don't understand, but getting someone to read it is like pulling teeth with pliars. It just doesn't happen.

Anyway, I could go on, but I'll leave it at that. Unfortunately, getting people to read is never an easy process, and I'm almost to the point where I'm giving up on trying. If people want to be considered experts on subjects they know nothing about, let them. I'll just smile knowingly and laugh behind their backs instead.

Sex Doesn't Sell--in movies

2009-12-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

According to a "ground-breaking" article by CNN, they've discovered that sex doesn't necessarily sell when it comes to movies. This is one of those few articles that is missing an appropriate "no duh" at the end of it.

This is an example of one of those stories that gets written because someone has taken a slogan and then decided that the evidence doesn't match the wordage of the slogan itself, mainly because the slogan is just that, a slogan. Also, the slogan is appropriate to a completely different vehicle, and the reporters are trying to play the game of "lookie what we found!" when in reality they found that their lack of research equates to a stupid story.

So, why do people say "sex sells" if it doesn't sell in movies? Because it sells in advertising. That's where the wordage gets the most play. Beer commercials are a great example. Guys drink beer, girls show up wearing almost no clothing, and then profit! Girl wears sexy lingerie, other women watching the commercial see it and then go out and buy lingerie expecting to be as sexy as she is, and then profit! Okay, the second example is an example of misleading advertising (as was the first) mainly because I think most of those commercials are designed for guys who then turn to their girlfriends/wives and then try to get them to wear the sexy lingerie, and then somehow profit entails, but the results don't somehow come out the same.

And that's the beauty of sex sells advertisement. Almost always it creates a fantasy that is unattainable for all but women who happen to be sexy lingerie models. Guys aren't going to end up with her. Sorry, but she's dating some rock star that makes gazillions of dollars and wouldn't give you the time of day. Average women aren't going to look like her; let's face it...there's a reason she makes millions of dollars to pose in her underwear.

Which brings us back to the original topic, and that's sex sells imagination in movies. When does it ever sell? Well, I can think of a few examples. "Mr and Mrs Smith" was a movie that was definitely a sex sells kind of movie. It had two of the hottest stars in movies, both sexy to people of practically both genders interchangeably, and that sold that movie well. I'd venture that Transformers benefited from several sexy stars, although I personally never liked the movie or the stars of it, but I'm commenting on movie trends, not on my own wants and desires. If this was about my own wants and desires, every movie would have Shania Twain running around in lingerie. Come to think of it, every movie with Shania Twain in it regardless would improve 90 percent of the movies regardless of what she was wearing. And she could sing the soundtrack, too. Hmm, must consider this for a future post and column.

But I digress....

Some other movies that do well with sex selling in their movies are, well, for simplicity, porn. I mean, let's face it. If you are interested in sex in movies, then you really can't go any simpler than that. So, why don't more guys just watch porn instead of watch movies that are sexually suggestive? Well, if the guy wants to get his girlfriend/wife to watch it, well, that's about as close as he's going to get.

But the point is that this article that CNN wrote is more about trying to dislodge a theory that no one is making. I haven't gone to a movie yet because I was interested in a sexual theme of the movie, ever. I've seen some pretty damn sexy movies over the years, but I went to see them because of some other reason. So the idea that sex sells is really limited to advertising and porn. I think the enlightened people just don't want to admit it. To make a movie that is nothing but sex is really either making a porn movie or a soft porn movie, and anyone who has watched the latter has begged for that two hours back in their life.

The Hobbesian Model in Retrospect: A case study approach to studying creation of government in online games, such as Ultima Online

2009-12-21T10:15:00.000-08:00

One of the hidden attributes of philosophy is the realization that no matter how much stock you put into a theory, the chances of that theory ever being challenged by real world circumstances are so miniscule that such events will either never happen or happen so far after someone’s lifetime that criticism is irrelevant anyway. Well, let’s take a look at one of the fundamental concepts of political philosophy that even non-theorists are required to study ad nausea: Why do societies and civilizations come together in the first place?

We all know the Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau models that stem from these conversations, and we all know how one buys into one theory or the other as to why people get together and allow themselves to be ruled over, or why someone gains power in what should be an almost impossible act of acquirement. I mean, what rational person gives over his or her power to some total stranger all in the name of protection from danger and a desire to avoid loss of belongings or life? If you look at that dynamic today, it seems almost ridiculous because why should any normal person feel that others should be in charge of him or her just because one is a part of every day society? Political scientists like to think they have it all figured out, depending up on what their particular bent is on the theory, but what I’ve always found fascinating is how little the average person thinks about these things, because the average person is the one who gave up power in the first place and continues to do it on a daily basis every day he or she does exactly what government tells him or her to do.

But before going off on that tangent, who was right? Did we get together to create a society for the sake of community, or was it something even more basic like Hobbes projects, and we just got together because we’re scared to death of each other, feeling that we’re probably a lot better off with some neutral administrator than we are trying to fend for ourselves? Unfortunately, we’re so far into the game that we no longer have to even ask why we got into it in the first place. We’re incapable of getting out of it, so why should it matter why we got into it way back before we even started writing histories about it?

Fortunately, there was a stable platform where this question was being asked, and there were a lot of people participating to give us exactly the answers we might be seeking about this situation. To find the answer, we have to go to the one place that scientists are still apprehensive about going: Computer games.

The problem with trying to test political theories, or even just philosophical theories, with computer games in the past is that they have mainly been seen as an environment that gives us access to children, and of course there is the stigma that we are almost always talking about a game of some sorts. Thus, scientists avoid being seen in that medium, because it then indicates that their science isn’t scholarly, so we miss a lot of information that is both fascinating and ground-breaking. Fortunately, we’re a little more enlightened these days concerning such issues, so a lot of scholarly research is coming from the genre of computer games.

But even more important is that games have evolved into sharing an agenda with another one of those new areas for exploitation, and that is the world of social networking. With the advent of Myspace, Facebook and other networking tools, scientists are now finding themselves with access to a lot of social data that they only conjectured about before. In the past, a scientist would study a bunch of students at some particular college or series of colleges, almost to the point where we probably know more about sophomores in college than any other entity on the face of the planet.

But something new happened in the 1990s, and it passed by a lot of social scientists without them even realizing it was happening. One of these games that came along was called Ultima Online. It was created by a group of computer gaming professionals at a company called Origin, and it was the culmination of a series of medieval setting role-playing games, called Ultima, which had, at the time, recently received resounding success with its seventh version, Ultima VII. It would continue on with several other continuations, specifically Ultima VIII and Ultima IX, but when Ultima Online was released, it was to the fanfare that was created from the global success of Ultima VII, a game where you arrived in the world of Britannia as the immortal avatar, a human who has achieved a sense of full enlightenment and brings that enlightenment to the welcoming, and not so welcoming, people of Britannia. The originator of the series, and the owner of Origin, was Richard Garriott. He would come to be known as Lord British, the sovereign who lived within the lands of Britannia.

Ultima Online was one of the first graphically enhanced multi user dungeons, where many people could play the same game at the same time. To handle the expected player capacity, different “shards” were developed, which housed exact duplications of the world of Britannia. The explanation was that the wizard Mondain had broken a gem that shattered into shards, each one being a different representation of the known world. The entire world of each shard was identical, but once the game went live, the world would change demonstrably, so that if you lived in one shard, you might not recognize the environment in another. An example was an early misunderstanding of this fact when I found a house near the city of Yew that had a training dummy in it I could use to train my fighting skills. Being on another shard, and not recognizing this nuance, I found myself wandering that same area near Yew, wondering why I could not find the training dummy house, no matter how much I searched.

A feature that made Ultima Online unique was that you could be attacked by other players, if you were wandering around outside of the safety of a protected town. In town, the guards would kill anyone who committed a crime, like stealing or attacking another player without cause, but outside of their protection, you were pretty much on your own. In the game, they called this player killing, or “pking”. At one point, a new player would realize that leaving a city could be dangerous, and thus, would either stick close to town, or be very cognizant of surroundings when traveling.

This brought about an interesting dynamic that leads to the focus of this study. At one point, there was the realization that going outside of town might be dangerous, but there was an entire world out there to explore. Either you hid in town and missed everything outside of town, or you took a chance. In the beginning, you took a chance alone, and after some time, you were probably killed by someone who made his or her livelihood by preying on unsuspecting tourists. But slowly, something emerged that acted as a compensation to this sort of behavior: The player town emerged.

The player town was a collection of self-made homes that its owners banded together to create a small society. Leaders were elected, commerce was developed and encouraged, and, most importantly, security was developed. Players did not have the advantage of automated guards appearing in their towns when criminals appeared and acted in such interests, so players had to become the guards themselves, often serving as militias that acted against anyone who worked against the interests of the town. As these towns grew stronger and larger, the security they offered grew as well. If a town member was attacked near town, the town militias would band together and go after the pkers. Eventually, these militias became armies, and from time to time, an attack against town members, or to people allied to the town, would result in a force of players who would travel to the power base of those who orchestrated such negative actions, often leading to deadly force.

In a very short time, players banded together and created small civilizations within the game that had their own leadership, and quite often their only reason for banding together was the protection of all. Others would join to engage in safe commerce, because it was often difficult to find customers outside of major cities, but customers often sought out player cities rather than game-run cities as the venders in player cities were a lot more accommodating to dealing economically than a system that was mainly computer driven (the major cities, which would not allow the placement of player venders).

For years, this was the model of city creation in Britannia. Some cities rose or fell based on how they handled outside elements. Some of them became famous, while others lasted mere moments before disappearing forever. An example of one of these cities that lasted for several years of renown was Shannara, named after the famed novels by Terry Brooks. This was also one of the cities that serves as an excellent case study for the changes that occurred after the introduction of Trammel.

Trammel is one of those concepts that can lead a former Ultima Online player to immediately start frothing at the mouth. It is probably one of the most controversial moves an online gaming company has ever done, short of the New Gaming Experience that was introduced to Star Wars Galaxies by Sony Online Entertainment, which for sake of simplicity, changed an online game so drastically that it is still unclear to this day as to whether it saved or destroyed a game that was seriously suffering in its ability to maintain its player base. Players had been leaving SWG in droves over many changes made in the game by SOE over the years, and this was supposed to fix things, but the controversy over the drastic changes have divided that player community forever, often leading to vehement disagreements between current and former players.

But Trammel was an animal of a completely different nature. Ultima Online was attracting a lot of player killers in the game, and over a particular Christmas holiday season, the number of pkers and thieves, another annoying distraction to players in the game, increased drastically. The UO message boards were filled with angry players who demanded that Electronic Arts (the new owners of Origin who had pushed Garriott from the company after the purchase) do something about it. The result was Trammel.

Trammel was a mirror world of Britannia that was added to every shard. The player would cross through a portal to this new world, and it would be a place where pkers could no longer attack unsuspecting players, and thieves could not steal from anyone as well. Those desiring the player versus player experience could travel through the portal to the old world, now known as Felucca, and everything that happened in the past was still active in Felucca. But Trammel was safe.

So, the majority of the player base moved to Trammel. Felucca became a graveyard, which was fitting because the lands of Britannia were made to appear dark and forbidding, much like a graveyard. Very few players decided to remain in Felucca.

This killed player cities almost overnight because those that existed were now in the “dangerous” land, and some people made it a habit to not even visit Felucca anymore. Then, after a number of months, the developers of the game opened up housing spaces in Trammel in what was a huge land rush that rivaled the land rush that took place in the prairies of the great northwest of the United States. The evening that housing was turned on was an event itself, with almost the entire player base signed on to grab pieces of land that they were looking forward to, finally being able to put down a huge house instead of relying on tiny little houses that had been all that could be placed in what land was left of Felucca in the old days of Ultima Online.

After housing was opened up on Trammel, the first player cities were created there as well. Liberalis was one of the first player run cities to launch on the Napa Valley server. However, after it was created, it quickly died out. Then, with almost every city that came after, the cities lasted a short while and then were abandoned.

What was discovered was that the reason for creating player cities was gone. Without the danger of pkers, without needing a place where people could gather for safety, other than the game’s manufactured cities, there was no reason to put one’s effort into such areas. The guilds that were active during this period slowly dwindled away, players finding themselves playing other games instead of Ultima Online. There seemed to be little challenge left in the game; without a need to band together, the point of Ultima Online was pretty much lost.

Games like World of Warcraft and Everquest helped players of UO realize what was missing in the game, specifically quests and something to do. Ultima Online was one of the few sandbox games, meaning that the players made the environment, not the game designers. Without a need to band together to create societies, which was crucial in the older days of Ultima Online, there was really no reason to continue playing the game.

Ultima Online is still around today, but it is a shadow of its former self, many of its prominent players having gone onto different games, often brining their entire clans with them as well.

For political philosophy, the Ultima Online experience offers a unique opportunity to explore the nature of individuals to band together and create societies and civilizations. Unfortunately, few games since then have offered an environment that produces a similar necessity, so it is unknown if there will be an opportunity to view such a dynamic again. But it is important that social scientists keep their eyes on such possibilities, because like Ultima Online, those opportunities often do not last long, and once discovered can change so quickly that the opportunity may be lost before it was ever realized.

I can't stand cold (snow) weather, but honestly I can think of worse things to complain about

2009-12-10T06:10:00.000-08:00

The Winter has finally hit us in Michigan, and it is hitting pretty hard. It's hitting me especially hard because I don't have a car, and each morning consists of a half hour walk before I can get to the bus that drives me the rest of the distance to work. The walk sucks, and the waiting for the bus sucks. But having said that, it's really not the worst thing in the world.

This morning it was about 18 degrees out, and it's probably going to get a lot colder. I was freezing. I have a pretty good jacket I bought so that worked well, and the hood on it actually covered most of my head pretty well. But my face was freaking freezing. Freeeeeeeeeezing. Must figure out a way to compensate for that. What was really bad was that there's no sidewalk anymore, so I have to walk through tromping snow, which means I'm exhausted by the time I reach the bus. I can't figure out a way around that, as the city likes to plow the street but doesn't think too much about the sidewalks. Not too many people walk, as I can tell from the very few sets of footprints on the ground (there were none this morning and only one set yesterday).

When I reached the bus stop this morning, as I was watching the cars slowly drive by (the drivers scared of any speed in this near blizzard condition...does near Blizzard mean "near World of Warcraft"?...but I digress), I started to think to myself that "yes, Self, it does suck that we're freezing out here and don't have a car, but, Self, would you really want to be driving in THAT?" By THAT, I meant the near World of Warcraft conditions, or blizzard conditions. I would not want to be driving in that, and when the bus finally arrived, all I could think to myself was "now someone else gets to drive the rest of the way." Actually, that wasn't all I could think to myself at that time. I was also thinking about how hot Shania Twain is, and I was also wondering how come people who talk to their stuffed animals are considered sane, but those who are spoken to by their stuffed animals are considered insane. But, again, I digress....

So, I got to work, and I was glad to finally be in a warm place. I started smiling as other people started reporting through email and such that they could not make it into work because the conditions were so bad that they didn't feel safe driving in it. I guess when it comes to comparisons, they really don't have much ground to stand on, but it's not always about comparisons. Like, when I was in the elevator, there was a woman telling another woman: "I can't believe I had to come into work today. Omigod, it took me ten minutes to warm up the heat in my car. I so should not have to come to work under such conditions. This place is so lucky I came in." So, I guess everyone has his or her own dilemma and extreme to report. Sometimes, it's worth showing up just to listen to everyone else's. Kind of the whole walk a mile in someone else's shoes, or "I wanted to complain about walking a mile without shoes, but then I met a man with no feet" or other such fun analogies.

Anyway, so I'm at work now, and it's okay. The weather sucks. And it will get worse. I remember my first winter here in Michigan when I first came to do my PhD at Western Michigan University. Everyone said the winters were HORRIBLE. And the first one was the mildest one in decades. So I laughed. And then the next Winter, it was the worst Winter they'd had in decades. Or second worst. And it sucked. So I then realized it was like to be a man with no feet. Or something like that.

Solving Afghanistan requires knowing what you want to do in the country in the first place

2009-12-03T10:52:00.001-08:00

There's an interesting, somewhat irrelevant article on CNN from a former Soviet general who occupied Afghanistan during the era of the Soviet Union. The article makes the mistake of allowing the general to make the argument that the United States is doing the same thing in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union was: Installing a government that is friendly to the occupying country.

And that's the problem right there. The reason the United States is in Afghanistan was NEVER about establishing democracy. Oh sure, we're slowly coming to try to do that, but that's not why we went there. We forget why we went there when we invaded. We didn't go there to conduct a regime change. We went there to kick some ass. Kick some Taliban ass and to kick it all across Afghanistan until we couldn't find anymore Taliban ass to kick anymore. Then we should have done what any angry mob does: Go home.

Our reason for being in Afghanistan was vengeance. There's really no denying that. We went there because we were certain the Taliban were hiding Al Qaeda. So we invaded and slaughtered the Taliban stronghold. Now, well, we're sitting around and letting them come back to power.

What we should have done was wipe them out and then leave. Maybe stop for ice cream, but then just leave.

We've never been all that good at nation building. No one really is. As the Soviet general argues, the Afghans are going to do what the Afghans want to do. So let them. And if they piss us off again, we send in the Air Force, kick some ass, buy some more ice cream and then leave again.

That's really what we should be doing in Afghanistan. Sitting around and hoping they'll get together and make nice is never going to work. Sorry. It just doesn't work that way in the real world.

The Art of Lazy Science

2009-11-29T16:41:00.000-08:00

I'm still in the process of continuing to read Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How they Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PHD and James H. Fowles, PHD, but one thing I've noticed in a tendency of the authors to resort to what I consider lazy science. The book itself is quite phenomenal in its process but its quoting and reference work is atrocious, leaving a lot to be desired. An example is on page 188, where the authors reference Robert Putnam by stating: "These findings contradict some of the core recommendations made by political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues who study the effect of "social capital" on the health of our democracy. It then references Putnam's Bowling Alone, but no specific chapter or passage is included. Nor is there any indication as to what colleagues these authors are talking about, especially when they mention a book that was written by one author. They then continue: "Putnam argues that highly clustered network ties improve information flow and increase reciprocity at a societal level because everyone is looking out for everyone else." If they're going to challenge specific arguments made by Putnam and unnamed "colleagues," perhaps the authors should at least give enough reference information for the reader to be able to come to a likewise conclusion.

Another blatant error comes in the next chapter when they start talking about tit for tat game theory, specifically that put forth by author Robert Axelrod. They talk about his cooperative strategy on Page 219, but when they reference him, they reference his work that has never been created, some strange volume called The Evolution Corporation, which they state he wrote in 1984. I am impressed because that means he put that out at the same time he wrote The Evolution of Cooperation, which coincidentally was written in 1984. In other words, someone should have at least edited this book to get the right titles of books they're references, especially when they're using some of the biggies of political science literature. And no, there is no The Evolution Corporation from Axelrod; I checked, just to make sure I wasn't missing a great volume of his and making a really stupid argument against bad science. When your own theory uses Axelrod as much as mine does, it's pretty hard to miss alternative novels written by him during the exact same year (with almost the exact same title and almost about the exact same subject).

Bad science! No cookie!

If obesity is contagious, why isn't good health as well?

2009-11-27T07:43:00.001-08:00

I'm reading an interesting book right now called "Connected" by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. I'm reading it as background for my Friendship Over Time theory, specifically to explain the process of how cultural adaptation can occur over time as a process of societal change. But what is really interesting for this post is an argument that is made in Chapter 4, which is that obesity is contagious. They cite a bunch of studies and show that over time obesity can spread in groups, and eventually push itself onto outlier connected groups, up to three degrees of separation.

What never made any sense to me in their study was how come this doesn't happen with positive circumstances, like good health? How come good health doesn't spread to three degrees of separation of people?

My guess is that what they are showing is that bad things tend to spread much easier than good thing, much like communication theory shows that it is easier to push a negative message than it is a positive message. In my thesis study, when I was showing that Boris Yeltsin's message of 1991 Soviet Union's past was negative rather than the putsches' message of it being a positive past was easier to push to the public, I think there's something there. Physics shows that chaos theory tends to push disorder rather than order, meaning the universe has a tendency to spread itself out rather than contain itself in order, so why should ideas and concepts be any different?

What this means is that in order to get your friends to all want to lose weight, you have to put serious energy into the central depository of information, meaning that the state of rest for information should be one of "do nothing" and that potential energy is always there to do negative actions, pushing towards disorder, such as gaining weight and leading to less healthy outcomes. In order to turn the message, you need to put energy into the mix to achieve a higher level of valiance of energy states (so that potential energy will yield kinetic energy that leads to positive results).

So mathematically, if you want to achieve better results from your social groups, you have to put in positive energy that is stored as potential energy that can yield kinetic results that spread out to a higher level of order. In other words, energy goes uphill, requiring effort to achieve positive results, while it is very possible that if your goal is negative attributes, your potential energy required is already stored at a state of rest and is just waiting to be released.

Living in Interesting Times

2009-11-19T15:26:00.000-08:00

As the old Chinese curse has finally become a part of our every day lives, we now live in interesting times. Living in a country that has not been in an official war in many decades, it is somewhat ironic that we are now living through a number of wars in name only, like the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and most recently, the War on Terrorism. We have soldiers stationed overseas in numerous areas, including Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, depending upon where you place Afghanistan on your version of an official map. Some of those troops are stationed in peaceful environments, while others are part of sweep-up operations, and others can arguably be considered to be part of actual wartime conditions. But ironically, to use that Morissette-inspired word again, we’re not in an actual war right now. We’re just in places with guns and a readiness to use them, and unfortunately sometimes in a necessity to use them as well.

Which brings me to the subject of this little scribe, and that’s the recent act of violence that occurred on US military property, the attack that took place at Fort Hood, Texas. I don’t think any American argues that the incident was a definite act of criminality by a very disturbed individual who had been entrusted as an American soldier. And I don’t think very many Americans would disagree that this individual is probably someone who was acting in a definite mode that could be construed as illegal, and possibly even of an escalatory nature that would lead to a state of war, if we could actually attribute his actions to a country that was working against the United States. Unfortunately, the culprit was an American, working for the United States, who went nuts and killed a great deal of Americans all in the name of some psychotic delusion that he was fulfilling a personal vendetta against demons that most Americans will probably never understand, nor will most ever even try.

What is truly disturbing is that there are those who feel it necessary to attribute this man’s actions to the state of terrorism, hoping to somehow link him to some ideology that they dislike and hope to cast further distaste upon by making such a connection. There is little doubt in my mind that he was probably aligning himself with some religious idealism and movement that he believed was righteous and virtuous in his mind, and I would also not be surprised if he somehow hoped that might one day be linked with their movements and ideals as well. However, that does not necessarily mean there is an actual connection to those organizations, other than circumstantial and fanciful in nature. Yet, there are those who are attempting to make it seem as if this lone gunner is tied to terrorist actions because a dictionary definition can somehow equate his actions with bad linkage, much like Saddam Hussein was linked with 9/11 just because it served a political purpose to make such an argument.

It is that same type of linkage that appears to be making its way into political rhetoric today. And this is unfortunate because in order to truly deal with this pseudo war on terrorism means an actual ability to actually pigeon hole it enough so that such connections can be made; otherwise, linkage is useless other than as a rhetorical rallying tool. As a mechanism to actually get things done, real linkage is necessary because if there is a real connection, which there is not, then by attacking the foundation of the circumstances that led to the attack, we might actually fundamentally serve to defeat the very nature of terrorism. And unfortunately, that will never happen if we were to do so. Think of it this way: If there is no connection ever made, and it’s doubtful that there ever will be, then if we manage to discover what drove this person into psychotic levels of disturbed behavior, and we manage to eliminate the causes, then all we have managed to do is fix the problem from happening with someone in the military who is acting on disturbed behavioral traits. While this would be a good thing to attack and eliminate, we must realize that eliminating such behavior will do nothing to eliminate actual terrorism. However, if we believe the opposite, then if we ever do succeed in eliminating such causes, we will fool ourselves into believing we have done something to eliminate terrorism, when in reality all we have done is set up a false sense of security so that one day we will get attacked again, and like usual it will hit us in a way to where we find ourselves asking similar questions over and over, like “how could this happen?” and “why didn’t anyone see this coming?”

This is why we must be vigilant against such fake moves to equate bad behavior with terrorism in hopes of furthering political movements, which is the only cause that benefits from making such connections. Recently, I’ve been monitoring a number of anti-Obama individuals who find it necessary to make any attack against Obama possible, and this has served as an easy mechanism to do so. What works better than rallying the troops behind a claim of a president who cannot handle terrorism happening during his administration? Unfortunately, while this might benefit political actors with really low level goals, it also hurts the country with long-term effects. The solution is to ignore stuff like this, but unfortunately, when it works as such a strong rhetorical tool, the chances of that happening are slim to none.

It is the same rhetoric that was used during the beginning of the war or terrorism; any attempt to criticize it is immediately used as further ammunition to push the cause that much deeper into the national psyche. It plays on the simplistic argument of fear mongering without any actual costs involved. When it is finally defeated by a stronger counter-narrative, it is usually too late, and the political circumstances have changed or reversed so that the original benefactors of the original discourse now benefit from reversing the message.

That’s where we are now. The discourse has reversed (a new party is in power) so the people who defended the regime are now taking the rhetoric of the original complainers (who used the original complaints to cast out the previous regime), which can only serve to uproot the new regime that has taken charge. Unfortunately, the one thing that gets lost is the truth and basic ethics. If ever there was a time for moderates and moderation, it is now; if ever there was a forum where moderates are ignored and cast out as irrelevant, it is also now.
Kind of sucks, if you think about it.

The Revolution May Be Televised But There Not Be Anyone Watching the Station

2009-11-12T07:41:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine and I were discussing revolution the other day, and an interesting comment was made of how "well, that sort of thing can't happen here", and it got me wondering how many people actually think that. And it then got me to start thinking about the reality of revolution and how most often so few people ever see it coming.

Think about the American Revolution. Sure, we talk about it in such grandiose terms, but at the time the people who existed back then probably had no idea it was going to be as instrumental as it was. I can imagine that some farmer was probably thinking that the result of the armed conflict was still going to lead to another season of farming and the hope that he might make a bit of money to survive through another year. It's not like these things are planned by a secret cabal that sits in a darkened room making these things happen. They generally happen at an unspecific time when things just sort of fall apart.

Revolutions are weird animals. In the 20th and 21st centuries, we tend to think of them as social revolutions, but throughout history they used to be disgruntled revolutions, where a bunch of people decided they were fed up, fought the establishment, and then the system collapsed around them. Quite often, the conclusion was a reinstitution of government that was very similar to what happened before, but for some people there was change. For others, it was more of the same.

The world of revolution is one of those that has certain actors as influential and others that sort of play along with whatever happens. That former category is the one most history books discuss. That latter category is made up of most of the people who have ever existed in civilization. They matter little, and unfortunately, they are usually the ones who pay the most in the conflicts (with their lives, their livelihoods and even the surrender of their ideas).

I think of the Peasants' Revolt in the Middle Ages as an example of revolution and how it impacts the average man or woman. A bunch of local people got pissed off that they were being taxed by the government and the Church, so they rose up, burned a couple of churches and attacked a couple of tax collectors. They weren't planning any great ideals or futures for themselves; they just didn't want to pay any more money at one particular time. And they practically overthrew the government. Until the government's soldiers showed up and killed a lot of people.

That is how most revolutions tend to exist in civilization.

So, my question is directed in a different way. Why are we so comfortable now that we believe that revolution cannot possibly take place in the United States? Is it because we haven't had one for so long? Is it because our police and soldiers are so strong that we just don't see it lasting long enough to grow steam? Or is it because we're fooling ourselves into a false sense of security?

I plan to revisit this subject at a later time. I just thought I'd open it up to some initial pre-thoughts. That's all for now.

Fort Hood suspect is now conscious

2009-11-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

New York Times article

As a writer, one of the things that constantly rings out to me is awkward dialogue moments, because I find those to be the most interesting to write. When I read this article, all I could think about was awkward dialogue. Not because I could see it or hear it, but because I could imagine it.

Imagine the nurse or patient care specialist who first has to confront this guy who just went nuts and killed over a dozen of his fellow soldiers. How does this professional handle the conversation that is certainly to emerge from the alleged criminal's first conscious moments? How do you handle a conversation with someone that you probably would never hold a conversation with on your own ever because of the horrific nature of what he just did? Yet, this person who is there when the criminal wakes up is required to give adequate service to this patient. As a human, I can't imagine ever wanting to have that conversation. I mean, how awkward would that be? But as a writer, I would want to be a fly on the wall just to hear how it would emerge, just to know how do people handle intense moments like these? As a writer, I can only imagine and try to reproduce such moments, but in the real world they happen.

I'm just glad I'm not the one who has to be the participant.

Publisher's Weekly's Gender Problem

2009-11-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

Publisher's Weekly announced its 2009 list of best books. Here they are:

Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey (Knopf)

Await Your Reply
Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
Neil Sheehan (Random House)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

Big Machine
Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

Stitches
David Small (Norton)

Shop Class as Soulcraft
Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann (Doubleday)

The problem? There are no female writers on the list. And to be honest, I'm kind of not all that concerned. It's a list of the ten best books for 2009. It's not like women haven't been on the list before. I sometimes wonder if political correctness really needs to be as inclusive as it is sometimes.

Oh well. I didn't make the list either, so I'm thinking there's a legospaceman bias as well, but that's just me.

The New Novel and the usage of Nano

2009-11-03T06:09:00.000-08:00

Writing a novel in 30 days is an interesting experience, and I'm only on the third day (only having written for two days now), and I'm at 5900 words of my 50,000 word goal (over ten percent). My new novel is something completely different for me, as I'm writing a novel that involves Plato's Republic, and I'm doing a 21st century interpretation of the novel in an almost 1984-ish style of writing. The book is about a man who lives in a futuristic society (not that far from where we are today) where Plato was right, and everyone is placed in society by what metal is constituted in their blood (bronze, silver or gold). As the novel continues to be written, it starts to add little bits and pieces of its own that seem to want to be included, even though I've been free writing it for the most part. It's now starting to take serious form, and even as I was walking to work today, it was generating in my mind as new ideas kept coming to me, each one of them demanding to be part of the new novel.

Only once have I ever attempted to write a novel fast. It was back when I was a counterintelligence agent in the Army, and I had two weeks off of work, so I wrote "Deadly Deceptions", which was titled "Whose Side Are You On?" when I first wrote it. I was very happy with the novel, and it took very little time to write (even fast than the NaNo contest of 30 days); I think it took me a week and a half, if I remember correctly. Most of the time, it takes me six months or so to write a novel ("The Ameriad" took nearly five years, but that was because it was written in spurts rather than all five years in a row).

So, I have to say that this is turning out to be quite the experience for me, although I do find myself resisting the need to write each night, and I have to keep fighting myself from doing something else. I guess that's part of the problem whenever anyone tackles a project like this.

New Novel Begun

2009-11-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

The National Novel Writing Month has begun. I started this morning with my new novel, temporarily titled, Plato's Perspective. It's a mainstream novel that has a bit of a futuristic setting to it, although it is not really science fiction but a political novel that has to do with Plato's Republic and his attempt to integrate education with the concept of the myth of metals (each person falls into one of 3 metal classes). My first jaunt into writing it has resulted in 1875 words. The goal is 50,000 words (about 200 pages), so let's see how this all works out.

The Reactive World Provides Few Solutions

2009-10-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, we leave in a reactive world. What does this mean, and why is it important? It means that we're rarely proactive but only reactive. This means that instead of looking for solutions to problems that might happen, we seek to solve problems that already occurred.

Think about it. 911 was one of the wake-up tragedies for the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. Were we prepared? No, not at all. We were taken completely by surprise, and ever since then all of our politics have been about reactions. We reacted to the Taliban in Afghanistan, going after them because they were harboring the killers who attacked us. We attacked Iraq because of what we claimed they had done; let's face it, as much as we'd like to think we went into Iraq to stop them from doing things in the future, the war was sold on a linkage to 911 that never existed. Oh sure, we can pretend that lie wasn't sold back then, but it was, and it was sold well. Again, it was a reaction.

I was reading a story today about San Francisco. The Bay Bridge has been closed down because of part of it collapsed, again. The fix that proved to be a bad fix was a fix to a collapse during the San Francisco earthquake. More reactions. No preparations. So, now the bridge is closed, people can't figure out how to get across the bay, and people are all upset. All reactions. If people would have thought this out, they would have had a contigency plan in place for when the Bay Bridge goes down. Their solution? Take BART. Only, they don't have enough trains running, and BART's continuous reaction to all things politics in the San Francisco area has been to raise rates whenever anything happens. Expect a new rate soon now that BART has to work harder. They just raised it a short time ago because BART didn't have enough money. And then they raised it after that because they realized they had to pay their workers more because they wouldn't go back to work and threatened to strike. Great reactions. No proaction.

A young girl in the Bay Area was raped the other day by at least 10 gang members. The reaction? Shock. Claims that this sort of thing shouldn't happen "here". This morning, young people from the school where she was raped complained that the reaction has been so negative towards them, stating things like "What about the good things?" Well, sorry, but when a young girl gets raped and EVERYONE ignores what's happening to her, except for the few that jumped in and cheered on the rapists, well, sorry young people, but it's pretty hard to "think about the good things" that happen in your school.

Years ago, I used to serve as a security expert in the military. I used to complain that every time there was a huge terrorist action (this was during the 1980s when there was one happening every week in Europe), the US soldiers would go on alert, we'd start investigating every car that came onto post, and then two weeks would pass by and we'd go back to being morons again. Then terrorists would attack again, and no one would expect it. It was like playing security games with people who all had long term memory loss disorder. But it would keep happening. And I would keep complaining, and then they'd go back to what they were doing before. But that didn't bother me as much as the fact that someone would ALWAYS say, "no one could have expected that" when there were a few of us who kept saying: "Stop putting your heads in the ground and do something!"

I feel that way now. Gangs are pretty much ruling entire neighborhoods in some cities, and no one does anything about it. Oh, they talk about doing something about it, but they rarely do. Or they turn their police loose on the population for a few weeks and then tone them down again. Then the criminals come back out of the woodwork and do their thing over again. It's like the riots that took place after the big moments in time in the last decade or so, like the Rodney King verdict. People went nuts after that and started attacking innocent citizens on the streets. African-American gangs practically went to war against Korean businessmen in Los Angeles because...well, I don't actually know what were the actual reasons, but I guarantee they had nothing to do with the Rodney King verdicts against the police officers that were exonerated by the local jury. People were angry over other things, and as much as people kept warning that something bad was going to happen, no one cared. And then when it happened, people started in with the infamous, "No one oould have expected that" when everyone should have expected that.

That's part of the problem of living in a reactive society. We don't do anything to prepare for bad situations but hope that things will last long enough for us to retire or die before the powder keg goes off. Like social security. It's been falling apart for decades, but no one wants to do anything about it. Or health care. Or the recent problems with the national debt. It's almost as if we imbibe ourselves on American Idol long enough, we're convinced that the payment will never come due.

Well, it will. But it will happen when you least expect it, because that's how these sorts of things work. But honestly, we all know no one could have expected that. I mean, how could we have possibly have known?

What CNN really doesn't want you to know

2009-10-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

I was watching CNN last night, and I noticed that Anderson Cooper's prime time show must have made the comment "the best news team/best political news on television" so many times that I lost count. What I found even more interesting was the next day in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/media/27rating.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=todayspaper&adxnnlx=1256666567-ru7DyOrsxx5q0hBtzHH67Q) in which it was pointed out that CNN comes dead last of all the cable television news programs, in almost EVERY category. I noticed that CNN's page has no link to this story at all. Couldn't find it anywhere. You might kinda wonder why they might want to avoid revealing that fact to potential subscribers.

Turns out Fox News is beating them on practically ever front. Andersoon Cooper was dead fourth. Studio execs for CNN kept stating that Cooper was their strongest news hitter. Turns out he's not. He got beat by Nancy Grace's RECAST of her show from an earlier period.

I've always found Anderson Cooper an interesting entity because I really think CNN thought he was their cool guy for young people to watch, but never actually tested him on the demographic. Just sort of assumed he'd draw in the numbers. And then when that didn't happen, they thought he'd bring in the older crowd because of his news gumption skills. Funny, but that didn't happen either. To me, he always seemed like a nice guy with no real purpose that people kept hoping would come into his own because he's like the guy who is married to the owner's daughter. You want him to do well, only because it might hurt the marriage. Except, I don't think he's married to anyone important at CNN, so that doesn't work out that way.

Oh well. Good luck next time, CNN.

It's really the little things....

2009-10-25T11:59:00.001-07:00

Little by little, I'm acclimating to Michigan and my new life here. For some reason, I thought I would be regretting the move across the country, but I don't. Not even a little. Sure, I'm freezing in the mornings because I don't own a coat, or I own one but have no access to it as it is in California. Unfortunately, the coat I had was a one of a kind type, and it is very hard to find anything similar here. Sizes are hard to match, and that one was just a perfect coat. I haven't found anything here. It seems like the stores realize there's a Winter coming up, but all the jackets seem geared for Spring. Or they're just stupid looking. Anyway.

I have a few pieces of furniture now. Nothing spectacular, but I have a table, which I'm using for a desk (it was delivered a few minutes ago). The desk/table cost me $25 (which included delivery), and it is perfect for my needs. I'm buying another smaller one from her to hold my TV, which is another thing I bought a few days ago for $40. I am finding most of my stuff on Craigslist, and I think it's great. My 20 inch Magnavox TV is pretty nice, and it's nice to have access to television again. My apartment includes free cable, so now I can take advantage of it. I thought the ScyFy channel was missing (it says channel 22, and I have no signal for 22) but it turns out the channel is 73, and I've been able to watch Stargate Universe on my own TV finally.

Little by little, I'm getting on the right medications. Dealt with a PA the other day who didn't understand that I didn't understand what she meant when she read back my lab results in doctor speak. I kept asking her what she was talking about, and she would explain with more doctor speak. NOT a very customer centered PA. One of the first lessons in communication is making sure the person you're talking to you has a clue what you're talking about. Therefore, you don't speak in jargon to someone who is not someone in your field. So far, this doctor's office hasn't impressed me that much. I called on Friday stating I am out of medication, so I need the doctor to call in the prescription. I explained the urgency. Nothing happened. Little things like that. The doctor is okay; her staff is not.

I'm getting ready for the national month of writing, or whatever it's called. I still haven't decided what novel I'm going to write in November, but I have to do that soon because once November comes, I don't have a lot of time to think about it after that. I need to be writing. But that's something I'm looking forward to.

All of my stuffed animals are here now. They don't seem all that grumpy, even though some have been traveling a lot, and others have been at my sister's house just stored in boxes. I promised them we're home for awhile now. No more traveling or storage.

I keep forgetting I don't have the eating capacity I used to have before. I bought some cheese and chicken quesadillas from Costco yesterday, and microwaved two of them for lunch today. Could barely finish one of them. Every time I eat, I think with my eyes, not my stomach. So I ended up wasting a whole quesadilla. I guess in the old days I would have forced myself to eat it. At least I'm not making that mistake anymore.

Well, that's all for now.

Why Netflix often drives me nuts

2009-10-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

A short time ago, Netflix ran a contest to find the best algorithm to help customers with movie recommendations. The American Statistical Association (ASA) recently declared that one of its team of statisticians came up with the winning formula. Great for them. Unfortunately, Netflix still sucks when it comes to predicting the movies I might like.

The reason? Well, one movie is not like every other movie that does the same sort of gimmick. One of the constant suggestions is crap that wants to be the movie Clerks. Okay, Clerks was great. Every wannabe Clerks movie is not. Stop recommending that trash to me.

Little Miss Sunshine was a cute movie. I liked it. That does NOT mean that ever avant garde movie that has appeared after that movie is one I'm going to like. Just because it was fielded at the Sundance Film Festival doesn't mean I'm going to like it. Stop recommending this trash to me, Netflix. Just because some movie actress decided to make a $15,000 movie doesn't mean I'm going to like it. Nor does it mean it's JUST LIKE movies I might have liked in the past.

So far, Netflix is broken when it comes to suggestions. I don't even use their suggestions anymore. I look for movies I want to watch based on my own desires. I wish it wasn't that way because I love Netflix, just not their suggestions.

What it takes to get a job in this economy

2009-10-22T10:17:00.000-07:00

There is an excellent article in the New York Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/us/22hire.html?hpw

I apologize for posting it this way but the blogger application I'm using is a bit stubborn with me here, so it's the best I can do.

The article is all about a $13/hour job that was adverised at a trucking school. What I found fascinating was how much work the HR people went through to eliminate anyone who had education or management skills. In other words, they lowered the bar significantly and then had no qualms about eliminating anyone that might have had experience, education or for that matter, skills.

This is what a lot of people are facing these days as they look for work. I know for me that advertising higher degrees was a death warrant for any chance I ever had at getting a job interview. I either couldn't meet their minimum experience and education requirements, which was always so hard to figure out anyway, considering I have enough degrees that not too many jobs really could elude me for long, or I had too much experience and education, which of course they would never admit or reveal. It is truly a sad commentary on everything when you are forced to hide your experience, and even age, from prospective employers. But unfortunately, that's where we are these days.

CNN's Recent Move to Cover All Things Latino

2009-10-22T08:10:00.000-07:00

I know this is going to immediately appear politically incorrect or ethnically-challenging, but at what point did CNN become the Latino Awareness Station? It seems only yesterday that Latino organizations were calling for the skewering of Lou Dobbs and CNN for its continuous, vitriolic series of attacks on illegal immigration, and now the front page of CNN wouldn't be any more Hispanic promoting, even if was covered with interactive pinatas. On the front page today (October 22), there are articles exclaiming:

Killing puts focus on crimes against Latinos
In depth: Latino in America
Commentary: But what's a Latino?
CNN Wire: Top Mexican Cartel Leader
Share Your Reaction (to Latino in America)
Soledad O'Brien Reports (on Latino in America)
Incentives Draw Latinos to Miltary Service
Latinos in America: Meet the Garcias
Latinos in America: Full Coverage
Should Mexico Mess with corn genes?

If this was an article by someone who was racist or ethnically-challenged, the article would now go off on a rant of how the news media is forgetting whites or some equally stupid direction, so let's leave that distraction for those who think in such limited fashion. Instead, I'd like to focus on why CNN is now going off on this particular area of reporting. In other words, let's study it from a communicative media perspective.

I can think of a hypothesis or two that might make sense. How about the obvious?

Hypothesis 1. In order to respond to negative comments from Latino viewers, CNN is now attempting to appear more favorable towards Latinos.

Okay, this is a good hypothesis for our purposes, although it's not completely correct, mainly because it is a big lacking. Yes, CNN is probably responding to the negative commentary it received from its viewers, but it is not much of a stretch to assume that a lot of those comments came from people who were not normally viewers of CNN. After all, Lou Dobbs has been doing his schtick for some time now, and people generally don't subscribe to services that work against them and their beliefs.

Hypothesis 2. CNN was attacked seriously over its coverage of illegal immigration in Lou Dobbs's segments that studio executives realized how many Latinos were out there potentially available for watching, so they're now trying to tap that market.

This makes a lot more sense, even if it's not worded the best it could be for a hypothesis. Think about it. Lots of people have been complaining about CNN, and as more and more people heard about the negativity of Dobbs and his show, more people must have been contacting CNN. Somewhere down the line, a studio executive had to put some figures together to realize that there were a lot of potential viewers out there who might start watching CNN. But they wouldn't watch ONLY if CNN toned down the rhetoric. But they had to do something to actually attract the demographic population. So what better than to pull out one of their long term reporters, Soledad O'Brien, a Latino, and then start producing content around the idea that CNN is a Latino-positive station?

It might work. There are some problems, however. As much as I hate to say it, the more content that exists that tries to attract Latinos might actually serve to push away non-Latino populations, which right now make up the majority of the viewer audience. So, CNN is taking a bit of a chance by focusing so much attention on one particular demographic. Sadly enough, Fox News actually attracts quite a bit of the already established demographic that CNN draws upon. If Fox News were to tone down its conservative rhetoric, it is quite possible that it might successfully take away most of the general viewership of CNN itself. Fox already has the advantage of placement, due to cable subsidiaries and Murdoch's ability to ease into such markets.

The next few months could prove to be very interesting for CNN because of the chances it is taking and how quickly the tide can turn based on any one decision.

Fox News and the White House War Against Fox News

2009-10-20T05:34:00.000-07:00

You know, I don't doubt that the White House has it guns out for Fox News, as there's always been an antagonistic relationship between the left and Fox News, but one thing I found really demeaning was how Fox News chooses to engage its customers in this debate. Take the following poll they listed here:

I'll include the poll here so you don't have to go to their page.

You decide:

The White House is still attacking Fox News, 10 days after its original comments. Why?
They want to shoot the messenger
They don’t have a good case to make
They confuse News and Opinion
I don't know

In case you haven't noticed, the option of "Fox News is out of line" doesn't show up. You either get to choose "They want to shoot the messenger, they don't have a good case to make, they confuse news and opinion or I don't know". If this was a scientific study, which it obviously is not, it would get laughed out of academia and science in general.

If Fox News really wants to complain, perhaps it should stop skewing its surveys so that there's nothing for the White House to complain about in the first place.

Life on the Duane front

2009-10-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

I moved into my new apartment last week. It's really nice and pretty large. It has a washer and dryer in the apartment, including a dishwasher and a microwave oven. It's a one bedroom, but honestly I don't need any more space than that. It also comes with a detached garage, so whenever I get a car, I'll have a place for it.

I'm still having real eye sight problems, even though I'm on the proper medication these days. Not sure why it's taking so long for my eyes to bounce back, but I have real trouble reading with my glasses now, and I'm really hoping I bounce back quickly because the last time I had this problem, I ended up in the emergency room of the hospital. I had some blood tested the other day, but the doctor never got back to me, which I hope is a good thing (last time they sent the police to escort me to the emergency room).

Haven't had the opportunity to do much writing lately (really hard when you can't see the screen of the computer), so I'm hoping to get into that soon.

Michigan is already getting a bit cold, and I don't have a proper jacket yet. I left my two larger coats with Kat, and I figured it would only be a short time before I'd get them, but I'm freaking freezing now, and I don't anticipate I'm going to see them any time soon. I have to walk a long distance to the bus stop every morning and evening, and that walk is really, really cold. My thin jackets I brought with me aren't doing me that much good. I bought gloves two weeks ago, but I accidentally lost them on the bus, which means I won't have gloves for awhile (can't afford to buy another pair yet).

It's pretty funny living in an apartment with absolutely no furniture. I can't afford any yet. Yesterday, I bought an office chair for $15 from someone on Craigslist. That much pretty much blew away the last of my money for the next week. But at least I have a chair to sit on in my apartment. Hopefully, next week I'll be able to buy a few new pieces of furniture so that this place isn't so empty here.

The job is going well. I like the people with whom I'm working, and the work load seems all right. Getting used to the work atmosphere, and all that seems to be working. Eventually, I'm going to have to buy a car, because I live way too far away from the bus, and there's no way for me to even get to the local store without a car. I tried going to Meijer's supermarket the first day I moved here, and it was the longest walk I've ever had to do, and at some points the sidewalk just disappears, leaving you at the mercy of speeding cars that don't seem to recognize pedestrians. It's really not safe for someone without a car on that road, and as Winter approaches, it's not even conducive to survival.

Not much more going on. This posting may sound somewhat negative, but things are actually pretty good. I've been having a bit of a time getting over the whole mugging some time ago. That really messed me up badly. My right shoulder is still hurting pretty bad, as is my head and neck at times. My doctor recommended me for physical therapy, so I'll start looking into that as soon as I can start affording the co-payments for that. $20 a pop might not seem like much to others, but when you have absolutely no money, it is somewhat significant.

This has been my first weekend in my new place, and it's been nice having my own place to myself. Things are working out, and I'm grateful for that.

Moved into new apartment

2009-10-14T07:47:00.000-07:00

I finally found a decent place to live, and I moved in two days ago. I spent the night there last night for the first time.

Advantages-
The living space is huge.
There's a washer/dryer in the unit
dishwasher
microwave
did I mention lots of room?

Disadv-
In the middle of nowhere (I feel like the Unabomber with neighbors). The nearest store is a LONG walk
That's pretty much it.

Had to call the office this morning because I can't seem to get the washer to dispense water, and my bath tub filled with water and wouldn't drain. But honestly, not horrible problems that won't be fixed (so I believe).

I get Internet on today (they're dropping off a cable modem, and supposedly I just have to call them when I get it).

Already have cable, but don't have a TV, so eventually I'll be able to explore that benefit. Have no furniture either, but again, that will come with time.

The Concept of Mathematics, Television and How It Defeats Its Purpose to Attract Young Potential Mathematicians

2009-10-07T19:04:00.001-07:00

One thing has been bugging me for a long time, and it took me a long time to figure out exactly what it was. You see, I'm a huge fan of the television show NUMB3RS, which is about a young professor who is massively gifted, was born a prodigy of math, and solves FBI crimes using mathematics. As a mathematics-based researcher (I love math), I always thought the show was good because it showed the positive nature of using mathematics to solve problems. And then I realized that wasn't the premise.

No, it does what Hollywood tends to do a lot. It created a character who is not normal, who is a prodigy, who had to be born to do what he does. Then it shows how great mathematics is, but leaves you with the impression that in order to do mathematics of that order you have to be as gifted as that young man. And because the rest of us usually aren't prodigies who were recruited by Stanford, or whatever, when we were 10 years old, we can only see such circumstances as fiction.

But whenever I've watched the show, I've enjoyed remarking that I understood a lot of the concepts the main character brings up because I loved mathematics and studied it extensively when I was first going to college. But then I get that bad taste in my mouth because I realize that the show is telling me that even though I love math, I'm never going to be a Charlie (the guy who is the math genius on the show). So, I find myself somewhat disliking the show.

This bothers me because they created what could have been a great vehicle to attract young people to math. We certainly don't do it in our school systems, where we spend a great deal of energy equating mathematicians with nerds, losers and geeks. Most of our popular entertainment points out that the jock is the hero, and the geek is really the anti-hero, or made the hero is comedies because people can laugh at him as he tries to be what no one expects him to be.

Anyway, that's my thought on the television show NUMB3RS. I'm sure there are those wo disagree with me, but they're all geeks and losers, so who listens to them anyway?

National Novel Writing Month

2009-10-07T06:43:00.000-07:00

One of the projects I'm planning to participate in during November is something I've always wanted to do. It's called National Novel Writing Month. It takes place from November 1st until the end of the month, and the goal is to write a 50,000 novel in that time period. This should be an interesting experiment for me. It's not the first time I've written a novel quickly. Deadly Deceptions, a mystery/suspense novel that takes place amongst US counterintelligence agents in South Korea, was written during a two week leave I took once while in Korea. But not every novel has been that quick, judging from my last one, The Ameriad, which took me over 5 years.

So, I'm thinking about which novel I'd like to write next. I'm allowed to outline it before writing it, so I might get on that soon. I was going to be rewriting The Armageddon Project, renamed To Touch the Unicorn, renamed to 72 Hours in August, but it is really a rewrite, and that doesn't seem ethical in a contest that is supposed to be "new" work. So I'll be thinking about my next NEW project.

As for other things, starting to become comfortable in my new job in Michigan. Having trouble finding an apartment because of my old bad credit (plus the last 4 or so months of being destitute and not having a job), but have to keep believing things will work out for the better.

That's all for now.

Starting a new job

2009-09-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

Well, I made the trip across the country on Amtrak from Sacramento (San Francisco) to Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was an interesting trip, and something I'm glad I did because I've never done that on a train before across the USA.

I met some interesting people on the train, specifically a British tattoo artist who was living in the states and traveling to Chicago. He and I spent the majority of the trip together talking and just having a good time. It definitely made the trip go by faster. He was an interesting fellow, and at one time he almost got into a fight with this Berkeley reject guy that was on the train and trying to pick an intellectual fight. He didn't stand a chance against Brandon, who really knew a hell of a lot about politics and history.

Anyway, I'm completely out of money, but I start my new job tomorrow at Spectrum Health. I am so glad I got this job. Medical coverage starts up for me in a few days (on the first). I went to a health clinic in Grand Rapids yesterday to see if I could get a prescription for my drugs that I need to be taking. I've been out of medication for about two weeks, trying to mentally convince my body not to shut down or put me into cardiac arrest. I'm on most of my required meds now (had to spend the very last bit of cash I had to fill the prescription at Walgreen's but I think it was worth it). Times are going to be tough for the next few weeks, but once I start getting paychecks, things should start leveling back out again.

Well, it's late and I need to go to bed. Have to get up really early tomorrow to catch the bus to work. Wow, haven't said that in a while....

Why Government Keeps Getting Bigger in the USA

2009-09-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

What is funny is that people keep trying to blame one or the other party in the United States as being the culprit. In fact, both are to blame, but only because they hang onto rhetoric that is decades old, and the common person is too set in his or her ways to realize what happened.

The problem started in the 1960s and is only now at its zenith of problematic proportions. Prior to the 1960s, for the most part, Republicans (or the right) were content with control over state governments. They never saw the federal government as useful, or (and this really important) prosperous. The benefits of being a member of Congress were pretty dismal back then and prior to that period. The Democrats, having solidified power in the federal government (not the presidency, as that changed constantly), started to look at their positions as something they should reward, so they did. They made Congress such an attractive place to work with all of the benefits they added, that Republicans, who were more concerned with taking care of their businesses back in the states (where the real money was for them) that they started to see that Congress might be as beneficial financially as staying home and running the state governments. So, from the 1970s on, you started to see an upswing of Republicans. The Democrats had a power base back then, but they rarely had any resistance from Republicans (aside from the territories that don't switch at all because they've always been so partisan based). Well, what kept the Democrats in power was the money they received from their union funding and general assistance PACs. Their PACs were ALWAYS willing to reward someone already in office, but rarely a challenger. The Republican PACs, however, were willing to find either an incumbent or a challenger. It doesn't take a lot of math to figure out that Republicans were going to be armed with a lot more PAC funding than Democrats, and slowly they were going to start knocking them out of federal government representative positions. This went on until the 1980s when the Republicans took back Congress. It's been wavering ever since, and has only pushed in the Democrat's position because everyone was so pissed off at the Republicans over the Iraqi War that it was bound to happen.

So, with all that information in mind, it should not be hard to see that Republicans who now see government as "good" are going to be willing to grow government, where they see it as part of their power base now, rather than something to complain about. The Democrats have always been pro-government and government growth, so that didn't take much of an impetus. So, we have two parties that NOW believe larger government is a good thing.

Those who are against big government don't have representatives anymore. There are too few members of Congress who represent them. All that is left are the ones who are from areas where they have never been challenged by anyone else, so they're still in office. But the power brokers in Congress are all about making Congress stronger and government bigger.

It's not going to change with either party, because both parties are now part of the problem and complicit in its continuation.

So, what's the answer? Well, if you want smaller government, the answer is to throw out practically everyone and put in new people who don't want larger government. The problem? Each congressional district's constituents consistently respond the same way in polls: "I like my member of Congress but think all the rest should be thrown out". Think about that one for a moment. And then realize why it will never change.

"The High Crusade" by Poul Anderson

2009-09-13T23:07:00.000-07:00

I read this on somewhat of a whim. The book is somewhat old, written in 1960, and I found it while I was looking for an apartment in Oakland a few months back before I found my current place. It was in the bargain bin of paperbacks at this trendy used books bookstore. I saw the cover and read the pitch blurb, and it suddenly dawned on me that this might be a lot like my Tales of Reagul series, where a Roman set of villages is transplanted to an alien planet as a psychological experiment conducted by an alien race.

The High Crusade is a lot different than my idea, thankfully, although it was quite intriguing nonetheless. In this story, a group of aliens on a scouting party come to Medieval England to invade and end up getting fought back by a British nobleman who ends up stealing their spaceship and having one of the surviving aliens take them to join King Edward during the Crusades. But the alien double crosses them and puts the ship on autopilot to one of his home planets, thinking he's doomed the Englishmen. The Englishmen end up launching an attack on the military alien race and slaughtering them, and then practically destroying their interstellar empire.

Very interesting book. Quite short, too. It won both Hugo and Nebula awards during its time on the shelves. While the book wasn't what I was expecting, it was still worth the read to see how a great science fiction writer can write in brevity and still create an excellent story that serves as a somewhat condemnation of mankind's tendency to wage war violently.

Killing A Character and then it comes back

2009-09-11T17:36:00.000-07:00

This is the memory of an event that happened while I was writing my ninth novel, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy. This isn't a story about the novel, but something that happened while I was writing it.

One day, when I had finished a long session of writing, I was in one of those head spaces where the rest of the world didn't exist, and all I could think about was the story that was in front of me. It was a somewhat critical point of the novel, too, because one of my important characters, named Tina, was killed as a progression of the story. It was a difficult choice for me, because this was one of those secondary characters I really liked, and my original thought was she was going to make all the way through the novel. But at one point she HAD to die, because it was one of those turning point moments where nothing else made sense. So, after agonizing about how I might save her at the last moment, I finally killed her off.

I was really tired as I had been writing all day, and I was trying to finish up the follow up to that particular scene, when there was a ring of the doorbell in my apartment. I worked on the second floor, so I climbed down the stairs, wearily, not really thinking about what I was doing, but because I lived in Daly City, and you didn't just open your door to ANYONE, I asked "Who is it?" to the person on the other side of the door.

She said: "Tina."

My jaw dropped, my body started perspiring almost immediately. I mean, I'd been thinking of nothing but Tina this whole time, and there was this person at my door with the same name. Coincidence, obviously. Had to be. So I said, "Um, what do you want?"

"I used to live here," she replied through the door. "Can I come in?"

I about freaked out right then and there. I mean, this didn't make any sense, but I was thinking it was her. She came back. She didn't want to be dead, and now she was here. I kept thinking, okay, Stephen King writes this kind of stuff, but this sort of thing doesn't really happen. I mean, does it?

So I tried to look through the spy aperature to see if she looked like I had imagined "Tina" would look, but I couldn't see anything. It was like she wasn't there.

"Um, I'm not opening the door until I can see you through the peephole."

I stared through it again and then this little, tiny woman appeared before me. She had to back up a bit because she was a bit too short to see if she was standing in front of the door.

It wasn't Tina, or at least the Tina I knew. So I opened the door.

It was a friendly Hispanic woman who said that she used to live in my same apartment and was wondering if any mail had come for her as she took a long time to forward her address. I then remembered there was some, but we had given it all back to the postman the next day each time we received it.

So, she thanked me and left.

It dawned on me then that it was from her letters where I actually got the name Tina for that character. I had seen her mail come every day for a few weeks, and the name just stuck with me.

But that was what happened when I killed my first major character. She came back. And she wanted her mail.

Remembering 911 and other annual dates

2009-09-11T16:34:00.000-07:00

I suspect this may not be taken very well, but it's one of those things I've been thinking about saying for awhile. It has to do with the remembrance of particular events that are revisited on a yearly basis.

One thing that always fascinated me when I was a counterintelligence agent was how often a yearly remembrance of some event would serve as the impetus for destruction many years later. During the 1980s, there were some huge riots taking place in South Korea. People in the states who talk about riots here have no idea what a riot is until they've seen one of these. During most of the year, at least back then, things ran quite smoothly, and then there would be a remembrance event of some police crackdown from a year ago or several years ago, and next thing you knew there were college students throwing Molotov cocktails through business store windows and groups of people overturning police cars. There would be spontaneous groups of tens of thousands of young people running and screaming through the streets. If you were a foreigner, and recognized as one, you could expect to be attacked at a moment's notice because a mob mentality is just that, a mob mentality.

Every time I think about a yearly remembrance event, I think about these riots. I think about how IRA splinter groups would celebrate the annual passing of an important event with a new attack. In the Middle East, it was quite common for a small war to break out over the remembrance of an annual event (from whatever side).

So, 911 has reared its head again, and people are starting the whole "where were you at when 911 happened" thing again, and it makes me suspicious most of the time I hear something like that. I mean, one of my friends posted it on her Facebook page, and to me, that's innocent. But it's the ones that start up all sorts of political causes that all seem to have something to do with remembering 911. From the protesters of the Iraq war to the people who want to protest Obama's health care ideas, people have a horrible tendency to take these things too far and try to link them with nonsense.

911 was a horrible event. But the attempts to compare it to Pearl Harbor and other such ineffective comparisons actually diminish the impact of the event itself. Some superpower did not just launch an attack and wipe out our entire Pacific fleet as a surprise attack. No, some really bad, hateful people decided to default on their humanity and treat innocent people as victims of their stupid cause. Basically, we were acting like an isolationist superpower country that had just been woken up by some kid prodding us with a stick, when in reality we weren't all that isolationist; we were just somewhat clueless as to how to handle ourselves on the international stage. The world had changed a lot since the days of Vietnam, World War II and the Cold War, but we were still in that same mentality. People watched news shows about how US soldiers fought with other countries or combatants, but the common person had never been required to personally acknowledge that there are some bad people out there. 911 did just that, and unfortunately, the US went off half-cocked after that until its people woke up and realized what they were doing. Honestly, I don't blame them, but unfortunately hindsight only happens AFTER a series of events.

My worry is that this attention on particular dates will lead to what it tends to always lead to: More anger and more justifications for things that don't need to happen. When you focus that much energy on wanting to "remember" what happened on a specific date a year ago, or years ago, you fall into the trap of continuing aggression when that aggression may not be necessary any longer.

My fleeting hope is that if people want to continue to remember 911, they'll do it from the perspective of how we can make things better, not so that we look back at it as how we're still angry. And there's nothing wrong with memorial services for those who lost their lives from the unjust attacks. You just have to be cognizant that there are those in the crowd who would love to use such events for nefarious purposes, and quite often we don't recognize those moments until the ship has sailed and we're suddenly realizing what our grief has brought us.

World Without End by Ken Follett

2009-09-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

To tell the truth, I was anxiously awaiting the publication of this novel. I had read the previous book, Pillars of the Earth, and it goes down as one of the better books I've read during my lifetime. So, when I discovered Ken Follett was writing a sequel, I was extremely excited.

I managed to get the book in South Korea while I was there, so I have somewhat of a rarer edition (a small paperback rather than the much larger sized book they were selling here in the states for much more money). It's the same book, however, and it runs at 1025 pages. And there's so much greatness in it, too.

The story picks up where the last one left off, but several generations later. In the previous books, Tom the Builder had finally managed to build his cathedral, which was the goal of his entire life. In the sequel, the descendant of Tom is a young man named Merthin and his brother Ralph. The two brothers, a young girl named Caris who Merthin likes, and a peasant girl named Gwenda all go on a little journey into the woods where they come across a knight fighting for his life against heavily armed assailants. They step in and help the knight, who then reveals he's the holder of a secret letter that could bring down the kingdom. In order to hide out, he decides to leave his lord/lady's service and become a monk, hiding out in a priory for the rest of his life, knowing its his only chance at survival. His enemies will leave him alone as long as they realize that the letter will get out somehow if he should ever meet his death.

The story takes place over the lives of these four young characters as they grow up and constantly come at odds with each other, or become partners, or lovers, or mortal enemies. Merthin becomes a great builder, much like his ancestor (wanting to build the highest church in all of England), Caris becomes a great healer, and through a series of unexpected turns, one of the most powerful entities in Kingsbridge Priory, Ralph becomes a squire, and then a knight, and then an earl, who knows nothing but violence and an immoral exchange with the world, and Gwenda becomes the wife of a peasant man who is constantly at odds with Ralph, which leads to so many ups and downs throughout the rest of her life.

The story is very well written, very well researched, and brilliantly crafted. At one point, you think you know what's going to happen for the rest of the novel, and then something comes out of nowhere, but in that period of time, it seems so natural. The plague hits Europe during this time, and it becomes a character as well, constantly reappearing to reshape the landscape of the novel, changing a quiet village into a chaotic free for all area of horror and anarchy.

The book can be read without reading the first novel, but I'd honestly recommend reading Pillars of the Earth first, just because there are moments where knowing the old story kind of enhances the new story. Plus, the first book was brilliant. But I'll go out on a limb and say the second novel was just as powerful.

This is the kind of book that should eventually fall into the classics literature charts because of the scope of what it attempts to do. When I first read Pillars of the Earth, I was shocked that this came from the suspense author of Eye of the Needle and Key to Rebecca. I loved those books, but for such a different reason. I also read and disliked his The Modigliani Scandal, not realizing it was one of his first books, and even he admits "They are too short, however, the characters have no past and the action often moves too quickly for the reader to enjoy." He even predicted readers might be disappointed and write him negative letters. After reading that novel so long ago, I was so glad to see that even he admitted there were problems with that novel.

But World Without End is definitely one of his best. I highly recommend it, although it's one of those books, like War and Peace, where you won't be sitting down at 8am and finishing it before you go to bed. It took me a LONG time to read that one, but I'm happy that I did.

The Bear, the otter, and the fox: The Art of Deflection in Writing

2009-09-05T14:48:00.000-07:00

To those who have read James A. Michener’s Poland, the mention of a bear, otter and a fox might make complete sense. To those who have not read this wonderful book, it probably makes little sense. So, some explaining might be necessary.

You see, in politics today, politicians have become experts at a technique called deflection. Rather than focus on the issue at hand, they create an issue that seems much more important and then focus on it instead. Hopefully, this results in people forgetting about the original issue. Quite often, the secondary issue sounds important but has little ability to be resolved, like the infamous “War on Christmas”. Yeah, it sounds big and dangerous, but it’s really a paper tiger. Critics claimed that when President Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal started pointing towards impeachment hearings, suddenly there was a need for NATO to bomb an Eastern European country, and that was all the White House could talk about. So, deflection has been with us for awhile.

But when it comes to writing, it’s different. Some writers attempt deflection in genres like the mystery novel, where you believe that something is happening but eventually you realize it’s something completely different. However, Michener did something in Poland that few other authors have ever achieved, and few actually attempt.

In Poland, a noble family domesticates a bear, an otter and a fox, and these three animals live in harmony together. Meanwhile, huge events are taking place around them that involve political intrigue, military threats and epic squabbles between different families. Yet, the three animals live in peaceful harmony together. From the story’s perspective, any number of connections can be made between these animals and other entities both in the story and outside of it, but what’s most significant is how Michener handled this unlikely, triangular connection. If you read the story, you find yourself hating the continuous, repetitive story of the three animals living in harmony together. I remember getting really disturbed every time he got back to those three characters together, thinking, come on, get on with the story. And then, during a scene where soldiers are attacking the noble family that owns the animals, the family is killed, the animals act like domesticated animals and come to their rescue, and are killed one by one as they try to protect each other from men with guns. It is over in moments, and I remember being left with a nagging in my chest, saying, “You can’t do this! Not to them!”

It was such a brilliant technique that I have looked for it ever since, and even tried to include it in some of my own writing over the years. The author makes you hate a particular character by continuously droning on about that character and then with a sweep of a pen, they’re dead and gone. And it’s almost as if you need grief counseling to get over the shock of losing those characters that you came to hate so much but now realize how much you really needed them.

What I Learned from Computer Games About Foreign Policy and War

2009-08-30T12:46:00.001-07:00

In 1983 and 1985, two computer games emerged that created a buzz in what would be a continuous projection of foreign policy and war, in which computer games might simulate actual real world situations, eliminating the need to actually go to war to experience the effects of war. Before this, from the 1950s, with A.S. Douglas’s simulation of tic tac toe in 1952 and William Higginbotham’s infamous “Tennis for Two” in 1958, numerous games emerged that helped evolve the genre from mainframe systems to personal gaming systems in the 1970s and 1980s. However, it was Bruce Ketchledge’s 1983 game Geopolitique 1990 and Chris Crawford’s 1985 Balance of Power that really changed the industry in the eyes of potential foreign policy usage.

The two games were similar. You spent the majority of your time in negotiations between international powers, and in the end you ended up with a high score or thermonuclear war. The real difference between the two games was that Ketchledge’s game played out the nuclear war in all its 1983 pre-CGI glory while Crawford’s game ended with the prescient words of "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." As a player of that game when it first released, I can tell you that when you received that message, it had a much stronger impact than any computer graphic series of explosions ever could have.

What was unique about these series of games was that they used a series of negotiations with foreign entities that can now best be described as a tit for tat strategy, where you continue to reward your opponent until you achieve your goals. The difference was that the computer saw each negotiation as separate and distinctive, meaning that previous successful negotiations did not necessarily create a much more conducive environment for future negotiations. You had to treat each series of negotiations as unique and untied to anything else. The only exception is that negative steps in the negotiation process managed to lead to a much more hostile set of relations between your country and the one that might eventually be your nuclear opponent. It is a lot like negotiations with North Korea, to be honest. One mistake, and one set back, sets you back years, and the new series of negotiations pretty much start you up as if you’ve never been on a positive path before.

Since those series of games, there has been a belief in computer gaming circles that simulations can be designed in such a way that they might emulate the actions of real nations in the world. A number of games have been released that attempt to do just that. One well known entity has attempted to take a more historical approach, and it has been very successful, both in implementation and in sales as well. Sid Meier’s Civilization series takes a leader from the creation of a city to the development of an entire empire that can span the globe. The terrain used can be pretty much anything from barren wastelands to an actual excellent representation of the planet Earth. The game has gone through several sequels to itself, including the colonization of both the New World, and a planet of the star system Alpha Centauri. But what makes Civilization so unique is that even though it includes famous, and infamous, leaders of Earth history, any number of chances can change the entire course of one’s civilization.

Civilization IV is the latest in the series of this game, and there is something those who study foreign policy and war can recognize as an unexpected benefit. To explain this benefit, let me just tell a small story of a particular game I was playing.

In this game, I was the most powerful nation on the planet. There were ten or eleven strong opponents against me, representing all sorts of different civilizations, like Catherine of Russia and Lincoln of America, for example. In this scenario, I had gone to war against Catherine of Russia because of reasons that are not really important for this discussion, but at the end of the war, I managed to wipe out Russia’s civilization. This left me in a position of peace with the rest of the world, because Russia was my only real adversary for many game years of playing. However, something started to nag at me as I conducted peace with the rest of the world. I had developed this humongous army to finally wipe out the Russian empire, and now I was sitting on it, and it was doing nothing. I started to focus my economy on peacetime needs, and as I continued the years moving forward, that huge army that was now sitting there doing nothing just seemed like it was waiting for me to do something. Anything.

And isn’t this very much how the world is as well? After World War II, the United States was this behemoth of massive military proportions, and that military industrial complex ended up dictating a lot of our foreign policy from that point forward. It would not be a hard argument to make that we had this huge army that was just looking for some place to put it. Even today, with two wars having just been fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, the idea that this army needs to be used for something never escapes the thought process of those in power. An idle army is a scary entity for a lot of countries. Sometimes, an idle army is the reason a country collapses, or falls into civil war. There are so many scenarios that can go bad, yet in the United States, we ignore what has happened to so many other countries and throughout so much of history, often by stating, “well, that can’t happen here.”

A final lesson, at least for this essay, is that of the human factor. We often look at statistical projections and number projections and make determinations of economic circumstances, but quite often it’s frowned upon to do that with political behavior. Political science used to be a science where the belief was that projections are not part of the science, because anything can happen. However, more and more political scientists are becoming tied to statistical research so that it is not surprising that a lot of foreign policy projections coming from political scientists, or political economists, also now start projecting future international behavior. Very dangerous, and quite often very wrong.

An example comes from a very interesting world domination game called SuperPower. It uses very real world information to make up the countries that come against you, but at some point in the game Belgium goes nuts and tries to take over the world. This example is why political scientists are wise in avoiding projections in international affairs that rely on statistical argumentation. The thing that is missing in the game is rationalization. The reason Belgium has not taken over the world is that people are involved, not numbers on a computer. Yet, when you crunch numbers with no concern for the thought processes of the people involved, you come up with all sorts of funky answers.

These are just some of the interesting connections that can be made between computer games and international relations. Unfortunately, scholars are very apprehensive about connecting themselves to a medium often considered the canvas of children. Therefore, it is very possible that many great insights can be achieved by computer games and the study of those games, but like in so many similar situations where history is doomed to repeat itself because no one remembered what happened before, we might be too proud to ever realize the answers were found in a place no one of importance will ever see.

The problems with anonymity, the Internet and being unknown

2009-08-21T18:43:00.001-07:00

A couple of stories came across my desk today that I found to be important. By the way, I don't really have a desk where stories come across it, or even a place where something like that would ever happen. I'm lucky if I can find a story after an exhaustive search on the Internet. But it sure sounds good saying it because I like to think I'm as important as those big guys that have stories that come across their desks. Anyway, so this series of stories came across my big, Oak desk today, forcing me to push aside my security briefings from the President so I could focus on them. What? It could happen. Really. Anyway...

The first of the stories was about a young woman who got outed on the Internet by telling all of her blog fans that she was who she was. We all know the story: Boy meets girl. Girl meets alien. Alien destroys most of Manhattan before we find out it was really just looking for a gas station. Oh wait, different story. Sorry. In this story, here, Virginia Montanez, was writing a blog that criticized the Mayor of Pittsburgh. People were starting to figure out who she was, so she outed herself to avoid having someone else out her first. Boy, she showed them! And then her job fired her. Turns out she worked for a nonprofit that probably didn't like being seen as the employers of someone who made fun of the mayor, and well, we know how that sort of thing works out.

Yesterday, after Kat and I finished fighting off ninjas that were trying to destroy Union City, we went to see the movie Julie and Julia. It was a cute movie about a young woman who decides to cook her way through Julia Child's famous cook book. I won't get into the details to avoid ruining the movie for you, but at some point the aliens do fight back and we end up with a great cliffhanger where evil supermonkeys save Paris by stopping the evil Dr. Massachusetts. Or something like that. Anyway, the movie itself was actually pretty good, but something about it really bothered me. It's based on a true story, from the perspective of the young woman who wrote the book/screenplay, and what bothers me is that she was an unsuccessful writer who couldn't get her book published and gave up on writing, but then somehow made it famous by writing a blog about cooking.

Now, I've been writing a blog for years now, and aside from two other people, my stuffed animals are the only ones who read it, and that's just what they tell me to avoid an awkward evening alone with me when I confront them about it. Part of the joke of the movie is how only her mother reads her blog, but then out of nowhere, suddenly she's got the most successful blog since Hitler blogged about his trip across Europe in the early 1940s.

How does this happen? Why do some people have the most popular blogs on the planet, yet the rest of us can't seem to get a reader even if we kidnap people and put them in front of a computer that only goes to my blog with its browser? Believe me. I tried it, and somehow they managed to find lesbian porn instead of my site, and I fixed the computer to ONLY go to my site. I just don't understand.

So, one of the things that bothered me was that the moral of the story seems to be that if you can't get published as a regular writer, do something outrageous and ridiculous, blog about it, and then you'll have a writing career. Does anyone else have a problem with that? I ask that figuratively because I realize that my stuffed animals are the only ones reading, and they just stare blankly, like they are too cool to give an answer of their own. Stupid stuffed animals and their "I'm better than you are" airs they put on!

Why I Was Not Meant for Academia

2009-08-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

I just received an email from the National Communications Association concerning its annual conference. I have to share a few paragraphs that were included for the big conference speech.

This year's Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, "Discursive Struggles of Relating," will be presented by Leslie A. Baxter, F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor at the University of Iowa on Thursday, November 12, 5:00 - 6:00pm. in the International Ballroom South at the Hilton Chicago.

Relating is a cacophony of disparate, often competing, discourses. Meaning-making emerges out of this dialogic agitation in which discourses bump up against each other in ongoing interplay. This view of relating is the central tenet of Relational Dialectics Theory, a theory of communication and relationships developed by Baxter and her colleagues and grounded in the philosophy of dialogism articulated in the 1930s by Russian literary and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Baxter will discuss the discursive struggles that animate relating in a variety of relationship types and will discuss, as well, some broader implications for how we can approach the study of communication from a dialogic lens.

It's this sort of thing really bites at me every time I think about the fact that I'm part of this academic community. First off, who are we trying to attract to this discipline if we keep making the discipline so ridiculously complicated sounding? One of the first lessons I learned as a writer is WRITE SO THE AUDIENCE UNDERSTANDS. One of the things that really gets on my nerves with academia is the desire for academics to sound really smart and really intelligent by using big 5 dollar words when dime and penny ones will work just as well.

What is this lecture about? Um, after reading it about ten times, I think it means that this professor, who studied a lot of stuff by a Russian professor named Bakhtin is going to talk about how difficult it is for people to talk to each other; essentially, if you talk to someone long enough, you start to develop meaning in your conversation. Yeah, of course it's difficult to talk to each other when you use words and sentences that nobody else understands!

I wrote a paper years ago that pretty much pissed off every academic reader who read it. It was entitled, "How Political Science Has Brought About the Demise of Political Science". Basically, it said that we tried so hard to be "science"-like that we made simple things complicated. In the end, we excluded other people from joining the discourse (conversation, for those who have not attended Dr. Baxter's lecture), because we wanted people to think we were really smart.

I'm starting to realize why I was never really meant to be an academic. I understand it all, and I love learning more about what we don't know, but I can't stand the posturing and the desire to be perceived as smart. I'm a Socratic (the early kind) who truly believes that not knowing something is so much more beneficial than claiming to know something. I guess that's why my calling was to be a writer. I like to communicate with people (not search for meaning-making through dialogic agitation). I like to be able to say what I want to say so that many people understand me, not just the people who work hours and hours trying to get through my sentences. To academics, I'd be somewhat of a luddite, if you interposed technology to be a desire to communicate, I guess. But what do I know?

A couple of pet peeves while looking for a job

2009-08-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

I won't get into the whole "I can't find a job and I'm pissed" thing, but I thought I would share some of those little nuances that really bring frustration in the whole search process. Some of the first ones we already know:

1. You have too much experience or education to work here.
So, in other words, at some point I ended up with so much experience and education that I must now crawl into a gutter, starve and then die. Seems kind of wrong. But that's just me, and I've got too much education, so that probably means I'm wrong.

2. The impossible request routine.
I love this one actually because it's just so wrong in so many ways. I was reading a job ad on Craigslist for someone with these words: Include a few sentences at the top as to why you feel you would be a good fit for our company. The only problem? There's no information in the ad whatsoever that even hints anything about the company. So, I'm thinking my response should be: "I really think I'm a good fit for your company because I'm very vague about myself, constantly living in a state of ambiguity so that no one knows anything about me. I think I would fit right in with you all mysterious people and your unknown company."

3. The Desire for Entry Level People Who Already Have Had the Job:
Yeah, I'm not kidding. What this category means is that they advertise for an entry level person to join their company. Then you open up the ad, read it and discover that what they're looking for is someone who has at least five or six years of previous experience already doing the exact same job. What part of "ENTRY LEVEL" does five or six years of previous experience cover? My favorite of this category was when Homeland Security first launched, and there was an ad for someone to fill a position that had NEVER existed before, but wanted five years previous experience in that exact same position. I mean, NO ONE ON EARTH ever had that position before. I wonder who lied his way through that interview with a straight face saying, "Oh yeah, I did this job before, even though it didn't exist, and has just been invented for the first time." It's like going back to Ma Bell back in the early days of telephones and saying that you are an expert at videoconferencing.

Okay, enough of my gripe for today. I'll go sleep off the rest of the night in this gutter I just found. It's my gutter. Everyone else stay away!

Why it is so easy for Republicans to Derail Obama's Health Care Agenda

2009-08-13T16:28:00.000-07:00

Some people may be amazed at how easily the Republicans are being able to derail Obama's health care agenda. Some people may think back to Hillary Care and wonder if the same thing is happening. In a word, yes. In several words, not really.

What is happening is something Democrats really need to understand if they're ever going to get any legislation of merit passed EVEN with a majority, and EVEN with a filibuster proof majority. What's amazing is that the Republicans aren't doing anything new; they're playing a card right out of mass communication theory, and they're doing it really well, even if the majority of THEM have no idea why what they're doing is really working.

What they're doing is so easy to do in this country because of one simple reason that so many people don't seem to understand. Getting people to say no is much easier than getting people to say yes. Many, MANY studies have been done on persuasive tactics, and one of the agreed-upon conclusions in so many of these studies is that if you want to be the victor in a debate over a complex issue, which health care is definitely a complex issue, choose the negative side. Republicans have become experts at negative campaigning now for decades. How many elections have we seen that weren't "vote for me" but "don't vote for the other guy"? It's become so successful that even Democrats are doing it, although I suspect that neither side realizes why it works; they're just glad it does.

It plays into the distrustful perspective of most Americans. We don't trust anyone, even though the majority of us would never admit that to anyone, including ourselves. This makes it so easy to take the negative side and then beat down the issue with ridiculousness because the beauty of such a tactic is what the health care people (and Proposition 8 people who wanted to stop the amendment against gay marriage in California) don't understand. You see, the trick is to make up ten ridiculous statements about the issue you want to defeat. The other side spends all of its energy defeating each one of them, and might successfully defeat 8 of the 10. But that's where the beauty comes in. It only takes ONE to defeat the issue, and when you cloak something into conspiracy clothing, the logical stuff can be defeated, but it will always leave ONE or TWO issues still clouding the issue. And that's what causes the negative to vote against it.

So, they can claim that health care reform is going to kill your grandma, and you can refute that by saying it's stupid, but they're still going to win because one person believes Obama wants single payer, even though the person might not even know what single payer is, and one other person thinks that doctors will quit the medical profession. Neither one of those things will likely happen, but you don't have to convince both people on both issues; only one has to slip through in the myriad of issues that you throw into the negative possibilities.

I'll let Democrats in on a little secret of how to negate the negative offensive. Responding to EACH allegation is only going to lead to defeat. It's like a debate team that spends all of its 1st affirmative time impacting their arguments with so many examples and arguments that the negative has to spend all of its time just making sure they don't forget to address the 10,000 arguments that were brought up. In debate, you collapse their arguments into similar sounding arguments so you can address 1 through 5 as one argument, 6-10 as another, and then so on. Otherwise, you end up collapsing from straight out exhaustion.

The response to the Republican campaign is not to appeal to the arguments, as the Democrats keep doing (hello being shouted down in your own town halls, Democratic leaders) but to do what I call appealing to the audience through a stronger narrative (or counter-narrative) so that the ground is never given to the other side to keep arguing on their own ground. A Cheshire cat offensive is never going to allow you to give a constructive counter-offensive, or even an adequate defensive, because it will keep changing its argument to make sure that you never have a chance to get back any ground.

What you have to do is show that their foundation never had merit to begin with, that the two of you are not even arguing the same dilemma. If the Republicans argue that the issue is "doctors quitting", the response is NOT to poll a bunch of doctors and look for some who say they won't quit. The response is something along the lines of "Insurance companies are evil and want to kill patients to save costs" or whatever. The point is: You have to be on the ground yourself making arguments, not trying to land on the battlefield that's already being waged in your name in countries you aren't fighting to protect.

There are two examples that show how this should be done (one obscure and one that shocks me that no one seems to even give it any attention). The first is my favorite example because I did work on it, and that's the 1991 August coup in the Soviet Union. Yeltsin beat the hardliners by showing that his vision of Russia's future was more believable than the one concocted by the Soviet hardliners. End of story: Yeltsin wins and hardliners get thrown out of government. The second is the actual election between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Hillary was trying to make the whole issue about a great past (the Clinton era) while Obama was trying to make the issue about a better future that would emerge with him at the helm. Obama's rhetoric defeated that of Clinton's no matter how hard she tried to make her brand stick. We got Obama as a result, and that narrative carried through to an election that was literally the second part of his offensive against Hillary. McCain never had a chance.

That's what's needed now. The Democrats, or the Obama team, needs to construct its own rhetoric of a positive future rather than let the Republicans win by running on negative campaigning, about the only thing they know how to do these days. Otherwise, we'll end up with no health care reform and thousands of dissertations about how no one saw it coming.

Living Without Race

2009-08-07T01:15:00.000-07:00

I'm bringing this up because I have somewhat of a unique perspective to this debate for a number of reasons. I'll just throw out a couple of situations to start.

1. I was one of the last 10 applicants chosen for an interview for a government funded outreach program for helping the homeless. During the interview process, I had the opportunity to observe some of the local homeless that took advantage of this organization's services, and they were present as 60 percent white, 30 percent African American and 10 percent of pretty much everyone else. What I found most interesting was that the staff working the government location was 100 percent African-American. Of the people being interviewed, 9 were African-American, and there was me. The three people in the round table that interviewed me were African-American. Surprisingly, I did not get the job.

2. A union organizing job. Got through the telephone screening with flying colors. In person, there was me, one of two white guys, and all women. Of the women, 80 percent were Hispanic and African-American. The staff making the decision consisted of three women, two of them of minority status. Surprisingly, the two white guys were not chosen to continue for the job.

3. During a phone call with another government job, I was told that my background was impressive, but I'd probably not be "comfortable" in the job environment. No further information could be obtained, other than that it was obvious the work environment was mostly minority status personnel.

One of the things that has always intrigued me at graduate school is that people immediately put you into categories based on knowing nothing about you, yet teach that you should never do that. During one class, we were discussing poverty. There were a few minority-identifying individuals in the group (although not of a minority living status in any way, shape or form these days) who actually got upset whenever anyone not of a minority status talked about poverty issues because as one African-American female graduate student stated, "You ain't never lived in my world." This came from someone with a great education who up until that moment, never used the word "ain't" in a single sentence. I remember being told that my living in a roach-infested home that we were evicted from didn't mean anything because I had no idea what it was like to be "black".

Recently, I got mugged by three African American men. I was actually told by someone to stop bringing up "African American men" because that's racist. That one kind of floored me because what I'm starting to see is a sense of blow back in that no one wants to talk about the bigger elephant in the room, which may actually be race, because that might cause people to have to talk about race, and I get the sense that as a white guy, I should NEVER be allowed to bring it up, unless I'm saying good things about minority races. I'm starting to wonder if there's a huge racial powder keg getting ready to explode and we keep adding fire to it because we don't want to run the risk of it exploding.

What's interesting is that my minority identifying friends from graduate school often don't want to discuss race or ethnicity at all because they've somehow managed to put it all behind them. Yet, those communities where the problems exist still exist and didn't go away because the lucky ones got out and managed to integrate themselves into more civil society. It's like the only people who want to talk about the problems are the ones who want to either "fight crime" by smashing down on anyone who lives in those areas, or rally the disenfranchised to fight against the system. In other words, no one actually seems all that interested in going to the specific communities and making those places better. The place where I was mugged actually has Joe Montana (of 49ers fame) trying to bring a huge industrial project to that area for community growth; it sounds like they're going to turn him down because his partner in business may have done some illegal things in the past. But no one else is trying to anything. And no one else seems to care.

I guess what bothers me the most is that I keep getting the sense that those who are of historically minority ethnicities and races realize that a discussion is necessary, but no one wants to have that discussion. And if you're a white male, you're seen as the problem, never part of the solution. Which in a melting pot society scares me, because nothing's melting anymore; we're becoming more and more segregated and pretending everything is all right because we're too scared to face up to the possibility there might actually be a problem that a speech can't easily solve.

In conclusion, I personally believe it IS possible to move past race, while being completely aware of the problems that occur because of people who focus on race (whether they be racists or people who can't get past it). What seems to happen is that we focus so much on the problems caused by focusing on race that we've become completely incapable of distancing ourselves from race. In other words, people want to keep invoking race as an important vehicle to be eliminated as a problem, but no one wants to eliminate the focusing on race as a problem. It's like we keep ending up with MORE race to deal with the desire to push away from focusing on race. M. King and R. Kennedy had it right, but we don't seem to focus on them anymore. Instead, the people discussing race and a future without race don't seem capable of ever allowing such a situation to ever happen.

Digging through the cobwebs of the writing addict...I mean attic

2009-08-06T16:35:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a personal project lately now that other things aren't falling into place (like a job and survivability...little things like that). Some of you know that I have over 100 short stories that I've written over the years, plus a number I've lost count of concerning articles, plays and other such stuff. So, I've been trying to nail down all of my short stories so I can start sending them back out again.

You see, I used to have a writing career. I really did. It was starting up and looking pretty good. Then I started dating a woman who I loved more than the world itself, and she kind of messed with my head by convincing me that I wasn't a good enough writer to be writing professionally. I was so in love with her that I actually believed her and stopped writing. Later on, I realized what had actually happened; she considered herself a writer, even though she had never written anything, and it bothered her that I was prolific and actually producing a lot of writing. At the time, she was too perfect in my mind for me to ever believe that something like this might be going on. Anyway, we don't need to watch network television to realize that sometimes guys are stupid. I certainly was.

Anyway, I was actually producing a lot of stuff back then, and I was actually becoming somewhat known. Editors would comment on my submissions, talking about previous publications of mine, and it just felt like it was only a matter of time. And then stupid Duane stopped writing and selling for over a decade. Yeah, really.

So over the last few years, I've been trying to relaunch my writing career. Two years ago, I finished what was obviously my hardest novel ever to write, which was a Greek epic foundation novel (that's also my first humorous novel as well). Then just recently, I completed the rewrite of a series called The Deck Const, which I intend to be writing for the rest of my life (just finished the first novel of the series, called Rumors of War).

Now, I'm going through agent rejection hell, which is really bizarre but part of the game. Most agents have switched to wanting to receive emails instead of letters, and while this might seem like a good thing because of the cost, I have this theory that people don't take email as seriously as they do regular mail, so when they get query letters, they really don't take them all that serious. So far, I have gotten the impression that most agents tend to take some kind of weird pleasure in automatically rejecting anything that comes into their email boxes. I get the impression that I have as much luck sending spam to a sex site than I do getting a writing job from an agent.

Anyway, so now I'm working on my old short stories, and it's like visiting old family because some of these stories were written two decades ago, back when I was a much different writer. Some are newer, like my latest short story "Precipice" and the previously published and award receiving "Buried Memories". But others are really old, like my very first short story, "Looking for Gold in a Lead-Lined World" which was a combination of humor, Dystopian science fiction and US-icon criticism. It's such an interesting little experiment to look over some of this old stuff and then think, "is that something I would write today?"

Anyway, just some thoughts as I quickly run out of money and embrace homelessness, insanity and glorious levels of depravity.

The problem with sites about "girls"

2009-08-04T16:13:00.000-07:00

When I was in South Korea, I don't remember where I got a link to it, but I followed a link to a site that is all about women in various dress, usually swimsuits. Basically, it's a paparazzi type of site that is all about showing famous women in various stages of undress. And the blogger who runs the site spends most of his time critiquing the women for how "hot" they are in particular pictures, and how hot they aren't based on the same kind of sophomoric criteria.

Now, maybe I'm just getting older, but I was just cruising that site earlier today, and I've discovered that I'm so uninterested in the site and everything it has to offer that I'm not even interested in the famous women that he tends to show nonstop on a daily basis. First off, I find myself somewhat ashamed that there are guys following a site like that to begin with, and even worse, I find myself ashamed that I've ever bothered to look at it myself.

What that site has managed to do for me is actually make me less respectful of the women who seem to go out of their way to build their careers off of pictures like that. I mean, there's a sense of me that thinks "wow, it's cool that Jessica Alba is really hot." When you're seeing nonstop pictures of her on a site like this, where it's VERY obvious that she's orchestrating her career by appearing in such stages of undress that will get picked up by this guy and other sites like his, you start to wonder why someone would demean herself to appear like this. Granted, her career is explosive, as is the careers of a lot of the other women who appear, but honestly, it seems so dirty and disgusting a way to make someone's living.

One other thing I've started to notice is that the more women that appear on sites like that, the more I start to feel that quite a few of them really aren't attractive but are exploiting themselves instead. An example is Megan Fox, who it can be argued has about zero talent for acting when it comes to actual acting. Yet, that page CONSTANTLY shows us more pictures of her puckering her lips and acting sexy. I find myself somewhat disgusted every time I see her. It's like we're rewarding the wrong people for the wrong things.

It's like the old idea of having posters of centerfolds, or whatever we call them nowadays. In the old days, every kid had the Farrah Fawcett poster. I'm sorry, but they did. And if you asked them why, not a single one would have told you it was because he respected her acting in Charlie's Angels because by the time that poster became famous, she was no longer even on the show. Not too long ago, a friend came over to my apartment in South Korea and asked me why I had a poster of Shania Twain. It's one of those hot posters of her. This one:

Now, when asked about it, I said I liked her music and respected her as a great entertainer. The woman just looked at me as if she didn't believe me. That's one of those things that happens because of the basic nature of why so many guys seem to have posters of women these days.

Sadly enough, that guy's site is a good reason why this sort of thing takes place as it does. This is the 21st century, and we're still seeing female actresses as hot models rather than as actresses. And part of the problem is the actresses themselves because they realize they have to do whatever they can to make a career as fast as they can, so they fall right into the familiar trappings and make things so that the next girl who comes after her is treated just as generically and unfairly as she was. It's why, to this day, I don't think we have more than half a dozen women who are ever taken seriously as actresses, although some try. You have the Meryl Streeps, Sandra Bullock and what used to be the career of Julia Roberts, but even those are rare box office draws, catering to a very specific market, like the romance crowd (especially for Bullock). Some of the great female actresses, like Uma Thurman rarely even get a mention, and are often left to make avant garde movies because no one else takes them seriously. So we end up with massive amounts of movies with Jessica Simpson, Megan Fox and (insert generic hot woman who has no talent). And the ones that do have some talent? They're left performing in movies that make fat, funny guys look cool.

You'd think something would have changed over the years, but I see it's still more of the same.

Finishing one project to start another

2009-08-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm going to try to ignore the depresso stuff and just get back to the writing stuff for now. I closed out my Facebook profile for awhile because it was getting really annoying to read the updates and to realize that things just aren't working out for me, and to be honest, I just don't want to deal with the drama that site tends to create and foster. So, enough with that.

I finished the edit for Rumors of War, and I've sent it out to an agent as a query in hopes of finding a potential representative. I've also sent out a batch of queries for the other novels as well. I figure nothing's going to happen if I just keep thinking about it rather than doing anything about it.

And that brings me to today's discussion: New projects. One of the things I've always disliked about writing is starting a new project. I don't mean the writing of a new story or novel, but beginning the preparation work for a new idea. Rumors of War was easy because the background for it was completed years ago. The Ameriad was easy because the novel itself was started half a decade ago. But now I find myself needing to start my next project, and I'm not sure what project it is I want to finish. I also realize that my time may be limited, so I have to do something and do it fast.

Unlike a lot of other meticulous authors, I suffer from what is called prolific writing. I write and I can't stop writing. You'd think that would be a good thing, but in reality it sometimes gets in the way of preparation because you want to be writing far more than you want to be preparing for the writing. And sometimes that preparation is so damn necessary. An example is my novel Thompson's Bounty. This is a novel about pirates and the Coast Guard. It also takes place in the 16th century. I wanted to just start writing it, but I knew nothing about sea travel, the Coast Guard or even pirates, unless you counted my many trips through the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland (before the movies were made). So I had to stop writing and actually do research, including taking a trip on a Coast Guard cutter to understand what a trip like that might be. I even got to watch them do a drug bust, which got incorporated into the story, although not as a majorly important part of the story.

That's where I am now. I have a couple of stories running through my head right now, including a rewrite of one of my earlier novels that has been rewritten about five times (starting as The Armageddon Project, to To Touch the Unicorn to its current state of 72 Hours in August). I also have a novel that has been fighting with me for years now called A Simple Life. It keeps coming back to me like a little kid that wants to go out and play but you never have time or the energy to entertain him. It's my first mainstream novel I want to write, but I'm not sure I'm ready for it yet, and even worse, I'm not sure I have enough time left to finish it.

So, that's where I am with my writing career. I don't talk about it much because it's been elusive for so many years now. I've tried so damn hard to make it happen, but it never does.

Thoughts and Ruminations

2009-07-31T22:17:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this mostly for myself rather than for anyone else. I'm figuring that I'm going to be closing out my web log soon as my renewal of my domain name is supposed to happen this coming month, and I don't really have the money to pay for it, so I'm figuring the blog is going to end up going into the ether forever soon. So I figured I'd get the last bit of juice out of it before giving it up forever.

Things haven't been working out well for me lately, which is not surprising. It just hasn't been one of those years. Nothing I can do about that.

I went for a one day screening for a job the other day, and it was somewhat of a no-brainer, but apparently that doesn't really mean anything because I didn't get that job. Nor have I been able to get any other job for that matter. It's like I'm living in this fake world where it keeps going on around me, but I'm not part of it. And no matter what I do, I can't become a part of it. I try, but it seems like life has pretty much just given up on me.

It's like one of those great epic stories (not that my story is all that epic) but I've often wondered what happens to the hero after the big story is over and there's no obvious sequel planned. Not everyone gets to be Indiana Jones, reliving new adventures over and over again because those adventures just seem to come to him. No, some of us got our one big grab at the brass ring and we've been holding on for air ever since, never realizing the oxygen supply was severely limited when we went on autopilot.

I've been working on finishing up some of my novels, so I can at least say I got something accomplished. I worked pretty hard on revamping my Rumors of War novel, which is the first part of an epic arch story that I've been planning for a good part of my adult life. It's unfortunate that I'll never get to finish that epic. But I suspected it was going to outlast me anyway. I spent most of the day rewriting major sections that needed work. I'm hoping to have it completed by tomorrow. Then I'll send it out to be rejected before allowing it to disappear in the ether with everything else.

I never succeeded in getting a decent agent to sell my novels, so most of them will disappear into the ether eventually, never to be seen again. I think I'm okay with that. Galileo kept his secret manuscripts to destroy at the end of his life, but I think that secretly he always wanted them to be published after he was gone. I'm not the same. To quote one of my published pseudonyms, Davina Marconis:

I’ve finished the poem I was going to write
For the world
And I’ve kept it hidden here.
But like Galileo’s secret manuscript,
I will keep it to destroy right before I die
Yes, my poem can change the world
But this world doesn’t deserve it.
Crito, Asclepius can have his cock.
But that’s a gift from Socrates
When I go, I’m leaving nothing
Not even the memory of the fields
Of Laramie
And uncertain beginnings.

Trying to find a reason

2009-07-23T17:57:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry I don't have a link to a story to have you read instead. This happened to me. Today. In the morning. On the way to BART to travel to get my medication at Costco.

You see, the medication thing has been a drama that should have a thread of its own. It involves all sorts of things like lack of health care, the incivility of dealing with Kaiser Permanente, the civility that exists in dark corners of Kaiser Permanente, and how come a pharmacy can't communicate with a hospital without adding all sorts of extra drama. Well, that was taken care of, and I was on my way to get my medication when I turned the corner of the main street to walk up the stairs that leads to South Hayward BART.

There were three African American young men sitting on the stairwell railing when I turned the corner (you really don't get a warning...you turn the corner and you're there). Before I could even acknowledge them, the first of them stepped forward and clocked me. I mean really hard. I've taken some pretty hard hits in my time, but this came from nowhere like Mike Tyson finally found an ear he hadn't bitten yet. Next thing I knew, the three of them were on top of me beating the living **** out of me. No kidding. I can hold my own with the best of them, but this was the first beat down I ever had where I got in ZERO hits in response. This continued on for about two minutes as they pretty much robbed me blind. I mean that figuratively because they took my glasses, smashing them as they did so. I didn't have much of value other than my iPod Touch, but they ripped that out of my ear (literally ripping the cord as I kept trying to fight them off). Basically, my fight consisted of making sure I wasn't killed rather than actually trying to get in a lick or two of my own. I'll be honest but most people I know would be in the hospital right now after what I went through.

Then they ran. I stumbled back up, realizing I couldn't see **** because of my lack of glasses. Finally, I realized I needed to get to the BART station and report this. Other people had watched them run by and after the danger was gone, they were nice enough to report that they had seen these guys run by them with my bag and belongings.

So, I spent the next half hour with BART police debating with Hayward Police as to who had jurisdiction over the crime. Never mind the bleeding veteran. Jurisdiction was a conversation that required no less than ten police officers. No one was actually looking for the suspects. They wanted to know who had to write up the report. But as I say this, I will admit that even with that complaint, they were friendly and cordial to me, so this isn't a miff against the police in any way. Just one of those legospaceman rants.

The sad thing is: I used to feel pretty safe on this path to BART. I only live about five blocks from BART. Now, I don't feel safe at all. My main concern is that I'm going to do what comes naturally and start carrying a knife with me, or something like that, and I'm going to take out one or more of these guys next time it happens, which knowing my luck will land me in prison for a good part of what's left of the rest of my life. But I don't know what else to do. I don't perceive getting any protection from the police. I can try fending them off hand to hand, but these guys were smart and knew EXACTLY when to ambush me (or anyone else for that matter). I doubt there's ever going to be a fair fight, which brings me back to the obvious again.

So, now that the incident is over, let's go back to the original question. Three young black men ambushed a white guy. Is this a racial thing? Is this a societal thing? How do we stop this sort of thing from happening to more people? More police? More education? What drives me nuts is that I don't think anyone, and I mean ANYONE is trying to solve this type of situation. Oh, don't get me wrong. Politicians are building careers on talking about it, and sheriffs are cementing their careers by talking about how they'll eradicate something that they never seem to eradicate. But what is there we can do aside from take the law into your own hands?

Oh, by the way, I wasn't kidding about what I said on most people probably being in the hospital after this. I didn't get out of it unscathed. Lots of blood and let's just say that I wouldn't be surprised if I have a concussion as my head feels like a jackhammer just went through it.

Health Care Is Only A Dream Away

2009-07-22T23:06:00.000-07:00

Health care is all the rage in the news these days. President Obama's health care plan is going to revitalize the entire country. Complacent doctors say it will destroy the very foundation of medicine in the country, causing all of us to become troglodytes who will have to turn to witch doctors to be cured if "socialized medicine" gets passed in this country. Love it. Hate it. Whatever. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and in reality, no one really cares.

What am I talking about? Well, it's one of those issues that people have a stake in because it's political. It defines your party identity, so people take sides based on what they believe in. Most people arguing, and most people who are being listened to, are people who already have health care, and they don't need it. It won't affect them; it will affect those who really have no voice, and to be honest, no one really wants to listen to them in the first place.

Last time we tried to have universal health care, or something like it, we ran into the personal story defense, which is one of those fake defenses that makes people think the sky is falling based on one or two examples. In other words, if ONE person is affected negatively, then they can throw all sorts of fear tactics around and the people will blindly turn out against it. That's what happened with the Harry and Louise defense. Basically, what happened was this fictitious husband and wife were played by two actors, and the Republican Party made them pretend that they were going to be completely destroyed by President Clinton's health care initiative. The plan failed and has been forever linked with the failure that is Hillary Clinton, even though she tried to put that behind her as she ran for president unsuccessfully.

Well, that same sort of thing is happening again, but it's turning into more noise than anything else. And what people don't realize is the true fear of universal health care this time around is that the new program may not actually do anything different than what we're already doing. In other words, we may spend billions of dollars, but in the end we'll have a little bit of the same of what we already have. Those in the middle, people like me, will still have no health care, and the only ones that qualify will be those with steady jobs or those who have figured out how to game the system, something most of us in the lower middle class have never been able to do.

So what about me? Why am I talking about this as if I'm in this strange category of people who have no health care? And why should someone like me really matter?

Well, if you watch the way events will unfold, people like me are unimportant, and no one really does care. I don't say that to seek sympathy, but to pass on that people do not care for those who shouldn't be in a bad situation; like a lot of our class arguments, people blame those who don't end up coming out on top, almost as if it is a failing in their own abilities that they are starving to death and dying from lack of proper medical care in the country that has been the shining beacon for so many others before in the past.

Yes, I'm one of those without health care. How did I get there? Well, I had health care when I was working full time for a hospital system. Then I went back to school to do graduate school, to be able to better myself and get a step up in the academic community. So I had health care while going to school. After school, I took a job in South Korea where I still had access to health care (universal health care in South Korea). Then things turned bad. The job I had stopped paying me, and my only recourse was to return to the United States without employment. Since then, I've been unable to find a job, so the little bit of money I had accumulated is slowly dwindling, and my lack of health care has started to make itself known by the fact that I take a number of medications for an ailment that is part of my medical history.

Not having health care is a very interesting dilemma to be in. It is like being one of those turtles that has overturned itself and cannot get back up on its feet again. You keep thrashing over and over again, hoping somehow that someone will notice you're there thrashing, but people just point and stare, sometimes commenting on how bad it is that the turtle has fallen on its shell and can't get up again. This continues until the turtle eventually dies of starvation because it can never make itself upright again.

That's how being without a job and health care is for someone that isn't comfortable being without a job and health care. I walked to BART today to catch a bus that leaves from there, and while I was there, I was accosted by no less than five beggars, asking me for money. That is something I told myself long ago that I would never do, and the activity disgusts me, but at the same time I'm starting to see these people as possibly smarter than I am. I mean, they're not pretending that they're going to turn things around; they realize they're screwed, and they just stand there at the BART station asking people for money. They gave up. And they're probably making more money per day than I stand a chance to anytime in the very near future. So who is really the foolish one here?

I went to Kaiser today because they used to be my old health care provider. It's amazing how unhelpful the system is when you're no longer one of the "members". All I really needed was a copy of my prescriptions so I could at least find out what medications I've been taking (unfortunately, the prescription information of mine was lost in transit, along with my military DD214 (proof I served) and tons of personal paperwork that might make this whole situation a bit easier). Member services at Kaiser is annoyingly rude to most of its members and people like me. They seem to see everyone that shows up as an antagonist, so the attitude is immediately one of hostility (you could sense it when the one woman at her desk kept lecturing people for not waiting until she said she was ready to see the next person...imagine being spoken to like a prisoner at a detention facility, and you get the impression of how it feels to be in need of information from that type of a gatekeeper).

This ended up putting me into the emergency room of Kaiser because that's the only place that will see you if you're not a member. And they're not like other emergency rooms. They want money, and lots of it. I'm not talking about small amounts of money. They wanted astronomical figures. An example is drugs. The drugs that I take cost about $600 for a month's supply from Kaiser Permanente. The same drugs for the same period of time, bought from Costco, would cost me $37.50. But that's where the fun begins, because just getting the prescription from Kaiser to Costco was one of the quests that would have made the computer game Myst proud (for those who do not know...as one of the first real puzzle games, that game confused the crap out of tons of computer players when it was first released, causing more than one computer screen to end up with a broken beer bottle sticking out of it by the end of the night).

Anyway, why am I talking about all of this? Well, the argument for universal health care is waging in Congress right now, and in the end the chances are pretty good that nothing is going to come of it. Oh, they'll probably pass something, but it will be what's called feel good legislation, where they can claim victory without actually doing anything. The taxpayers will spend many billions of dollars, a few people will get outrageously more wealthier than they already are, and nothing will change. Why is this? Well, because people in Congress already have the greatest health care you can possibly get. And they get it for life. They don't need it. So why should they care? Sure, it sounds good to seem like you care, but at the end of the day when they're arguing numbers, what they care about is getting re-elected and becoming more powerful. Those of us slipping through the cracks don't matter. We're irrelevant. We can't die fast enough.

So, here's where I say something that hopefully will get you to think (I am addressing this to the two stuffed animals of mine who make up the readership of my blog). There is massive dissatisfaction with the government today by more and more people are finding themselves out of work and losing some of the basics of everyday life, like health coverage. There is a tipping point to where the amount of people falling out of the system start to become opponents of the system. We're not there yet, but we're moving there. And the problem with that is, and the problem that has ALWAYS caused, is that when this antipathy starts to turn to anger, there's no warning. Nor is there any smart seer on a hill somewhere with his or her pulse on the attitude of these people. When they rise up, they sweep pretty much everything out of their way as a movement that takes a life of its own. We've seen it happen so many times in the proto-modern times, and we've started to see it happen a lot more since the post-communist world where groups of people have become important variables that cannot be tracked until they've already done their damage.

Part of the problem with Obama is that he was seen as some kind of messiah, a response to what was considered a horrific period for the liberal ideas of mainstream America. Well, he's starting to show himself to be as regular as any other person, and that momentum that brought him to power is starting to show lots of kinks in the armor. People said they wanted change, but that's not what they really wanted. They wanted prosperity as part of a desire for accountability. They're receiving neither, and nothing indicates that anything being done today is going to lead to just that. I wish I was wrong, but I'm not.

My problem with internships

2009-07-09T19:16:00.000-07:00

I understand that a lot of people need experience, and sometimes people in school can get a leg up by taking an internship, but I'm starting to see something that I don't think was originally intended in the whole internship market. Businesses have been using internships as free labor, and they're getting pretty blatant about it as well.

While going to the University of the Pacific, one of the requirements they implemented in the second year I was there in graduate school (which means it did not affect me) was that political communication people were required to fulfill an internship. That's easier said than done as quite often people just don't have that kind of time while working an assistantship during grad school. But some people had to do it, and they did. In that context, I can understand the value of an internship. For those studying political communication, some type of job that involves political communication is a great internship to give someone experience in their field.

It's AFTER this process that I start to wonder about the whole internship thing. I look at a lot of jobs on Craigslist, and one thing I've started to notice is that really crappy jobs are often advertised as internships. I'm talking about the kind of jobs where you won't learn anything other than how to file papers and answer a telephone. Yet, they're wanting people with strong qualifications before they'll "hire" them as an intern who doesn't get paid. Think about this for a second. An internship is supposed to help you gain experience in your field, so you can go on to get a good job in that field. However, these internships want you to already have extensive experience ALREADY in the field, which means you probably had to have had an internship to get the internship.

This reminds me of the episode of The Office where Michael Scott attends a career fair where he is looking for an intern for their business. He doesn't like the one kid who seems interested, and then realizes after a short amount of time that NO ONE wants to work for his paper company, especially when his internship is a free internship. So towards the end of the day, he finds himself desperate and tries to win back the one kid who he shunned (which doesn't succeed).

This is what the whole internship thing reminds me of because I keep seeing companies that want people with tons of experience before they'll allow you to do an internship for them. And they're crappy companies! I'm not talking about Lucas Film deciding to let you intern as a film director's assistant. I'm talking about some social program reject firm that really wants nothing but free labor from young people, and they have no huge name recognition either. What exactly do they offer someone other than MORE experience than they already have, which they achieved by doing the internship before them?

This has been one of my observations of a crappy behavior since looking for a job. Businesses see the economy as bad so they decide to fill their actual jobs with interns rather than employees, and they wonder why their companies don't seem to be bouncing back. If this sort of thing continues, the recession is going to be very depressive.

Um, teddy bears concealing drugs? That's the plot of one of my novels.

2009-07-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

I should have figured it would happen. One of my later novels, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, is essentially about this:

$30 Million Worth of Heroin Seized in the Bronx.
Traffickers Concealed Heroin Bags in "Build-A-Bear" Toys: 12 Arrested

Okay, it's not exactly that, but it's pretty close. That means that a good portion of my novel already happened in real life. Well, it's sort of different, but it's pretty hard to feel good about marketing a book when there's an article on the DEA site, here, that could be a synopsis of my novel.

Well, for the record: My novel doesn't have heroin in it. Nor did the teddy bears either. They had the formula for a new drug in it. And these guys were arrested for $30 Million. My criminals were pulling off a job that was worth $1 Billion. So it's a bit different. Plus, the bad guys were a splinter group of the CIA, and there was no DEA involvement at all (the novel was written before the DEA was doing anything more than going to Colombia and getting killed by drug lords).

And also, no teddy bears were harmed in the writing of my novel. Well, one of them. But he deserved it. Stupid teddy bear and hiding my diet Dr Pepper on me!

Anyhoo.

I left my heart in Bollywood

2009-06-28T16:27:00.001-07:00

Okay, this came out of nowhere, but I had to share it with you. I was contacted out of the blue by a somewhat infamous Bollywood director who is working on an avant garde film project. He had actually seen one of my plays a very long time ago (I won't even get into the implausibility of someone remembering a play from that long ago AND remembering the name of the author). Anyway, the play is one that Christie probably knows because she actually performed it with me during Forensics. It's called "Girls" and it is about a man who has undergone an experimental treatment to cure violent tendencies (he just happened to be a child abuser in prison for multiple crimes of that nature). Anyway, once cured, he is being released after his time has been completed in prison. One of his young victims decides that he never got the justice he deserved so tracks him down, picks him up in a bar, and plans to finish him off to pay him back for the secluded life she left him with, where she has been scared of interacting with other people for the last twenty years. Anyway, dark subject....

So, I was asked if I could turn this play into a screen play for a short bit in a larger Bollywood film. So, I did. And now it's in their hands. Because it's one of those experimental projects, I'll probably get mostly screen credit as payment, but it was something that took me a few hours, so it's not like there's a big loss.

Anyway, just thought I would share that now I'm going to be a big Bollywood writer. hehe

Article published in Artifact now online for viewing

2009-06-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

A copy of the issue of Artifact where Buried Memories was published is now online. You can see it here. This is the short story that won the Charles Clerc Award this year.

One of those things writers REALLY hate is now crossing over to programmers

2009-06-23T22:26:00.000-07:00

I was reading some advertisements for programming needs (people wanting to hire programmers), and I have to quote the exact wording (sorry if this is YOUR ad, but honestly, there's no excuse):

I have a great yet simple idea for an iphone app but dont have the time to learn how to develop an app with the iphone sdk.
If you are well versed with the iphone sdk, maybe you can help. I am willing to split the proceeds from the sale of the app, which I plan to sell for $2.99. 60% me 40% you.

Believe it or not, this is something the writing community has been plagued with for as long as there has been a writing community. I remember getting my first query from some "wannabe writer" who basically found out I was a writer and immediately had to say: "I have this great idea for a science fiction novel. Why don't I tell you the idea, you write the novel, and then we'll split the profit?" Now, think about that for a second. Is that really worth it to a writer? Do people honestly believe most dedicated writers don't have so many ideas already that they just don't have the time to write them out? I know that I have so many projects on the back burner that I will probably die long before I get to most of them. I certainly don't need Cousin Larry's "great idea" about a houseboat that can fly and has feelings.

That's what I'm starting to notice with the programmer gigs. Honestly, someone has a quirk of an idea and then wants a programmer to make it happen. And then like the quote I just included, the "idea guy" thinks he deserves 60 percent of the profit for having the idea. Honestly, who in the world would sign on for a stupid deal like that? Nobody. Except someone who has no ideas whatsoever, and if that person exists, he probably has very little programming skill available as well. It's different when it's a company that wants you to write code; that's an actual job with benefits. Some random guy with an idea is not a business executive making corporate decisions. It's some random guy with an idea who is too lazy to learn how to code for himself.

Part of what makes this so funny is that these people actually believe that the idea is all that is necessary without realizing how difficult it is to actually write a novel or to program an application to its fullest extent. The idea is often the easiest part. If you don't program or don't write, you'll probably never know that, which is why so many of them find they can't link up with the "right" people to do the job they want done for them.

Why we'll never get health care reform in the USA

2009-06-19T12:24:00.001-07:00

Right now, people are somewhat talking about health care in the United States. I mean, they're talking about it, even though they're probably not going to do anything about it. Really. In case you haven't figured it out, that's how politics works in the United States. We talk about things. We get outraged at things. And then we realize how hard it is to change the thing we're outraged about. So then we get indignant. And then we hear about something ELSE that gets us talking, outraged and then indignant, subsequently forgetting about the thing that we were first talking about. In case people don't realize it, and they do, but they just don't want to talk about it, we talked about, were outraged and then indignant about health care several times before we forgot about it and moved onto other things, like wars overseas, genocide in Somalia, anger about puppies being slaughtered and then outrage at how the Chinese may have cheated in the Olympics. And then we forgot all about all of these things and then started talking about John and Kate (whoever they are) and who might win American Idol this time around.

Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political hack, has an article about how we're outraged but no one is covering it. Well, they are covering it, but the problem is not involved in the coverage, but how it requires television to cover it, and honestly, talking about health care is boring to news people on television. If there's no fire to show pictures of, it turns into a bunch of talking heads complaining, and while that might get people going for a few hours on Fox News, the rest of the country turns that sort of thing off. While Fox News may like to talk about their great news ratings, even the BEST news ratings pales in comparison to the WB's worst prime time programming (okay, think they're calling themselves the CW now...hard to keep up with a TV station that has no one watching it).

So is this going to be a problem for health care? Of course it is. No one is covering it because it's not a great television story. If it's not a great television story, they can't guarantee news ratings. And if that's the case, don't expect to hear much about now. Now if some senator had an affair with a porn star, THAT'S news. But have that same senator talk about some common person in New Jersey who can't afford to have health care, and the rest of the country starts yawning before turning to some world wresting smackdown with big buff guys yelling at each other before they go to a commercial that sells us products to enhance our genitalia or grow back the missing hair on our scalp.

America is in dire need of health care reform. And not some fix it that doesn't fix anything but moves some money from insurance companies to congress members' pockets. The system has been broke for a very long time, and as long as we have to rely on the current form of media coverage, it's going to continue to break even further. The tough choices to be made won't be made because the people who need to make those choices have more to gain by doing nothing (they actually get reelected for doing nothing) than doing something (the other guys will knock them out of office if ANY chance is taken because the spin is always easier than trying to explain complex economics to the general voting public).

So, don't expect any solutions any time soon. Expect lots of bluster and lots of talking about the issues by people who won't do anything to change anything. Expect some legislation that pretends to do something big and may even be named THE HEALTH CARE SOLUTION but actually does nothing. Unfortunately, we here in the United States are not very good at reading the fine print. We're not very good at reading the actual print either. We're just good at believing we're making a difference by talking about and complaining about things.

Like I just did. Expect the solution to be as solvent as my article. It feels good to say it, but it still won't get us anywhere. But then, I'm not an elected leader. I'm just some kid with a computer.

Iran is like Russia in 1991 all over again...or is that China in Tiannamen Square

2009-06-14T21:41:00.000-07:00

I use Facebook and Twitter. They're both innocuous programs that do their thing, but I never really give them more than a second thought. Well, right now in Iran, Twitter and Facebook appear to be the on the forefront of what could very be the start of that country's next revolution. Granted, the chances of a revolution actually happening there right now are slim, but stranger things have happened in history. When the US was funding the Shah of Iran, we had no idea there was a revolution coming around the corner either. That's the thing with revolutions; no one ever knows they're going to happen until they're already underway or practically over. Then, the people who didn't suspect it end up being the guys running from peasants with pitchforks and torches. The erudite people on the sidelines laugh and talk about how they saw it coming long ago, although they didn't really start talking about it until the revolution came and gone. Erudites are like that a lot. I'm surprised more peasants don't run them out of town, too.

Anyway, the people of Iran right now are protesting alleged irregularities of an election that just took place. Ahmadenijad claimed victory, but then so did Mousavi. The difference is: Ahmadenijad has the support of the ayatollahs and clerics, and Mousavi is seen by them as a risk. The people are very much behind Mousavi, and they're getting pissed that it feels like the election was stolen (they're claiming Ahmadenijad received 2/3's of the vote to 1/3 for Mousavi). The numbers just aren't adding up for them.

The Iranian government has now responded by cutting off contact with all western journalists, sending in shock troops to raid anyone that might dare to protest or support anyone who is not considered an insider, and universities are being invaded by soldiers/police as well.

Strangely enough, the only signals getting out from the protesters are through Twitter and Facebook. Facebook is being shut down in most cases, but people are still succeeding in communicating revolutionary thought and actions through Twitter. Those of us in the west who have given up on Twitter as an Entertainment Tonight sort of information service are starting to realize that quite often, the revolution is broadcast through the least expected method and technology. In the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union, Yeltsin's message was transmitted to the population through copy machines and fax machines, even though the government had control of the "real" avenues of message distribution. That "old technology" managed to take down the empire while it was trying to force its control over the masses like so many previous revolutionary leaders had done before in the past. And don't get me started on the Chinese of Tiannamen Square fame; perhaps their biggest mistake was that they didn't have a process of dissemination that was not completely controlled by the Communist state system.

But right now, revolution is on the cusp of taking place in Iran. It's unfortunate that the USA cannot support them without derailing the revolution itself; we still have a horrible reputation in that country for what we did in the 1950s, so this is one revolution those young people are going to have to fight for themselves, and then if they succeed, we can offer them all of the support they might need and want.

Or the revolution may die where it started. That's the interesting thing about these types of events. We have no way of truly knowing what is going to happen because we cannot predict the future like some Hari Seldon psychohistorian of Asimovian design. Instead, we have to let things play out and hope that we can respond with the best intentions, doing what's right rather than what we think might give us the upper hand. Part of the US's problem in the world today is that we have often pursued the latter rather than the former; that's what got us into the problem with Iran in the first place, by supporting the Shah because we thought it would give us the upper hand rather than support the idea of democracy for the people, something that makes more sense for a country that stands on ideals and beliefs of freedom for all.

So who knows what will happen tomorrow? All we can do is help pick up the trash and hope we do it right.

Observations on Race, Racism, Ethnicity and Racial/Ethnic Identity

2009-06-09T11:18:00.000-07:00

Having recently returned from South Korea, I would like to say for the record that that county is, in my opinion, one that has never gotten over the idea that diversity is something to be cherished rather than avoided. Most of the population is Asian, and most of that population is most definitely Korean. The only difference seen is what can be chalked up to the "foreigner" element. Foreigners are present in the country mainly for business, and every now and then that foreign element marries into the Korean population. And that's kind of where things start to get really murky.

First off, I'd like to focus on the foreigner population that is there for business as its main purpose. Twenty or so years ago, a foreigner in Korea was seen as a cherished encounter. Little kids would run up to the "wayguk" and follow him or her, often touching the person over and over, much to the befuddlement of the foreigner himself or herself. Strangers would walk up to that foreigner and attempt to speak English, to show that the language was learned at some time in the past. Other old timers would smile and speak Korean to the foreigner, often trying to engage in some kind of hand gestures that indicated that there was some comraderie that might exist between them.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and you'll find some of those artifacts still in the Korean repertoire, but you'll also find a segment of the population that has grown tired of foreigners, often picking fights with foreigners and then blaming those foreigners for "not understanding Korean culture". Quite a few legal cases here in Korea are decided against foreigners based on that factor alone. Not too long ago, a Samsung crane barge collided with a Hong Kong cargo ship the Heibi Spirit, causing a massive oil spill. The Samsung crane barge was the initiator of the disaster, but a Korean court decided that Samsung was not the guilty party, and the blame was laid on the victims of the actual accident. Subsequent responses to the court case were met with several accusations of "not understanding Korean culture."

Another one of those misunderstandings: Women. Apparently, foreigners don't understand Korean customs either. Quite often, a Korean male will become lustful towards a foreign female and do innocent little things like invade her home and try to have sex with her without her permission. When that woman goes to the police, she is often told that she just doesn't understand Korean custom. Well, they're right because recently there have been a few major cases where a woman has been sued by a major company because she breached her contract by having the crap beaten out of her by her boyfriend. This happened just a few days ago to an actress who committed suicide because she was upset over some insignificant little thing; apparently her representation management felt that she needed to sleep with every man they set her up with because that's part of Korean entertainment culture. To add insult to injury, the company that hired her as spokesperson sued her and won when they discovered she was seriously beaten by her estranged boyfriend. See, even the Korean women don't understand Korean culture.

But I could talk bad about Korea all day, and believe it or not, that's not what this post is about Instead, I wanted to talk about race itself. And it has very little to do with Korea. Korea just opened my eyes to focus on this sort of thing.

When I returned home last week, I started focusing a lot more on the differences between people. To start, I moved to Oakland, and in case you grew up in a cave, in Michigan, you can't go two feet in Oakland without realizing that this is a place that is a powder keg just waiting to go off. Oh, people deny that and go on with their daily lives, while walking quickly down some streets and running down others, knowing not to make eye contact with the regulars.

There's a huge racial and ethnic divide in Oakland and surrounding areas that seems really sad, mainly because most of us here all have the shared identity as Americans, or US residents/citizens. You would think that would mean something, but it only really means anything when you're faced with the dichotomy outside of the US environment. It's really bizarre when you think about it.

Let me explain. When I was in the service, the people who served with me represented all demographics that exist in the USA. Blacks, Caucasians, Asians, Hispanics, and any other ethnicity that comes to mind all served together as part of a bigger picture. Sure, in some units there were problems when the commanders didn't understand that they needed to teach that the unit was more important than shared other identities. I can tell you a couple of stories of a couple of infantry and engineer units I was in where it felt more like a prison population with separations of skinheads, African-Americans and Latinos meaning more than anything else. And then in other units, the idea of race and ethnicity meant nothing to anyone but an afterthought. Quite often, the leadership made the difference in how people perceived themselves. People never really figure these sorts of things out.

It's no different here in Oakland. Really. The leadership here is what makes the differences what they are. Whenever a person runs on a platform of race or ethnicity, that automatically sets up a dynamic that is going to transpose itself on the population itself. I'm reminded of the TV show, The Wire, where a white politician decides to run for mayor of Baltimore against an incumbent black mayor. He does it by pitting another African-American against him and ends up splitting the black vote. Although the show is fiction, it is a strong representation of some of the forces that really do work in politics in this country. There are places in this country where no white person can ever run for office and other places where no one of any ethnicity but white can ever achieve an elected position. And that's just sad.

As I've been taking the bus around town a lot these days, I find myself within the same company of a lot of people who don't look or sound like me. And unfortunately, this is not what the founding fathers wanted when they were hoping for a melting pot. What you discover in this kind of situation is that people who identify as something other than you tend to avoid you or see you as an adversary. Taking the bus in Oakland is interesting in the very idea that someone who may be open to race and ethnicity may also be taking his or her life into his own hands because not everyone else feels the same way. I was in a McDonald's yesterday reading the newspaper when I turned to a group of older black gentlemen behind me and asked them if they wanted my newspaper as I was leaving. This led to a friendly conversation between me and the four of them that stretched on for about five or ten minutes. We parted in a friendly manner, and as I was leaving, a younger black man who was sitting at the next table wandered over to them and said to the other men in an almost challenging way, "Who was that asshole?"

This is part of the problem I think that has plagued most forward thinkers. For those of us who have done higher education and the graduate school route, when you encounter someone from a marginalized demographic that you would not normally encounter in daily life there is no problem seeing that person as another equal person who contributes to the educational discourse. But outside of that environment, you're constantly encountering people who never learned to "play well with others" and when you end up trying to treat someone in a fair, friendly way, that doesn't always achieve positive results. In some cases, it can get you killed.

And that's the problem with where we are with race and ethnicity in the 21st century. The bigger part of the problem is that we're trained to not acknowledge it. We put things into categorical boxes like partisan behavior and pretend that these sorts of things don't happen. The Democratic Party is a good example of this. They are the party that incorporates the most of the previously marginalized, disenfranchised voters, but at the same time that party doesn't do a very good job of bringing people up to a common ground but instead takes great pains to contribute to the separate but equal placement we maintain between these entities. Again, we don't acknowledge this, but like in Lani Guinere's Tyranny of the Majority, she points out that a different kind of perspective is needed to move the races and ethnicities forward, but unfortunately the people who benefit from these differences, like old style Civil Rights leaders, also benefit from keeping those differences present. That's a problem that the Martin Luther King, Jr's never envisioned: What do you do with the civil rights organizations when you start to achieve equality, and even more important, how do you keep the identity of difference from overwhelming the organization so that it doesn't become a badge of honor rather than a bridge to cross? And that's the real problem. As long as someone has something to gain from separating races and ethnicities, what chance do we have of those same people casting off the cloak of power that their organizing brought about? It's similar to the whole communism in reality argument. Sure, communism sounds like a great idea, but how do you strip the state from the skeleton once you achieve the destruction of capitalism? You can't because those who put all their marbles in that game aren't capable of taking their marbles and claiming victory.

So, having returned home, I find myself in the middle of so many different people, and I want to stand up and shout how happy I am that I can embrace the idea of diversity with so many people. But I'm afraid to do so because if I make that much noise, someone's going to see me and probably kill me for speaking out in public in the middle of a crowd of people who are different than me.

Moving into the memory of the one who got away

2009-06-06T22:33:00.000-07:00

I've been having a really weird time lately. I moved in with a friend who is letting me stay with her until I get back on my feet (find another place...find another job), and that's cool. The problem is that she lives very, very close to where I once lived when I was seriously devoted to another woman. This woman was THE woman, and I was going to pretty much be spending the rest of my life with her. It's been about a decade now since we went separate ways, and I'll be honest that I never got over it.

Unfortunately, I'm now in the exact same location where I was ten years ago. I was at Grand Avenue today getting something to eat, and I realized I was in our old neck of the woods. I kept expecting her to just show up. Almost every woman that walked by seemed like it was her. And I'm pretty sure she doesn't even live there anymore.

I then walked down to the lake and sat by the water on one of the benches, drinking a soda. It was a beautiful day. And then I watched the people walk by and jog by. This was where we used to walk, every day. We walked around the lake every day and all I could think was this was the place, and she was probably going to be coming around the bend at any moment.

But she never did. Instead, it was just me and my soda. And lots of strangers.

I'm not sure I like where I'm located right now.

Customers Get in Our Way of Business....

2009-06-06T14:28:00.000-07:00

Living Situation
Since being back in the states, I've been living with a friend in Oakland. It's an okay situation, but at the same time I'm highly allergic to cats, and she has two cats (plus two others that hang out outside of the house). For some reason, animals really like me, and they jump up on my lap and want to hug me and rub against me and just be all kitten-like with me, and that's cool. But I'm highly allergic to them. So that doesn't go very well. I've been getting really sick, so I might have to find my own apartment sooner than I was planning.

Wifi...or why I am starting to hate younger people in trendy businesses
One of the things I find myself needing since being back is wifi. In Korea, it was everywhere, and finding it was not much of a chore. Here, in the states, it's become a consumer product so companies do everything they can to charge you for it. The old "go to Starbucks" for wifi doesn't seem to be the norm anymore. I've walked into a couple of Starbucks, and they just don't have it.

A Peet's Coffee Shop is located close to where I live, and I decided to go there because they advertise wifi on their window. I went in and decided to order a vanilla bean frappucino with carmel, and I really felt bad because I was making this poor employee guy actually break his routine of reading some magazine he was reading behind the counter. With his tiny goatee and $700 "I'm a rebel" haircut, he stared at me as if I was some piece of garbage that accidentally rolled in through the door. When I ordered, he sighed. Yeah, he actually did. It was like he was going way out of his way in order to serve me. I was friendly and polite the whole time, and that just seemed to make him into even more of an asshole.

When I finally set up my laptop to write, I tried to access the wifi, and of course, you need a password to do it. So I had to go back to Mr. Special and ask him for a password. Without speaking to me, because I was so obviously beneath him, he printed something out on the cash register, without looking at it, and without even looking at me, he handed me the paper without ever making eye contact. That's how I got wifi access at Peet's Coffee.

Trying to find a job
It's not been easy. I really need a job soon, and I can't seem to find a line on any. I apply and apply, but I get generic responses, if I get a response at all. This does not bode well for the future.

Current status of me (Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSA!)

2009-06-01T19:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I wrote after I mentioned that I was going to be leaving South Korea. Things were really bad, and I wasn't going to continue going down that path anymore. At some point, you have to step up and do something about things, or you have no excuse to complain. I took my own advice, and I'm home now.

I thought I'd take a few moments to talk about the journey back. As I was getting ready to go home (the day before), my old boss tried contacting me by cell phone, telling me that I can't leave because the new boss will eventually pay me. Eventually. Kind of like he was going to eventually pay me. Even though he never did. I said, okay, and continued my preparations for going back to the USA.

The night before leaving, I was in the Seoul Incheon Airport, and I purchased a private room in the sauna they have in the basement of the airport. My plan was to get some sleep for the night before leaving in the morning. Unfortunately, my spidey senses were activated all night, and it was hard to get any sleep. Plus, the place was noisier than I thought it would be, and the room across from me kept turning the lights on and off, which kept waking me up from any potential slumber. So, I didn't get any sleep. But oh well.

The next day, I flew out of Seoul to Beijing. It was a pretty short flight. I had a four hour layover in Beijing, which was a good thing because my arrival started a drama that appeared like it was never going to end. I take medication, and for some reason that medication activated the "drug dealer" sensors on the Chinese drug detection equipment. So, I was escorted to another room where they kept running my bags of medication (Koreans put your medication in daily bags for your "convenience" rather than put the stuff in bottles like in the states). So, they kept running this slip of paper over my bags and then running it into the detection machine, and each time this big yellow light would go off, with a big, fun buzzer that indicated that I was definitely a Colombian drug lord trying to sneak through China for some drug deal in Vietnam or wherever it is Colombian drug lords do business these days (I stopped reading the memos from Colombian Drug Lord Headquarters some time ago). So, the interrogation continued. So after a couple of hours of waterboarding, they realized why I wasn't revealing what I knew: I didn't understand Chinese. Yeah, no one spoke English, nor Spanish, nor German, nor Japanese, nor Korean, so I was limited to making hand puppets and trying to convince them that my little pinky was a drug-free shadow representation. After a while of this, I started going through the chain of command of Chinese interrogation officials. In the beginning, I dealt with some guys that were obviously way low on the chain of command, because they had very little bit of information on their epaulets. Then each new person had more stuff on his or hers. Finally, I think I was dealing with the General of the Chinese Army, because everyone else in the place seemed to think he was the most important person who ever lived. As all of my stuff was laid out on his assistant's desk, I decided I was going to take a new tactic in this drama: I was going to make his assistant my very best friend. So I started talking to him, saying all sorts of friendly things. I looked up at the room to realize how unique the architecture was, and I indicated that I had never seen anything like it before. He took great pleasure in trying to tell me in broken English how the building was constructed, and that it was one in three great buildings. For the record, it was actually pretty impressive. And during our half hour conversation, he finally asked me what I did for a living. So I said I was a teacher, and I made a gesture to show that I taught little kids. He smiled and then went back to his paperwork. When the big boss came back in, the assistant turned to him and started speaking to him in rapid Chinese (I assume it was Chinese, although for the record it could have been Klingon and I wouldn't have known the difference). It was quite an animated conversation. Then I saw my new friend make the same gesture I did to show that I taught little kids. The big boss stopped talking for a second, turned and looked at me and then said, "You are through here. Thank you. Go to your flight." And then I was released into the waiting area for the next two hours to wait for my flight to San Francisco.

The flight back was pretty uneventful. I sat next to a Chinese woman who was immigrating to the United States. She asked me whether she should choose to live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New Jersey. Yeah, New Jersey. I thought about her options. Los Angeles, even though it's where I grew up, existed in my memory because during the Rodney King riots the African-American population targeted the Korean-American population to kill them. I thought that's probably not where they should go. As for New Jersey...the only thing I knew about New Jersey was that was where Tony Soprano and his gang worked. So, I didn't think that was a good idea. I love San Francisco, and I think it is one of those places where everyone can fit in, no matter how hard you try not to. So I said there. She seemed to be leaning towards Los Angeles, but I gave my two cents.

Since being back, I've been looking for both a place to stay and a job. Neither is secured yet. I'm foolishly spending money I don't have to spend, but I'm home, and that is a true sign of being a real American, isn't it?

Where Do They Go From Here?

2009-06-01T18:08:00.001-07:00

L.A. County raids homeless camp under 10 Freeway

Okay, the article is pretty simple. LA County has invaded a homeless camp that is under one of their freeways. The point of the article indicates that Caltrans has been having trouble keeping the homeless out of the area, so the police raided it, and they're attempting to keep the homeless from returning to that particular area.

This is one of those things that often bothers me, as I'm apt to want to discuss the homeless and poverty, two similar issues that are often treated as targets of the day issues that quickly go away when the media has a more pressing story, like a wardrobe malfunction or a Britney Spears meltdown of some sorts.

This is the sort of thing that always fascinates me because once they clear this sort of place out and have no intentions of offering them alternative housing, which you know they won't, where do they go? What are they supposed to do now? These are the castoffs of human society who found a place where society didn't have to concern themselves with them. Now, they don't even have that. So, what's next? City and county programs have less and less money to house these people or to even offer them the medical and psychological help they probably need. Police are only interested in moving them along. City officials care nothing about them because they rarely participate as voters and have no political clout whatsoever. Charities have enough trouble meeting their own ends right now that they can't afford a new demographic to have to take care of.

So, after we "clean it up", what happens to them next? Do they become criminals and then become part of the criminal justice system? Do they give up on everything and commit suicide, so hopefully they are no longer on anyone's radar to have to take care of? Do they join the homeless on the streets, begging for money on corners and in train stations? Even more important: Does anyone even care?

My last unofficial day at work

2009-05-25T03:19:00.000-07:00

Today was probably the worst day of work I've had in a long time. Yesterday was great. Yesterday was the two classes with the debate kids, and like I said before, I really like these kids. We had a pretty good set of debates. There was one small problem, however. The previous week, one of the girls accidentally broke the handle off of the door where we hold the class, so you basically can't shut the door unless someone is inside the room. Well, of course, fate struck and the kids were outside of the room when one of them accidentally shut the door, locking all of their stuff inside. So, after I realized that there was no other way to get into the room, I had to do what I was trying to avoid, and that's break into the classroom using my skills at lock picking, one of the few skills that I tend not to bring up in public too often, even though it was taught to me by the government when I did what I used to do for the military. Anyway, I did it when one of the girls wasn't watching, and once I slipped into the classroom, I thought I got away with it, but she had actually seen everything and was so excited that her teacher could pick a lock REALLY FAST that she had to tell everyone. Well, I just said the government trained me and leave it at that. Of course, try telling something like that to kids.

Anyway, fast-forward a day and this was a new set of classes that I went in to teach. I was mostly tempted to just skip teaching, but to be honest, my apartment was roasting around that time, and my sole reason for going into work was because I was about to faint from heatstroke. Anyway, once at school, I listened to the new girl talking about how she's nervous about staying because she realizes the school is definitely not doing well and is probably going under.

It turns out there was some information in this conversation because I found out that she used to work for the guy that is now the big name in our school, some thirty-five or so year old Korean guy who "graduated from Harvard" who has been spending his entire life charging young mothers of young kids money to hear his motivational speeches about how he got accepted to Harvard. Granted, he hasn't done anything since Harvard, other than have motivational speeches, but that's his big schtick. Anyway, it turns out that the girl I'm working with once worked for this guy in the past. Turns out, he pays as well as the school does. He owes her a lot of money, and he "promised" to pay her, yet never got around to doing so. I'm starting to think that this kind of thing runs in this particular circle of school management.

So, I taught the first class, which was mainly one 6th grade student who is pretty smart and always interesting to communicate with. I like him, so that was okay. The second class is the class from Hell, which is with a bunch of kids that have no concern for learning and want to play games all day long. They yell and scream, and they started today's class by calling me all sorts of Korean insults, laughing because they were convinced I had no idea what they were saying. Then they'd pull the typical 10 year old tactic of "teacher, do you know what she say?" And after ten thousand renditions of that, imagine how fun that class was starting to be.

So, I just stood in front of them and let them go on. And on. And on. About half an hour into the class, they started trying to get me to actually start the lesson because when your teacher is standing in front of the room, leaning against the white board, just staring, it starts to get a bit uncomfortable. So I continued just standing there. They then found their page where they remembered we were and asked to start the class. I began the lesson, and immediately after, almost on cue, they started going nuts again. So, I stopped and said nothing. And just stared at them.

Then they started the name calling routine again. I looked at my watch and said: "Class is finished for today." And then I walked out. I said goodbye to the other two teachers (the young girl I've talked about here, and some guy I've never seen before), and then left. I told the secretary, who I've known the longest that she's probably not going to see me again, that I'm going to be flying Wednesday. She asked me if I wanted to talk to the big boss. I said no. The last time I talked to her, she promised me AGAIN that she was going to pay me on a certain date (the fifth time now), and I had no desire to go through another session of that. So, I said no and wished her well. She told me she was probably going to be quitting on Friday.

Then I went home and made myself some eggs for dinner. Not really a dinner kind of meal, but I wasn't feeling like having the usual kind of thing. It means I have nothing for breakfast tomorrow, but that's tomorrow, and I'll face down that demon when she comes.

The Other Victims in this Human Drama

2009-05-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

Thought I would take a step back from complaining about the bad job and talk about another variable that is taking place at work that doesn't actually affect me, but is right there in front of me. What I'm talking about is some of the other people who work with me who are now finding themselves as potential victims in this problematic situation. It's bad enough that I haven't been paid in quite some time, but I'm not the only one. Others have been working pretty long, too, and they're also in a position that isn't very tenable.

Well, a new girl started working just last week, and she's a sweet, innocent-appearing, Christian, Korean girl who seems like a very friendly person. I've had a few conversations with her, and she's only now starting to realize that things aren't as solid as she first imagined them. I could see her trying to put into words her concerns, while at the same time trying to verbally convince herself that things won't be that bad. When she would ask me what I thought, I avoided becoming the voice of dread and told her that perhaps she should talk to one of the Korean teachers, another woman who has been with the company for a few months. I said that perhaps she can give her a better perspective of how things are going, because I really didn't want to have her coming away from a conversation with me and my negativity, feeling even worse for the effort.

This is the kind of girl who is very trusting, and she's hoping very much that things will work out. At the same time, the manager (not the owner) is about to quit as well, because she hasn't been paid in a very long time. The main secretary is about to jump ship right behind her. The whole place is imploding on itself, and it's sad to see anyone else swept up in the disaster that is this place.

But I feel really bad about this new girl, mainly because she seems so nice, and she's in a precarious situation where she probably needs to do something else. She told me that she came from a job where the previous boss told her that the ESL community is small, and that she shouldn't make waves (she may have not been paid completely at that job either) or she might find herself unable to ever find a job.

I find it truly sad that this industry allows this sort of behavior to take place and reinforces it through traditional feedback processing. I used to complain that I am stuck in this job because I'm legally not allowed to take another job in Korea, but these other teachers are just as stuck, because if they take another job, because they're allowed to by law, the industry itself punishes them for making waves and not just sticking it out until the boss decided he or she might be willing to pay a salary.

The manager asked me today if I'm going to be working on Sunday, realizing I'm probably going to be out of the country almost immediately because of this mess, and I said I would be there. She asked me why, as she couldn't see why I would loyally come in when I know I won't get paid. Well, on Sunday I teach debate to two groups of young kids who really like doing it. The classes are never a chore, and they're always interesting. Otherwise, I'd probably stay in a hotel near the airport and never teach another class here again. It's not because I'm being loyal or anything like that. I just like these kids, and I figure I'll at least give them one last debate class with me before I leave.

Alabama Police Officers on firing line over beating after high speed chase

2009-05-21T01:13:00.000-07:00

CNN's story is here. Much of the press in addition to CNN's coverage all seems to be about how police officers went over the line and beat a suspect who was unconscious at the time. Not surprisingly, this kind of story is common, and almost always the press treats it the same way: Shocked horror that police officers could be so callous and cruel in their actions to a citizen.

Yet, something always seems to be missing from the coverage. And I don't mean the opposite reaction, which is usually "the suspect had it coming because he/she should not have been resisting police like that" or something similar. And then the accusations go back and forth as both sides try to leverage some kind of higher moral ground over the other. No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something different that is missing.

And that's variable context. What I mean is other variables that aren't being considered in the bigger picture so that the issue doesn't always have to fall into the common camps of disagreement over a story like this one. I mean, it's a common issue, and it happens all of the time. Yet, the arguments wage almost on autopilot, as if the details aren't necessary. The argument is all that is required.

That's where I disagree. If we backtrack to a couple of other incidents, like an obscure one in Clay County of Missouri where a Kearney deputy was caught on camera beating a DUI suspect who led the deputy on a high speed chase. Does this incident sound familiar? It should if you just observed the Birmingham one that prompted this article.

Well, let's go back to a famous one, which is the Rodney King beating. We should all remember that incident where Rodney King was chased by a husband and wife Highway Patrol team that led to a brutal beating that was only discovered because a bystander happened to catch it all on film. This led to a huge riot after the exoneration of the officers by a jury of their peers. This also led to the infamous exclaim by Rodney King during the riot when he questioned, "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along?"

The reason I mention these incidents is not to rehash the whole idea of police brutality or suspect culpability but to point out the common variable in all of these circumstances. One variable seems to be a DUI factor, although the latest case in Birmingham is more of a drug involvement case rather than DUI involvement. This leaves one very important variable that is rarely discussed and that's the concept of excitation transfer theory.

Excitation transfer theory is one of those simple to understand communication/psychology concepts that occurs when someone has sustained some type of emotional impetus that remains in the person's body long enough to transfer over to the next emotional state the person finds himself/herself in. In the cases of a car chase, the excitation is the chase itself, where adrenalin rises, causing the person to become excited and agitated. Then when the suspect is caught, the excitation is still there, so it gets transferred to other actions, and quite often those other actions happen to emerge as a continuous beating.

A person in an emotionally detached manner would arrive at the apprehension state with faculties at full, yet an excited person would arrive ready to utilize this extra adrenalin that has been building up for actual use. And therefore, the beating occurs.

What is important here is that we in science already understand the condition a police officer is in at this point of the altercation, yet we never seem to do anything about it. A couple of years ago, the Chicago Police Department announced they were going to put tighter limits on police car chases. Unfortunately, public opinion has practically ended that from happening because it makes a police agency look weak if it announces it is going to let criminals go free rather than chase them.

The problem is that we have a no win situation because police officers are tasked with the obligation of getting the job done, but in order to do so, we put them into a situation that requires they subject themselves to an influence that leaves them vulnerable to natural passions. So what is the answer to this problem?

Well, better training is always used as the throw away response, but it is actually a viable answer. If police officers can be trained to recognize this excitation impulse within themselves, perhaps they might curtail it before it becomes an actual problem in the field. It might also help other officers recognize it in their fellow officers to keep them from making critical mistakes that might jeopardize careers and threaten the lives of citizens.

Other alternatives are those that Chicago was starting to recognize. They realized that there was a problem occurring, and it was more than just how police responded. Quite often, these car chases lead to accidents and death of officers, suspects and innocent civilians. None of those are ever to be desired by a police agency that is working in the best interests of everyone involved.

What does need to be done is an elimination of the usual suspects response that we always seem to get. There are more problems than the common responses, and unfortunately as long as these types of incidents yield only stereotypical responses, the problem will never go away, and we will continue to have to deal with the ramifications over and over again.

Discovering where I stand in the grand scheme of things in Korea

2009-05-20T23:31:00.000-07:00

I'm about to leave Korea. Things haven't worked out well here. I haven't been paid in so long that I don't remember when I was last paid. Well, I'll be leaving here next week, and I kept that open, thinking that all they had to do was try to catch up on my pay, and I'd stick it out. Well, in the grand scheme of things here, that's admitting I'm spineless, and therefore, leaves me open to further complications.

Let me explain. You see, I discovered through a conversation with a Korean teacher who was privy to a conversation with the big boss and her assistant manager where the big boss felt that she did not have to pay me because she didn't believe I had enough money to afford a plane ticket to leave. Yeah, I'm not kidding. The thought process she was using was that I'm helpless, stuck in Korea, and therefore there's no hurry to actually pay me. So, just because pay is several months behind is not a problem. The wayguk (foreigner) isn't going to leave because he has no way to leaving. Therefore, we can treat him as unfairly as we desire.

If this was happening back in the states, I'd quit immediately, find a new job and then move on from there. But I don't have that luxury here because I'm in a country across an ocean from my home. I don't even have the luxury of being able to claim my apartment as mine (it's "owned" by the boss who can probably kick me out if we ever come at odds with each other; I've heard of stories of people having to vacate their apartments in minutes, and sometimes having the doors locked on them with all of their stuff still inside).

So, when people ask me why I'm leaving, I would point at this complete lack of respect I've been receiving here from this job. Yeah, I could continue to work for free, but what person in his right mind would continue to do that. I mean, I'm as gullible as the next guy, but there comes a time when gullibility turns into exploitation. I'm a bit past that point.

Some people just aren't born to teach very young children

2009-05-19T01:07:00.000-07:00

Most people know my job has been going downhill for some time now. I won't go into the specifics again (it's all over my blog if you really want to read it, but just leave it at the fact that I'm not getting paid, and we're probably good to go), but yesterday definitely was a true nadir in my Korean teaching experiences.

First off, I'm really here to teach debate, and I have a solid group of students who participate on those days that I teach it (Saturday and Sunday). However, during the week, I've been required to teach English classes to fill time. Mostly, I've been teaching novel reading classes to students and every now and then a social studies class. It hasn't been that bad, but it hasn't been great either.

Well, we ended up with a new manager the other day, and she changed the curriculum completely. Part of the problem of being me here is that the mothers of these kids keep requesting me to teach classes (it may be because they like my teaching; it may be because they want the Caucasian guy teaching their Korean kids; or whatever). So, this new manager decided that I should be teaching reading, dictation and grammar instead of the usual novel classes. Well, the reading isn't that bad, and the grammar is pretty straightforward. But the class for dictation is a class of four students who are EXTREMELY young. Think fresh out of kindergarten and you get the age group. Think less mature than kindergarten and you get the mentality. So, I'm supposed to teach dictation to a group of kids that have no intentions of listening AT ALL. I ended up spending the last half hour of class fending off screaming kids yelling "We want ice cream!". Needless to say, I went home after work with my nerves so frayed that I don't think I will ever teach kids that age again, especially in a language they mostly don't understand.

That's what it's like to teach here on an almost constant basis. The kids don't want to learn; they're being forced into evening classes by their parents who want them to max the English portions of the TOEFL tests that they have to take in order to get into good schools YEARS from now. So the kids don't see a reason why they should be there, and they hold it personally against the teachers who are trying to teach them. And then to top it off, you have the mothers who have no teaching experience whatsoever constantly telling the teachers how they want the classes to be taught. Fortunately, I don't have to run into this part of the equation (the Korean teachers do, however), but there's always that sense that everything you do is being watched. All of the classes are on CCTV, so the parents often sit in the lobby watching the classes on the main computer, criticizing each teaching moment as it takes place.

That's the kind of atmosphere that I've been living in for the last 7 months or so. Now add the variable of "no pay at all" and you might understand why I'm heading to a major clash with this job.