Adventures in Bloggery

Choose Your Fears Wisely

2011-05-23T22:46:00.000-07:00

[Issue date 3/23/11]

As I write this it’s Friday morning in Seattle and on the West Coast of the United States all the way down past San Diego, everyone is bracing for the radioactive plume from the Fukushima meltdown, and I’m highly amused.

There was recently an earthquake in Japan that was quite significant and might be a reminder to West Coast Americans of some unpleasant realities attached to their choice of coast. But instead of thinking about those realities they prefer to dwell upon the hazards of being exposed to radiation released by a nuclear disaster from which they are more than 4000 miles removed.

In my day, we had what was called A-bomb and H-bomb testing. My government blew up whole islands in the Pacific and turned Nevada desert lands to glass so dweebs could read radiation meters and mark the results on clipboards. We loved it because we were advancing into the future, one mutation at a time. I was going to be Spiderman.

Seriously, no, we were scared out of our minds. But, guess what? Even when they blew up whole islands, only nearby Pacific islanders and a few sailors (ironically, Japanese sailors) who got in the way were hurt by it. Nobody 4000 miles away came down with radiation sickness.

So, I ask, why has everyone around here shifted their attention so quickly and fully from one humongous magnitude 9.0 earthquake and horrific tsunami to the far-distant effects of a nuclear disaster, which, even in the country it is happening in, if it were an earthquake, would rate only 7.0, 7.5, tops?

I’ve already answered that question. West Coast Americans know they are sitting on some real shifty real estate. It is human nature not to want to hear genuine bad news, even when you already know it. So instead of hearing the genuine bad news (which is, that were all overdue to experience our ceilings meet our floors and make loose-meat sandwiches of us), we’d prefer hearing false bad news. News that scares us without actually involving anything really happening.

I am torn by this. Part of me, “humanistic angel Wes,” says, “human nature is inherently good, so if people don’t want to think about the fact that the big subduction quake that’s 50 years late will render mass transit unnecessary by eliminating the ‘mass,’ I should celebrate that nature, and keep quiet about such things.”

Another part of me, “three ways a bastard Wes,” says, “Let’s put all this in perspective until grown men tearfully beg for a return to flat representative art.”

As always “three ways” wins.

Perspectively speaking, Seattleites are likely to experience less additional accumulated radiation this week than they would suffer from if they spent the entire summer vacationing in a brick house in Denver.

On the other hand, if the big subduction doozie happens, while it’s true that the increased proximity of stone and brick and airborne stone and brick dust might elevate your radiation levels three or four times higher (I’m half guessing because it doesn’t matter), it wouldn’t matter.

I’m so lucky I live two blocks north of the fault line on a hill that probably wasn’t here before the last time the earth rocked that much. So, when the earthquake we’re all trying not to think about happens, my neurons will probably be crushed before they can apprise my brain of the situation.

However, if my luck fails, I can lie on my back dying with the relief of knowing that the local fire station is sitting on the same hill as I am and will also be part of a new improved, bigger, hill, and I won’t be disturbed by any more annoying sirens from them.

Or, let’s say the hill drops out from under me and I’m down around sea level. Then, the earthquake will rearrange the bottom of Elliott Bay and send a nice big wave to fetch me from the offensive sirens. Either way, free at last.

You Can't Buy Objectivity

2011-05-23T22:34:00.000-07:00

[issue date 3/16/11]

I love liberalism. I love liberals. I married a liberal. Almost all of my best friends are liberals. But sometimes liberals can be horribly wrong. Let’s try to understand why!

A fantastic example of liberals off the deep end is seen in the current liberal hand-wringing over the fate of National Public Radio. I have had multitudinous liberal friends plea that I sign on to petitions to stop the federal defunding of NPR. This is wildly strange.

I won’t get started on the details of what defunding NPR really entails, such as the fact that NPR actually doesn’t have dedicated federal funding to speak of. We all know what we’re talking about is a principle of a thing. “Why, how dare they...”

Let’s visualize an average liberal and try to walk him through the decision whether to sign on to such a petition. For the sake of concreteness we should give our average liberal a name. My conservative friends clamor for “Ivan.” No offense intended, but, they’re all a bunch of out-of-touch freak buckets who think they’re reincarnations of Joe McCarthy or Roy Cohn. Like Reagan, they spent the 1980s in a delirium. They think The Rights of Man was written by a Russian. So I’ll call my average liberal “Steve” instead.

Steve keeps NPR on in the background at all times, only turning it down during Car Talk. Steve likes to get high while listening to Fresh Air. Steve has noticed that NPR news coverage has not been as liberal lately as it was during, say, the Carter Administration. But he clings to NPR anyway because it isn’t shrill conservative talk-radio à la Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

Someone comes racing up the road on a horse and shouts, “The Tea Baggers are coming, the Tea Baggers are coming,” and, “They’re marching on Washington and planning to withdraw government funding for NPR!” What do you do Steve?

At first Steve thinks, “Oh no, if the last remaining liberal radio channel is not funded by taxpayers, our political perspective and our very way of life is threatened! I must stop this!”

Steve is quick to adjust his reasoning and insists that he couldn’t support government funding of NPR because it is liberal -- he knows that would be wrong. He knows the taxpayers can’t be expected to support biased news. Instead, he insists, he wants NPR to continue to be subsidized because all the other channels are biased.

In other words, Steve’s position, in essence, is, NPR should be funded for not being conservatively biased. More precisely, he believes that the only radio we will have, if NPR loses government funding, will be entertainment radio or conservatively biased radio.

It’s easy to feel that fear and run with it, isn’t it? Sure it is. Let’s all breathe deep, and draw that fear in. Draw that fear in through your 5th Chakra, and now down deep to your first chakra, and now let’s bounce it, bounce it good and hard, and see if we can’t get it to blow your Crown Chakra clean off.

How realistic is Steve’s fear?

Who cares? The government doesn’t have any business funding a radio network just because you or Steve are afraid that unbiased radio won’t happen.

There is in fact no way, whatsoever, that continued government funding can maintain unbiased news at NPR. The fact that its funding comes from taxpayers can’t be a guarantee of objectivity.

We have to resist setting government priorities based on gut fears. That got us two wars and Homeland Security and a never ending budget crisis that is feeding conservative talk radio far more than the trickle of dollars NPR gets is worth.

On the other side, how stupid is it that conservatives would cut off funding for NPR on the grounds that a funding desperate NPR has gone begging for money from Middle Eastern sources? “Oh no, let’s not give them any more money, they’ve been begging.” Where have I heard that before?

It's Winning. Duh.

2011-03-09T21:05:00.000-08:00

The whole world loves an underdog...

Haha, that was your irony. The world does not. America especially does not. This country only cares about winners. Losers can drop dead.

There are deep historical and cultural reasons for this, having to do with George Washington’s false teeth, the Monroe Doctrine, the fact that they had photography already by the Civil War, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” that FDR died in office instead of on a ranch, and that we have people who seriously think Jesus loves Kansans more than Bedouins, even though they’re practically identical, except for the outfits, tents and camels. The same people can’t even name one Bedouin.

The Monroe Doctrine has had an important role in forming American attitudes about winning and losing.

Speaking of naming Bedouins. Here we go: Muammar el-Qaddafi? Moammar Kadafi? Moammar Gaddafi? Moammar Gadhafi? Muammar Gaddafi? Moamer Kadhafi? Muammar al-Qaddafi? Moammar Gaddafi? See, I can’t name one, either.

My point: America loves a winner, and how can you be a winner if nobody knows how to spell your name? You can’t get your trophy.

That’s why the Obama administration was so quick to back the sure Libyan winners-to-be, the non-Qaddafis, in spite of being so slow to come out for the non-Mubaraks in Egypt. It’s easy to tell that Kadhafi is a loser, but I can spell Mubarak, and he looks damn good in a suit, whereas Muammar in a suit looks like Michael Dukakis with shoulder pads.

How many times has the United States backed a dictator, just because there was no way he was going to be deposed?

DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, also illustrates my point. Two years ago President Obama was prepared to stand by DOMA to the bitter end. Why? Because it crawled out of the same alphabet soup Obama did? No! Because it didn’t look like it needed his help, that’s why.

For Obama to have opposed DOMA back then, he would have had to go on record as supporting what then would have been regarded as a lost cause. This being America, and not Vermont, his ratings would have plummeted.

But times have changed, and now DOMA is looking weak. There’s a truckload of independent legal challenges pending in courts and DOMA is taking one hit after another.

It violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, says one. KICK IN THE SHINS! It violates the Tenth Amendment, says another. TO THE HEAD! It falls outside Congress’ authority under the Spending Clause of the Constitution. GUT BLOW! By passing DOMA, Congress “overstepped its authority, undermined states' efforts to recognize marriages between same-sex couples, and codified an animus towards gay and lesbian people,” says another suit, kicking legal butt.

Now that DOMA is reeling against the ropes, Obama remembers he has better things to do with his lawyers than prop this loser up. So, when DOMA finally goes down for the count, our president will be on the winning side, sharing the cheers.

Learning to apply the theory to everyday problems:

As I write this, the Wisconsin State Assembly (their “House of Commons”) has passed Governor Walker’s budget which deprives most public workers of their collective bargaining rights. The law now goes to the Wisconsin State Senate (their “House of Lords”), where Democrats are fighting it tooth and nail from an undisclosed stairwell in a hotel in Chicago, a hundred and fifty miles away.

Can you guess which side the American people will take in this political battle?

Hint: In order to apply our theory, you need to know which side of the fight is going to be perceived as the “loser” side. You need to analyze which is more “loserly”, whether it’s to run away from a quorum, or to claim that collective bargaining rights have anything to do with balancing a budget in the first place.

For bonus points, find a way to change the result of your analysis by removing the Wisconsin Senate Democrats even further from the scene. What if they didn’t even exist? How would that make the unions look better?

Reaping the Consequences of Poor

2011-02-26T13:59:00.000-08:00

About a week before writing this, I was feeling more impoverished than usual. You know how it is: when you can’t pay your bills, your shoes have holes in them, and your credit card company tells you that if you keep paying off your balance at the current rate, it’ll be all paid off by yesterday -- meaning, after forever ends and time starts over again, and gets back to then. Roughly 50-85 billion years, or never, depending on how much dark matter there is in the universe.

“So,” I thought, “let’s get us some of that household energy assistance!”

That led to about 3 hours of me and Anitra “Other Household Member” Freeman studying the application process for federal LIHEAP energy assistance funds. Our conclusion at the end of those 3 hours was that the government doesn’t think we’re poor enough.

While that was disappointing to us, it provided us with new respect for the people who do qualify for LIHEAP funds, and how truly needy they must be. Whoa, that is some amazing poverty, people! Way to go!

The very next day, Obama announced his budget proposal that would cut funding to LIHEAP programs by over 2.5 billion dollars. Millions of households in America, representing approximately 3 per cent of the population, that are currently eligible to receive energy assistance, would be cut loose.

You can’t manage the political will to bring about an end to George Bush’s gift of tax breaks for the richest Americans, so they can keep the yacht industry afloat, but you can slash funds needed to help the poorest Americans have heat? OK, I see how you are, Obama.

No, wait, that’s not fair, is it? We bought health care reform by giving the opponents an extension to Bush’s tax cuts. Yay, we got watered down health care reform! But, you know what? The Republicans didn’t shake hands with us on the purchase, so they plan on taking the goods back, and keeping the extension.

That was muddled of me. Let’s look at the stupidity of these cuts from a different angle.

Consider those Predator Drones you keep hearing about. Like the one that wiped out an Afghan wedding party in 2007. Recently, the Air Force decided they weren’t deadly enough, so they would replace all their Predator Drones with newer Reaper Drones. (The old Predators will be sold at a discount to the Italians, to take out Berlusconi.) Each Reaper, at 10.5 million, costs more than twice what a Predator cost, and they want to buy over 250 of them over the next couple of years.

Our own people can go without heat next winter so that Air Force crews trained on arcade games, sitting in comfort in Florida, can kill more Afghans with the click of a mouse. Have you seen the ads? “It’s not science fiction.” All the excitement of war, and you get to go home to your wife and kids at the end of each shift, 1.4 miles away!

Oh, I get. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. So it’s all one big war, then, isn’t it?

Other ways it doesn’t pay to be poor:
That Ian Birk will not be charged for murder or manslaughter comes down to this 1986 footnote to the law "The legislature recognizes that RCW 9A.16.040 establishes a dual standard with respect to the use of deadly force by peace officers and private citizens... " stating that the lawmakers “really meant it” when they said police should be allowed to get off for murder almost all the time.

So any police officer can kill anyone so long as it can’t be proved to have been done out of malice. For example, let’s say you’re a cop, and you see a poor person wasting space. So long as it isn’t personal (you don’t have anything against that particular poor person, just poor people in general) you can fire away.

Exhibitionist Heaven

2011-02-18T19:02:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago some of us at Real Change were talking about how the rise of internet background-check services has hurt poor people. Years ago it was a pain to run background checks. If someone wanted to rent an apartment from you, you had to take their application materials to an agency run out of a trailer and hand it over to a guy named Rocky. You didn’t do it because Rocky smelled like cigarettes, stale peanuts, and three day old fish, and he charged too much.

But now, Rocky has a website so you don’t have to smell him, and his work is automated and uses semi-public internet resources, so the price is down around $30. The way the poor would-be renter gets screwed is that, with the background check affordable at all, it’s the renter who’s made to pay!

Good news! This intolerable situation will only last a few more years! Thanks to improving technology, the price of background checks will plummet so far, they’ll be given away free to anyone who has a computer and knows how to use Google!

“But Wes, how is that possible?” my detractors ask. Sneaky detractors always questioning me. Well, I’ll tell you. It’ll all be done with cameras, wires, connections, and computers, with some math thrown in.

By the time this column is printed, you’ll have had an opportunity to watch a massively parallel IBM computer named Watson play Jeopardy. I don’t know how well Watson will do, but I know he’ll outdo grandpa’s computer. He may not win against the human contestants, but he’s going to do better than a lot of people watching at home could do. Yet, Watson is self-contained. He’s not hooked up to an internet.

Meanwhile, the European Union, the United States of Europe, is funding a project to create a “robot” internet. I put the word robot in quotes because Watson is defined as a robot for the sake of this thing, called the RoboEarth project. Computers all over the world who are equipped to learn from experiences, like Watson, will be able to link up and share their growing knowledge about the world, and the humans in it, on their very own internet geared to their special interests and needs.

Meanwhile, face identification software is improving. It will soon be possible to upload a picture of someone, and tell your favorite search engine to retrieve all pictures that feature only that person and people who look just like them.

Finally, more and more cameras are being installed in public places, Several states are setting up their linked networks of surveillance cameras. But there’s nothing in the law preventing businesses and private citizens from connecting their own surveillance cameras to each other on the net, and every reason for companies that would like to track us all to support them doing so. So, got a surveillance camera? Earn some money just for leaving it on 24/7!

Put it all together, and you realize that it’s inevitable. The cost of the systems that track you will be paid by advertisers wanting to tailor ads to you.

Unless there are major legal barriers put in place (a constitutional amendment guaranteeing privacy would be a start in this country) you can expect as early as ten years from now that if you don’t remember where you were a week ago last Thursday at 3 PM, you’ll be able to able to find out by googling yourself. Switch to image search, and see what you were wearing. Modify the subject, and find out where the spouse was.

Computers will track you from one camera to the next. If you try to trick the computers by ducking into a port-a-potty and switch into a disguise, it won’t work, Superman, computers can count. “Duh-uh, where’d da other human go? Someone’s trying to trick me. Alert, alert! Oh there he is, with the red pantsies.”

And the good news is, it will all be free!

Tweet Like an Egyptian

2011-02-11T23:45:00.000-08:00

Above: A 1919 Egyptian uprising had a flag that clearly acknowledged the revolutionaries' debt to computers.

Like everyone else in the world I’ve been watching the events unfolding in Egypt with great concern. How can people be so cruel to one another? I’m referring, of course, to the shutdown of the internet and Twitter. It’s insidious.

We all know why it was done. The authorities felt besieged by revolutionaries. Naturally, they (the authorities) sought to deprive the revolutionaries of their power, so they unplugged them. I’m sure I would have done the same, if I were a dictatorial regime propped up by a rich foreign power, because I am also a walking moral vacuum, abhorred by nature.

That got me thinking, though. How would the history of the world been different if this sort of cruel drastic measure had been resorted to in the past?

For example, we’ve all heard of the American Revolution, and how, because of it, we live in George Washington State, instead of George William Frederick State, and we call ourselves Americans, after the continent, instead of British, after the fraction of the island. These are good things. But what would have happened had King George III done what Mubarak did, and cut off the colonists’ internet and Twitter?

One good thing: I’m sure that if they were cut off early enough the Boston Tea Party couldn’t have happened. They could never have pulled off that kind of organization without the aid of selectively distributed electronic communication. Consequently there would be no Tea Bagger Party today, which would be a relief. On the other hand, we wouldn’t know they could have existed, so we wouldn’t feel the relief, so we’d just complain about some other yahoos. Probably the Australians.

Then there’s the Declaration of Independence, which I learned in school was actually finished on MySpace, a sucky 18th Century predecessor of Facebook, on July 2, 1776, and only tweeted two days later. The British people were having their own problems and King George had already (this is real history!) shut down Twitter on their island. That’s why the British, including King George himself, didn’t know about the Declaration of Independence tweet until weeks later, when the ban was lifted and someone did a #revolution search.

That was what did happen. But if King George had shut down the internet and Twitter in the colonies that summer, the American colonists wouldn’t have been able to declare independence, so they wouldn’t know they were really having a revolution. No one would ever know they could pursue happiness, so we’d all be couch potatoes today.

No one would know what a “John Hancock” was. If you said to someone “put your John Hancock there,” they’d think you meant something dirty.

That’s just one minor revolution, hardly even the most serious one! What about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Velvet Revolution, the Velcro Revolution?

As we know now, without the internet and Twitter, none of those revolutions could have happened. Now I’m sure that some of you would say, good riddance to bad history. But you aren’t thinking how cool it was that all that went down. Just the French Revolution, for example, got us “Let them eat cake” and guillotines. Come on! That’s some cool s#*t!

Further hypotheticals to learn by:

It’s long been said that if the internet had never existed, children wouldn’t have learned violence from internet games. Discuss how the absence of violent tendencies among children would have affected history. First, pay attention to the Childrens’ Crusades, the development of the Mother Goose rhyming industry, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the world-wide stick and rock trade. Then, look away.

It’s also long been an established truism that without internet porn, men would never view women as sex objects. What would they have viewed as sex objects instead? List five possibilities and their relative likelihoods. Take into account the prevailing forms of agribusiness in ancient times and more recently, the rise of little tiny battery powered thingies.

Future Snark

2011-02-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

Whenever there are great occasions of public oration, I miss them. They always happen in prime-time, and I’m accustomed to averting my eyes during prime-time. In fact, I always arrange to sleep through prime-time.

Missing the oration means I don’t know everything that everyone else does. I know the words because they’re in the New York Times the next day, if the oration is anything to sneeze at. But I miss the nuanced delivery, the dramatic pauses, the turned up eyes, everything you need to really be fully informed in a country informed by appearances.

But we must do what we can. I shall now attempt to read Obama’s State of the Union address, as it appeared in last Wednesday’s New York Times. [Pause for slow reader.]

OK, let’s see, distinguished guests, fellow Americans, Boehner, rancor, shooting, contentious democracy, we’re great, yadda, yadda, we’re set apart as a nation (as opposed to what? -- as a broccoli?), we will move together because we must, but we have to do more, China, India, yadda.

Alright, here’s something. He says our country is built on an idea and that’s why our kids don’t just memorize equations, they answer questions like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I never put those things together before. So, it was our founding as a free republic that’s responsible for gnarly uncles asking endless stupid questions. Yeah, I can see that. It sure explains Uncle Ned. He never should have been free.

Next Obama’s telling us we have to win the future. Whenever someone points to something, I make a habit of glancing over my shoulder at what he’s pointing me away from. I guess it’s acceptable to lose the past if the future is still there to be won. I can switch to door number three.

Now here’s something else I did not know! I did not know this was a Sputnik moment! How did the new Sputnik get by me?

If I could see the Sputnik overhead maybe I could figure out how Obama gets from “What do you want to be when you grow up?” to “I want be one of the 80% of Americans riding in high-speed trains powered by 80% clean energy.” I don’t see that as much of a career, but then, maybe I just don’t know what the word “career” means. Is it like “careen?” What’s this 80% fetish?

What about my dream, that 80% of America be underwater, so I can get there by stolen rowboat?

Speaking of knowing things, we come to Obama’s first immediate concrete proposal, to continue income tax credits we already have for paying tuition. So that the people who can now afford to go to college can continue to afford to, until tuitions are raised again. A bold proposal.

After three decades of cuts in support for higher education, no change is progress we should all applaud.

He talks about bringing high-speed wireless to 98% of all Americans in 5 years, so that, among other things, students can take classes with a digital textbook. How about using that to crank the tuition down? Is that too much to ask?

How about a future in which 80% of adults have college educations that are fully paid off, so we don’t have a country of debtors?

Questions to propel further snark

Could the author of this column be any snarkier? Suggestion: come up with a snarky over-all assessment of the State of the Union Address that the author could have whipped out. Then, raise the snark level with a counter-snark of your own.

Reading comprehension: Is the author really snarking at Obama, or is he snarking at Americans for setting themselves up for these kinds of addresses, by their absurd expectations. Should every presidential address be a callback to Kennedy’s “Man on the Moon” address?

Obama said that at the time Sputnik was launched the science didn’t exist yet to go to the moon. Hello? Newton’s Laws?

You're Welcome, Now Give Us a Kiss

2011-01-27T02:26:00.000-08:00

My point this week: Eastern Washington should thank Seattle in writing for being so liberal.

See what I just did there? That’s a first! Fifteen years, and never before have I made my point in the first sentence! Sometimes I never get around to it at all!

I’m doing it now for two reasons. One, last week I opened with what I thought was an amusing misleading statement “Today’s topic is insanity”, and nobody got it. Two, recently I’ve been obsessed by something said to me 23 years ago. I was homeless then and a man I’ll call Luke Sidewalker had asked why, and I had given him four answers, the first three being impromptu jokes.

Luke, who had recently graduated in Advanced Pre-Modern Sociology, told me that my last reason, the true one, was false, because he had “learned” in Sociology Science 101 that people always say the truth in their first answer.

Not a sociology class; a sociology experiment.

I respectfully told him you can’t learn something that isn’t true, that sociology has yet to establish itself as a science, that sociologists don’t study whole people, they study half-formed college students because they make cheap plentiful guinea pigs, and that he was an idiot. But I have long pondered his words.

Mostly I’ve pondered, how many people are as stupid as Luke Sidewalker? How many really take every study ever generated by sociologists as gospel, without appreciating how much trickier it is to study people than atoms, and the tools aren’t there yet? Does diet cause such stupidity? Can we do a study?

But I digress. Last election, Washington State defied the national trend, re-electing Democrat Patty Murray over Republican contender Dino Rossi, and I spent hours on the internet trying to explain to various representatives of The Rest of The State, why there was a perfectly good reason that should have happened, even though only 9 counties went for Murray, and the other 30 went for Dino Rossi.

What looks like a failure of democracy is not, I said, because counties only report the votes, they don’t do the voting. The voting is done by people, and one-person-one-vote means if more people vote for one candidate than another, it’s not their fault that so many of them live in King County, which just happens to have 25% of the population of the state even though it’s only one county.

Contrast that with last Friday’s Seattle P-I headline: “King Co. pays for the rest of the state - is that fair?”

It doesn’t look fair! Our taxes make up 42% of the state’s income, but only 25% of the budget gets spent here! Wah!

However, as I have just now said, we’re 25% of the population, approximately, so the spending amount IS fair, on that basis. So what’s going on?

What’s going on is, King County is liberal. And liberals vote for liberal policies. Liberal policies are better. So the businesses here do better. So King County residents make more money. So they pay more in taxes.

More importantly, we’re liberal so we believe that’s exactly the way it should be! Let the wealthiest people pay the most, they that have the most to pay. Let everyone reap the benefits in accordance with their numbers and it will all work out for the best for all of us.

Now, a few conservatives happen to live in King County. For example, Luke Sidewalker lived in Eastern Wallingford, of all places. They might complain like this: “Hey, we King County-ers earned our money through hard work. Why should those the bare-foot children of Eastern Washington hippies, drunks, deadbeat dads, and other ne’er-do-wells get our money? They should earn their own!”

But most of us see the error in that reasoning. We know that our money will go to good use. It will be especially needed to raise the educational level of Eastern Washington, to the point where they could at least write that thank you note I mentioned at the beginning of this.

Above All, Please No Creepy Fake Smiles

2011-01-19T13:46:00.000-08:00

[We are up to date now. Reminder: these are my own versions, pretty much as submitted, with occasional graphic embellishments and added notes. The titles don't usually match.]

Today’s topic is insanity.

Ha, ha, that wasn’t very specific was it? Everything is insanity! The voices tell me so.

Seriously, an insane man recently killed some people while trying to kill a Congressperson, and this has been taken by many as a call to action. I don’t like what happened either, but honestly a lot of these calls to action are just nuts.

The idea that mental illness causes good people to do bad things is generally false. Mental illness most often causes good people to do good things that aren’t practical and not in their own best interests, or good things that aren’t efficient. Whereas, it causes bad people to be bad out in the open. Mental illness itself is morally neutral, like pneumonia.

When I was 12 I was visiting the house of another kid I’ll call “Charlie”. Charlie was the little brother of a former babysitter of mine. I hadn’t seen him in years. His parents begged my parents to get me to play with Charlie, because he was so lonely. His idea of playing that day was to hit me repeatedly with a stick, for half an hour, until I finally snatched it away from him, and broke it in ten pieces.

The parents, when notified of all this, sobbed, and said, “It all started when another boy threw a rock at Charlie’s head. He’s been mean like that ever since. That’s why he has no friends.”

Very sad, very tragic, very false. When I’d known Charlie before the tragic blow to his head, he was also a vicious jerk. He was just more efficient at it, and didn’t do anything so overt, so he could drag it out longer. All the blow to his head did was put him off his game. He lost his gift for creating deniability.

My mother was verbally abusive to people who visited her near her death. They excused her for it by saying it was “the brain tumor talking”. But she hadn’t had a talkative brain tumor 22 years earlier when she decided it would be fun to burn the back of my hand in one spot over and over again with a cigarette.

It’s all irrelevant until you start talking about prescriptions. The most popular prescription for the latest tragedy isn’t as bad as Homeland Security was for 9/11, but it’s just as illogical. We can’t be forcing ourselves to be civil just to keep from touching off a Jared Loughner.

It’s like saying, “we can’t integrate the Armed Services, Mr. Truman, it will touch off some violent racists, and there will be riots in the barracks!” Well, we did it anyway, there were riots, and anyone who says “I told you so,” give them a dirty look for me.

It’s not that we shouldn’t be civil, it’s that you can’t be civil for that reason. It isn’t a sustaining reason to be decent. You have to be decent and civil to begin with. Some of you aren’t, and you know precisely who you are. Don’t strain yourselves to act civil for the sake of public safety. We’ll all see through your phony civility, including the Jareds. Be civil for the sake of your own self-respect, or forget it.

Topical local applications

The typical Seattleite is always smiling and civil.

Most of you good readers live in the Greater Seattle area, AKA The Passive-Aggressive Capital of the World. Is this is a great place to observe phony civility in its natural state, or what? If you say it is, the teacher likes you. If you say “what,” the teacher smiles at you, says, “let’s get together sometime” and avoids you from then on.

As I write this, the state legislators debate eliminating programs that help pay for mental health treatment and the survival needs of the mentally ill. This is happening because state voters wouldn’t approve higher taxes for the rich, for fear that it would cut into their own chances to be rich one day. Who’s crazy in that picture?

If It's Monday, We're In Hell

2011-01-17T12:16:00.000-08:00

[from 1/12/10]

Here’s an expression I’m getting tired of hearing: “sign of the Apocalypse”. Now the End-Times are underway, do we really need to note that this, that, and everything else is a “sign of the Apocalypse”? Hey, it’s the End-Times, OK? If it’s morning, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. If it’s on the internet, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. If it’s Folgers, if it walks the walk, etc. Quit rubbing it in. We’ll all die and burn for eternity except the Christians (of the correct sect.) We get it, shut up.

I’m so over these End-Times. They started, as I’m sure you know, in the Summer of 1986, in the middle of Reagan’s second term. That was when the rapture occurred. My first thought, when Reagan and I weren’t rapted, was uh-oh, our lives are going to get way too interesting.

Well, they did. George Bush Sr., Iraq War I, Alzheimer’s, Clinton, Monica, Kosovo, Paul Schell, George Bush Jr., 9/11, Afghanistan War, Iraq War II, MySpace -- one daytime nightmare after another. Reagan didn’t survive it.

But now it’s just old. I’m sorry, I don’t have the attention span it takes to stay awake for this bore-fest. The real thing is as tedious as every end of the world movie I’ve ever walked out in the middle of.

The Bible totally over-hyped it. I thought birds were supposed to fall out of the sky everywhere at once. So far, what’s it been? Kentucky, Italy, and Sweden? That’s not everywhere. I’ve only been to one of those.

It turns out thousands of birds drop dead out of the sky, here and there, hill and dale, all the time, and have for hundreds of years. It just that before it didn’t get noticed as much as it does now that the world is ending.

A recently homeless man is now the spokesperson for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, while Bernie Madoff sits in prison. OK, that sign is exceptionally interesting, but not enough to sustain me.

I was fortunate that I missed one major sign of the Apocalypse, the reading of the US Constitution, except for the naughty bits, 30 words at a time, into the Congressional Record by the one third of Representatives who are able. I was busy doing something important, so I wasn’t at home in a zombie trance, glued to C-Span. Had I been, my innards -- bones, brain, and all -- would have liquified and spilled out my orifices, ruining my day.

What matters is, with a huge federal deficit hanging over us all, the Republican Party decided it was important for taxpayers paying Congresspeople’s salaries to see them demonstrate that they know the document (or most of it) that is the basis for their jobs. This proves that US Congressbeasts are indeed human with at least 2nd grade educations, and not horses, as they were (well, one of them was) the last time end-times were rumored. Hooray.

Locally, the Highway 99 tunnel project was officially handed over to the Dragados Company. (Dragados = Spanish for “pertaining to seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns,” an accurate description of a tunnel-borer.) This sign is simply annoying. Much like the collapse of the Minneapolis Metrodome. Ten years ago I might have cared. Now? Overdone. What isn’t collapsing, and what won’t be? Why should I have to keep track of every bit of it?

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” blah, blah. We only wished it was that simple. We know how to deal with mere anarchy. We’re talking massive cost overruns here.

An exercise by which to wait for your fiery plunge to eternal agony:

List ten signs of the Apocalypse that you have witnessed since Monday. You can do it. Been on a bus? In traffic? Read a newspaper? Write them large on separate paper and arrange them chaotically at your feet. Stare at them, and contemplate the next two or three years of your life.

Goodbye, supportive housing!

2011-01-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

[from 1/5/11]

Last week I mentioned that Anitra “Cosigner” Freeman and I have moved out from rooms where we have lived together for 13 years, into a one bedroom apartment in a different building. When I mention that the old place was supportive housing, and the new place is nonsupportive housing, some people raise their eyebrows. “Why, Wes & Anitra? Why would you give up all that warm fuzzy support?”

Was I the kind of kid who hated Teddy Bears? Did I stick pins in them and kick them down stairs? Is that why I reject other people’s earnest efforts to help me through life?

Well, yeah, maybe. I was the kind of kid who could spot the lie behind Teddy Bears. Why do Mommy and Daddy give you a Teddy Bear to hug? Because they don’t want you hugging them.

Those earnest efforts aren’t always what they seem. Let’s talk about what supportive housing looks like to someone like me, someone who hates Teddy Bears. As usual I may exaggerate here and there, for the sport of it.

I got into supportive housing because I was homeless and have PTSD. That’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for those of you who never heard of wars, but I didn’t get mine from Vietnam, I got mine from my parents. The Teddy Bear bastards.

Theory was, an agency would provide permanent housing and also support tailored to my specific needs as one whose emotional wiring has been whacked. They would have professionals on staff for me, who understood me. So, at least, was it presented to me at the time I was offered the place.

I may have missed something in the fine print. After all I was homeless and I just wanted off the street.

However, looking back, I really think the best support I got was help leaving, just this past month.

For example, how is it supportive for someone who has PTSD to subject him to three room invasions per month?

To start, we had one monthly inspection. Because we’re all psychos, you see, we had to be forced to majorly clean our rooms once a month, instead of every Spring and Fall like normal people do. OK, I could see that if we really were all psychos, but guess what? PTSD doesn’t impair your ability to clean. It impairs your ability to tolerate room invasions.

Old time fans of Real Change might remember that Dr. Wes here once dabbled in the graphic arts. This ended roughly 1998, around about the time I moved the art supplies into my room. I set up an easel, laying down old newspapers to protect the floor. The room invaders cried, “Clutter! Awwwk!” Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978. The easel had to be put away, the paints had to be put away, every month.

That and the woman upstairs screamed all night, and once even threw a chair through her unopened window, bringing glass and chair past my window to crash 3 stories below me, while I had flashbacks of Mommy screaming and torturing me. I complained for 2 years about the effect her disability was having on mine. She was finally evicted when staff decided she was too much for them to handle. I didn’t want her gone, I just wanted a quieter room, away from hers. So I could paint between inspections.

Then bed bugs invaded America, and we got an extra invasion per month because we had to be protected from bed bugs. Who’s the real bug in this room, I would ask.

Then we failed one annual inspection by Seattle Housing Authority, done by a retiring inspector who’d gone postal, and it was decided that to prevent that recurring the number of room inspections should increase by another 12, because by now they were just looking for ways to push my buttons?

I’m all for Housing First and supportive housing. But, can these agencies never learn that different people have different needs?

I Lie About Bricks

2011-01-17T12:07:00.000-08:00

[from 12/29/10]

This will be almost my worst column ever. Isn’t it good to know that now? That’s how I feel. Get it over with.

I have multiple excuses. There’s a world-wide recession going on. The Earth just turned on its axis. I’m writing this on Christmas Eve, and I’m being pummeled by Christmas music.

Worse, through all of that, I’m working at Real Change today. Real Change vendors live on their daily earnings so we can’t close the office two days in a row. Reality sucks. So I have to be here making sure the papers are available.

Worse than worse, through all that, Anitra “Ooo -- Let’s Keep This Pretty Brick Forever” Freeman and I have landed a new apartment together, and have been having to move out of our old studios. Thus, my life is now an endless repetition of putting Anitra bricks in milk crates, putting milk crates on shopping carts, and lugging shopping carts the 4 blocks uphill to the new digs. When I am not working at Real Change. Or writing. this. next. word. Anitra keeps thousands of painted bricks. I’m not lying one bit. Or did I just? Ha, ha! Yes.

With all that going on, I’m supposed to make some fun while drawing out one or two cogent comments reflecting upon politics, the environment, society, the condition of modern personhood, family values, and/or homelessness, without having a permanently debilitating emotional breakdown.

OK. Well. Let’s see. How about politics? What do you think of the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? How long have I been whinging on about that? Isn’t it great that I’ll stop now? That’s cogent. Note to Congress: Don’t any of you dare come around asking for a pat on the back for it. You all took too long.

Great. We’re making progress. Now, what can I say about the environment?

This reminds me of a true story. When I was 13 I had something they called “social studies” in what they called “Junior High School” at the time. I was put on a panel of students to make a group presentation to the class on the issue of nuclear fallout from nuclear weapons testing. My specific assignment in the group was to report on the dangers of Strontium-90 in the environment to people. I studied my topic to death.

My entire prepared presentation on Strontium-90: “Strontium-90 is a radioactive isotope of Strontium which has chemical properties similar to Calcium which is why the body absorbs much of it into bones where it is liable to cause bone cancer and leukemia.”

Then the teacher said, “Yes, go on. What happens then?”

“You die.”

That story is all I can think of to say about the environment at this time. Take it as allegorical in applying it to present conditions.

Speaking of present conditions, in human society news, I’m being told Lady Gaga is a guy. No way! Stop messing with me.

I don’t even know what “the condition of modern personhood” means, and past-Wes wrote it less than an hour ago. Past-Wes is always making trouble for me. I think he does drugs. Modern personhood indeed. What, like people have evolved just because we have computers?

Family values. Well, let’s see, a Seattle P-I story last week announced that “more than 21,000 homeless students go to school in Washington state,” an increase of 5% over the previous year. That can’t be good for the perpetuation of family values. Would somebody get on that right away? Thanks.

I just talked about homelessness and family values at the same time, so I get to tick both off the list! We’re done, except for a gratuitous exercise.

Exercise for the reader

Load up a shopping cart with two hundred pounds of bricks, or two hundred pounds of marshmallows, or a ten stone bag of cats. Push it uphill four blocks. Imagine you were homeless and that was all the belongings you had. Pretty realistic exercise, actually.

Gratuitous Annual Christmas References

2011-01-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

[from 12/22/10]

Let’s talk about a stupid sentence!

I heard this sentence on a stupid TV news show, uttered by a stupid “conservative” member of Congress: “You can’t balance budgets by taxing.” Whaaa?!

We don’t need to know who said that. We don’t want to get personal here at Adventures in Irony. We just want to laugh at the stupidity of stupid, stupid ideas. And this Dumbo’s idea is a doozy!

Let’s eliminate all our taxes then, and balance our budgets your way, “conservative” Dumbo! Start flapping your ears! Hey, everybody, clear the room! Elephant flapping his ears!

I’m sorry. Not only was that last comment entirely based on supposition, in that I don’t really know how the stupid “conservative” thinks budgets can be balanced without taxing, I also used a reference to a movie that 95% of my readers are too young to remember. I should have found a way to get my point across using Lady Gaga.

No, let me go back even before the flying elephant movie. Let’s go back to Joseph & Mary. That’s right. It’s Christmas. Here’s my gratuitous Christmas reference. Joseph & Mary knew all about taxes. They traveled by donkey 100 miles to pay their taxes in tax season, without a hotel reservation.

“So, what’s your point this time, Wes?” Well, I’ll tell you, Wes. Two thousand years ago the parents of JESUS didn’t have to be defeated in Congress to pay THEIR taxes, they paid them willingly, even when it meant riding a stinking donkey for over a week.

And how does all that fit in with this “conservative” label? How is balancing budgets using taxes some new-fangled liberal idea, when 2000 years ago the Romans were funding THEIR empire by taxing?

OK, let’s turn that observation around. How SHOULD the Romans have funded their Empire? Setting aside for the moment the notion that the Romans ought not to have had an empire, should they have funded it with bake sales? Rummage sales? Used book sales? Rock music benefits? Pledge drives? Subscriptions? “Your ad on this shield?” Selling naming rights to monuments?

I don’t know that they didn’t do all that and a lot more! The Romans, give credit where credit is due, were very creative. They invented ipso facto. They invented indoor heated flush toilets. They invented bat spit crazy politics. They were the real inventors of French fries, which are misnamed, as you all know, only they didn’t make them out of potatoes, they used parsnips. The French today call them “Panais frits” and make you wait an hour for them, then only bring two bites worth with a teaspoon of gravy on top.

But that’s beside the point! You can’t fund a whole empire charging a quarter quadrans per toilet use, or exporting fried parsnips to the Teutons. Even those and all the other tricks I’ve mentioned put together aren’t enough. Empires are very expensive.

So what’s it going to be, “conservatives”? Are we going to go so far back to the good old days that we don’t even have an empire? Seriously? Are we withdrawing from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Korean DMZ, our German bases, Diego Garcia, Okinawa, Kosovo?

Hell no, we won’t go. We never go. We’re going to be the Empire of a Thousand Years. So how do you fund an empire? How do you ALWAYS fund an empire? What’s the plain old normal way that all conservative governments that do things plain old-fashioned old normal ways use to fund an empire? They tax. Tax, tax and tax some more.

Going into Christmas time, or whatever you heathens call it, “End of the personal year” “No COLA Time”, “Unemployment”, let’s try to keep in mind that there could be no War on Christmas if there were no Christmas, and there’d be no Christmas without imperial tax collectors.

This is real conservatism: You balance budgets any way you can, and if that means raising taxes, you get on it. Grow up, people who want to call themselves conservatives.

All Men Are Smelly Rutty Ibexes

2011-01-17T11:58:00.000-08:00

[from 12/15/10]

Top ten Wikileaks revelations so far.

#10. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange favors Golden Trojans. Old joke recalled from college: what do you call a man who uses Golden Trojans? A. Dad. New joke for a post 9/11 world: What do you call a man who uses Golden Trojans? A. Surprising.

#9. All US State Department employees and dependents agree that Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is a ‘smelly rutting ibex.’ [Actually a mild family-friendly euphemism. The exact kinds of things they say about him can’t be repeated in front of impressionable children, because they’d just repeat it back to us endlessly, and spoil the fun of it.]

#8. That Hamid Karzai knows that he is a ‘smelly rutting ibex’, but he doesn’t feel that should keep him and the US apart. He is enjoying having ‘a dance’ with us.

#7. Iyyad Allawi, former US-appointed puppet leader of Iraq, begged us to invade Iran, at a time when we had already invaded two countries, including his, also at his insistence. We wrote him back a very polite letter, the gist of which was, “Get a life.”

#6. Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarak actually told US officials America should install our own dictator in Iraq once and for all, and forget this silly democracy business. At that time we told him we had Iyyad. Hosni said he had an uncle that would dictate for us for half what Iyyad was charging. We said, “no thanks,” money is no object, we just steal from the Iraqis.

#5. After a German of Lebanese descent was kidnapped, rendered to Afghanistan, and tortured under the direction of the CIA, the CIA discovered they had the wrong guy and released him, and he complained. Germany was all set to prosecute the CIA operatives involved in the kidnapping, then dropped the effort after one of our ambassadors told them the United States would spank Germany if they arrested any of them.

#4. While Germany was making us mad by wanting us to obey laws, a naughty judge in Spain was getting ready to prosecute no less than Alberto Gonzales, our attorney general, for allowing Spanish citizens to be tortured at Guantanamo. We sent Spain a very firm cable reminding them that children don’t tell their betters how to behave, and threatened to spank them, as well.

#3. Pakistan is providing safe havens for the Taliban. We should spank them. Oh, wait, they have nukes. Never mind that, then. But we’ll keep sending soldiers to Afghanistan to die, because otherwise the terrorists will have won.

#2. Hillary Clinton authorized spying on UN officials, including the Secretary General, in violation of international law that the United States has ratified. But let’s cut her some slack. After all, she’s married to Bill. She’s bound to be a little paranoid. We need to recognize, too, that paranoia is as much an ability as it is a dis-ability, and be accepting and celebratory of that fact.

#1 It’s not really a Wikileak, but the main thing we’ve learned from the whole affair is that Americans believe that the US government can withdraw freedom of the press from anyone merely by unilaterally declaring that they are not a journalist. Like all the other “revelations” from Wikileaks, this only surprises the inattentive. We already knew that the average American thinks that a citizen’s legal rights can be cancelled by arbitrarily being declared an enemy combatant. So, big whoop.

Nevertheless, Julian Assange and Co deserve awards, if only for proving to the rest of us that Pay Pal, Amazon.com, and MasterCard are also as cowardly as the German and Spanish governments, or as uncaring about freedom of speech and the rights of all the people of the world to know how much their governments violate their trust.

And now, a completely off-topic facetious remark. There’s a rumor Hillary Clinton advised Obama to compromise on continuing the Bush tax cuts for the rich. I’m sure she did, with his best interests at heart.

Goofy Is As Goofy Does

2011-01-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

[from 12/8/10]

Disneyfication of the world takes many forms.

I understand the impulse to Disneyfy. You want something done, but you don’t want to do it yourself, it’s too hard or too boring. On the other hand, you don’t want it done by the people who do it every day and have done it every day for years, because you don’t trust mere people. You’re a modern manager. You want it done by modern professionals. You call in Mickey Mouse.

[The above does not refer to the actual Disney Corporation or the actual Mickey Mouse. I am using them as metaphors.]

Illustration #1. Used to be when America was nation-building, we’d pick a spot and have our Army clear it of foreigners and funny-talkers, then have our Army Corps of Engineers build the nation we wanted. Now, we have to hand the nation building off to KBR and Halliburton.

Illustration #2. I am thankful to Teresa “With No ‘Aitch” Reeves for this one. Now that TSA employees themselves are complaining about having to grope travelers at airports, there’s talk of hiring outside professionals to do it. The possibilities make my head spin!

You know what they won’t do. SeaTac masseuses have been doing excellent work in this area for decades, with highly recommended happy endings. But TSA won’t hire them. They’ll hire Disney itself, and you’ll get a smelly old drunk in a Goofy suit sticking an over-sized gloved hand between your Fruit of your Looms and your looming fruit. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just predicting.

Or the job will be offered to clergy under the Faith Initiative, and you’ll come to think of it as part of the lingering Bush Legacy. In your pants, ha, ha, ha.

Illustration #3. What the Seattle Administration is talking about doing with Nickelsville.

The Nickelsville encampment has had as its goal a permanent site within the city for its own members to build permanent residential structures. The mayor’s office has come up with some potential sites. When one is chosen, what next?

The people residing in Nickelsville, the Nickelodeons, have always run their own affairs and done a fine job of it. But the city is talking about asking social service agencies submit proposals for the task of managing Nickelsville. They are seriously suggesting Disneyfying Nickelsville.

Even to suggest such a thing is truly insane. Nickelsville has been extremely successful as a self-run community. Its management structure is part of what it is, and it isn’t broken.

When Washington applied for statehood in the 1800s Congress required the people of this territory to come up with a constitution that was “not repugnant” to the US Constitution, and to generally respect the laws and contracts of pre-existing states. Aside from that, the settlers were expected to run their own affairs.

Perhaps that was a mistake. Maybe Congress and/or Benjamin Harrison should have called for proposals from social services agencies to manage the affairs of the new state. The Salvation Army, having formed in London in 1865 and being the biggest, most experienced social service agency of the day, in the entire world, would have surely got the job.

So instead of becoming the Soviet of Washington at the corner of the 47 Contiguous States, we would have become the only US state that was also a territory of an unestablished English church. I’m sure it would have worked out fine.

In fact, maybe we should go back and fix the mistake that was made 121 years ago. OK, probably there wouldn’t really be a lot of enthusiasm for having the Salvation Army run this state now, but maybe we can think of a good fit. I mean, the idea that people can govern themselves is a load of rot, isn’t it? We need to be managed by an organization with a track record.

I know, let’s turn Washington State over to Qatar! Second highest per capita GDP in the world, home to the 2022 FIFA World Cup!

Let's Be Swell!

2011-01-17T11:35:00.000-08:00

[from 12/1/10]

I think I have finally figured out my own country. For 61 years I have been trying to understand what has seemed at times as a death wish among my fellow countrypersons, at other times as a rather very-long-nap-time wish, at other times as a prolonged-stupidity wish. I now realize how wrong I’ve been.

Americans really are idealists in the truest sense. In the sense of wanting the ideal life, regardless of what it takes. It’s just that, the ideal American life is something we saw on television and in the movies.

The dawn of my awakening came when I saw the recent Seattle Times headline, “Washington drivers are spending less time in traffic,” along with the sentence further down, “People drove less because of economic recession, the state says.” My first thought was, “Wow, the state is smart today. Give the state a cookie!"

Then I thought, “Wait a minute, Wes” (I like to think to myself in the third-person, to keep in mind who I’m thinking to) “breezy traffic is the American Dream.” When has a James Bond Lotus or Aston Martin ever been stuck in traffic? I can’t even remember a traffic jam on Dragnet. That was set in Los Angeles! We’ve been taught to think that’s the way it should be!

Well, if that’s the way it should be, there should never be traffic congestion. So then, let’s bring that about. Let’s totally ignore the poor in our country. Pay them so little they can’t afford good food, much less drive to work. Take away health benefits and hope as many as possible are disabled and have to pay their gas money for oxygen instead of gasoline. If that doesn’t clear the roads, ship their jobs overseas.

And we’re doing it. The ideal American Dream Driving Experience, for all the drivers left. The day isn’t far off, when Paul Allen will have the highways to himself. I’m sure he’ll tell us all about it, how wonderful and freeing it feels.

It’s a little like the way we figured out how to solve the housing crisis. Kick everyone out of their homes. What crisis? But I digress.

The coolest thing we’re doing is rebooting the Korean War. The Korean War, as anyone who has seen M*A*S*H knows, was the ideal war. It was funny without being cloyingly sentimental. It was tragic-comical, just the way a war should be. It followed closely after the invention of Groucho glasses and the Tiki bar, which set the tone. Best of all, it never actually ended, so it was the Peter Pan, or the Saturday Night Live, of wars.

Don’t let anybody fool you. The Korean War isn’t restarting just because Kim Jongs are all nuts and because the North Koreans already have enough plutonium to do to Japan what we did, 8 times over.

The Korean War is restarting because America has always wanted it to restart. We’ve sat back and encouraged policies that would isolate North Korea economically and breed and feed nutty dictators there, and our passive-aggressive codependent diplomacy has trained North Korea to threaten us periodically to get concessions.

By the way, here’s a fun true fact for all you boys and girls: Kim Jong-il’s dead Dad Kim Il-sung is the incumbent Eternal President of North Korea. I think that sends a very clear message to the world, “Back off, we’ve been off our meds since 1994.”

Questions just to be asking questions

1. Suppose you think the author of this column is wrong. How wrong is he? Is he Jeopardy wrong? Is he Who Wants to be a Millionaire wrong? Or is he Gong Show wrong? Punctuate your answer with an appropriate sound effect. (If you can’t do the sound effect -- no credit for you! Wah wah.)

2. Estimate the number of Posthumous Medals of Honor it would take to get North Korea to surrender, first, assuming China enters the war on our side this time, and second, assuming they go with North Korea again. How long would you wait in line for that movie?

I Actually Wear a Nine and a Half

2011-01-17T11:23:00.000-08:00

[from 11/24/10]

Hello, Seattle Police department (SPD). Please meet Good Wes (GW) and Bad Wes (BW). GW and BW just want to talk to you for a few minutes, and address some feelings and concerns that they are having about you.

Good Wes: Nice to meet you, SPD. I’m a long time fan. I’d love to talk to you some time about the great work you do, but there’s just a little problem I’ve been having. You see, we write a column for Real Change, and we’d like to use it to write about other issues.

For example, the fact that Nickelsville, the homeless encampment, might settle into a long term site in SODO is great news to us, and we’d like to write about that. We’d also like to talk about misgivings we have about the process tending toward that result...

Bad Wes: SPD, DO YOU THINK WE HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN DRAG YOUR SORRY ASS IN HERE WEEK AFTER WEEK AND WASTE OUR HALF PAGE DESCRIBING YOUR PRECIOUS DUMPS?

GW: What my partner is referring to, is a tendency your people have of harming people who are not being a threat, and a tendency you have of being less than forthcoming about that kind of behavior.

Recently one of your people killed a man, and then you knowingly let a falsehood stand about the circumstances. This week it emerged one of your men kicked a suspect who was surrendering...

BW: I’M LOSING PATIENCE WITH YOU, GOT IT?

GW: Please forgive BW, he gets a little carried away. Understand, it’s not just the beatings and the killings that concern us. For instance, the beating, you know, was recorded, and you said the video was lost. Alright, alright then...

BW: B%LLSH*T! LET ME AT HIM!

GW: Now, now, he might be telling the truth...

BW: OR CRAPPING OUT HIS PIE-HOLE LIKE LAST WEEK!

GW: Alright then. But, getting back to the matter at hand. It then surfaced that another video was taken appearing to show your same man, the one doing the beating in the first video, assaulting a camera holder minutes after that other incident.

This comes as no surprise, but what bothers us is that the Seattle P-I had occasion to report “Asked to comment on the new video, [SPD] declined to view it, citing the existing investigation into the officer.” Really, SPD? Really? Because, you’re making it very hard to control my partner here...

BW: YOU WANT TO INVESTIGATE THE FACTS BUT YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE ANY FACTS THAT MIGHT AFFECT YOUR INVESTIGATING? ARE YOU F%&KING STUPID OR ARE YOU JUST COUNTING ON US BEING F%&KING STUPID?

GW: Please, please, settle down. Let me get back to our fundamental issues. As I have said, we’d rather not devote so much time and space to you, SPD. We want to return to our business.

We were looking forward this week in particular, to writing 666 words discussing the US external debt problem and its potential to increase US poverty, when you came around with your size 11s, and, uh, metaphorically, kicked our writing table out from under our pens...

BW: I GOT A METAPHORIC SIZE 11 OF MY OWN! BEND OVER, MOTHERF...

GW: Let’s not go there, BW. Let’s try to reason with Mr. SPD. Um, getting back to this beating, which occurred in October, almost a full month before the video was released to the public. The video shows a man, who has put his hands in the air to surrender, being kicked in the groin.

Does the SPD want all potential suspects to believe they will be beaten even if they surrender fully? Doesn’t that promote resistance to the police? I don’t know, I just think that’s something you need to be thinking about, SPD, while the ACLU calls for that federal investigation...

BW: MY PARTNER SAID, GET YOUR HEAD OUT YOUR A...

GW: Exactly. Thank you, and I hope I don’t see you here next week.

The Knife Hid

2011-01-17T11:18:00.000-08:00

[from 11/17/10]

Last week the Seattle Times reported that when the police arrived at the scene of the shooting of John T. Williams by Officer Ian Birk in late August, they found John T’s carving knife closed. I feel compelled to spend this column discussing this one small fact and its ramifications.

Actually, I tried to ease this topic off on other Real Change writers, but they were too clever to fall for my tactics. Everyone realizes that, as news goes, this is really just a two-line item. See my opening sentence. The rest is mainly, as I say, ramifications, and reporters don’t much care for ramifications, it turns out. So it got to be one of those, “Wes, you’re not a reporter, you do it” situations.

I have a problem: I feel an obligation to inject humor into everything, because this is supposed to be a humor column, and because I suck even more at non-humor. But finding humor is hard, when you’re fit to spit. Where exactly might the humor be in this situation?

It has to be hiding. Usually, if you don’t see it, it’s because you’re focused in too tightly. It might help me if I reflect on exactly where my outrage comes from.

Within the first two days the Police Department made a number of statements that implied that the shooting was justified. One police spokesman said the wood-carver approached Birk with his carving knife in his hand. This, we all assumed at the time, was based on Birk’s own account.

However, Acting Deputy Chief Nick Metz was also reported to have said that John T William’s carving knife was open. That sort of information would not have needed Birk’s testimony. The knife would have been recovered at the scene. So we, the public, were all led to believe that the knife was open.

We now find out that immediately after the shooting, a police investigator found the knife closed and pictures were taken of it.

There are two possibilities. Mr. Metz knew the knife was found closed and that it quite probably was closed when Williams was shot as it was a kind of locking knife not prone to close itself on a whim. Or, he didn’t know the knife was found closed.

If he knew the knife was found closed, he lied outright.

If he didn’t know the knife was found closed, nevertheless the investigators knew. Surely, as soon as he spoke wrongly about the condition of the knife, the investigators would have told Mr. Metz that he had misspoke, because we all know the police are not evil and don’t engage in mass cover ups.

Therefore it’s pretty certain that around about September 3, Acting Deputy Chief Nick Metz knew that the public had been misled regarding what was known about the state of William’s knife at the time of the shooting. So why did we not find out about having been misled until November 9?

There’s my problem. I’m focused too tightly on the fact of having been misled, and I’m assigning motives. I’m thinking, this Acting Deputy Chief thinks it’s not really a lie if you just don’t take it back when you find out it isn’t true. And this gives me the feeling that the leaders of my police department are personally pleased when they can find clever ways to lie to me, © Dr Wes. Which makes me, © Dr Wes, feel like I’m regarded as dirt.

I’ve found where some humor is! I’ve been growing all this outrage because I’ve been taking this whole thing way too personally! I need to look aside from my own personal feelings.

It’s not me that was shot to death for holding a folded carving knife in one hand and a board in the other, and then made out to be a villainous knife-wielding attacker.

It’s not me that’s since been lied to and regarded as dirt. It’s everybody but me! I don’t even subscribe to the Seattle Times!

Actually, I Was High On Cheeseburgers

2011-01-17T11:12:00.000-08:00

[from 11/10/10]

The history of elections, by me, © Dr. Wes Browning, would be a long list of poor-to-dismal elections, followed by one good one, followed by this last one. It’s not like I’m not used to disappointment. For example, I knew going into Carter vs Ford I had already lost, so, in a daze, I voted for a write-in candidate. I’ve forgotten who it was, but I think it was either the Ramones or a fireplug. Honestly, I was high.

But that was the 70s, and I’ve since learned it’s wrong to binge medicate. Kids, remember! Only use state approved pharmaceuticals under proper state approved supervision by a state licensed drug prescribing agent. Don’t end up like me.

We didn’t care for this last election. So we must look back on this experience and see what went wrong. Actually, we don’t really have to, but there’s this deadliney thing happening.

Anitra “No Closet Organizer” Freeman had an organized thought about the election. No matter what the Republicans said, all the American people heard was, “Hey honey, you know I’ll treat you good this time; I’ll never hurt you ever again, babe... “ and the American people cried and accepted the Republicans back, and agreed the beating they got from Bush and Co. had been their own fault.

That’s way better than the explanations I have, which are centered on stupid mistakes Democrats made. Oh well, here goes.

First there was this law called the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. This winning bill was passed with Democrats dropping balloons and taking full credit for every aspect of it, way back at the end of May 2009. Obama had been in office just 4 months, and the American people were still cutting him slack. It sounded wonderful. Credit card companies wouldn’t be able to ratchet rates up without warning anymore. It was called the Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights.

However, the law wouldn’t take effect until 9 months later, exactly. Nine months calls to mind morning sickness, vomiting, endless nausea, swelling, and “You did this to me you bastard! I’m never letting you touch me again!” That was exactly how the American people felt when all the credit card companies used the nine month extension to crank rates up by an average of 20% on everyone, regardless of credit history.

You could argue that the average cost of those increases for consumers for the coming year would be offset fourfold or more by the one-time economic stimulus payments most of us got -- but nobody argued that. Maybe that’s just as well, since we’ll be paying those higher credit card bills for years to come.

Death panels. All the Democrats had to do was frame this as a right to life issue. The whole point of that provision of the health care reform bill was to give patients more opportunities to decide for themselves if they would want the plug pulled on them and force doctors and hospitals to abide by the patients’ wishes. But the Democrats got “right to life” stuck in their craws. Were they afraid it would compromise their support of abortion to adopt that language? It would not have. It might have even helped on that front. In any case, you can’t win elections acting as if you’re opposed to life.

New Department: Predictions I can scrape by on!

The boss wants this column earlier from now until ever! So to keep topical, we’re going to talk more about what hasn’t happened yet!

This week’s prediction is that “Rescued Chilean miner” will become a permanent feature of our culture, joining all the other characters that made up the Village People, policeman, Indian, biker, construction worker, and GI, along with Grownup girls who fell in wells, and Outstandingly calm airline pilots under pressure.

I want to see a Survivors series with all these characters plus a Crushed Democrat competing at the lonely end of some tropical island I haven’t heard of yet.

Barbara Had the Holster I Needed

2011-01-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

[from 11/3/10]

Well, here we go again. I’m writing this Monday morning, the election is tomorrow for me and it’s at least a day ago for you! I hate it when I’m talking to somebody and they know more than I do! The only way I know to cope is to steer the conversation ever so subtly to something I know all about that you don’t.

Let’s talk about games I played when I was six! The games I have in mind are ones that have been rejected in much of our society, namely, shoot-em-up games.

In ‘55 and ‘56, not one person I knew was so civilized as to think it was too violent for kids with cap pistols and fake rifles and assault weapons to pretend to try to kill one another. We had basically three games -- Cops & Robbers, Cowboys & Indians, and War. War should have been Americans & Nazis, but had to be generic Good Guys & Bad Guys. “I’m not gonna be a Nazi! Oh, a Bad Guy? OK.”

What sticks in my mind was what happened when Barbara, the girl who lived downstairs, wanted to play. The only way the guys could allow a girl to play was to make her a noncombatant. But she had to play because I had the hots for her. So she was effectively made Doctor, although her title was Nurse.

Having Barbara be Nurse/Doctor meant each one of us could play more. When we were nearly fatally shot, which we always were, Barbara could fix us. This was done by kneeling beside the casualty, placing hands upon his stomach or chest or head, wherever it was he was experiencing agony, and uttering the words, “Fix, fix, fix, fix, fix...” Five times would usually do it. (Lesser wounds might only require two repetitions.)

There was also an interesting side discussion between Barbara and I about why she didn’t care whether she had a pistol, which was more or less life-changing for me, and made me want very badly to be nearly fatally shot in the groin area, but I’ve already said too much about that.

“What could this possibly have to do with anything that matters to those-of-us who know how the election turned out?” those-of-you might smugly ask.

I’ll tell you. This country, state, county, and city, are all messed up because of years of politicians fixing problems virtually by saying “fix, fix, fix” over and over again.

To get concrete about it, George Bush, who is slightly older than me, and certainly played many cowboys, spent more than 6 years fixing “terrorism” by cutting taxes for the rich and starting two wars. The theory, as you know, was: Cut taxes for the rich, and the economy gets better, everybody else does better (ha, ha, sure they do!), so the tax base improves and you actually end up with more in taxes from having spread all those great jobs around! It’s totally nuts! “Fix, fix, fix!”

It didn’t work. But guess what? The resulting mess is still there and somebody has to fix it. And what do you think they’re going to do about it? What are the odds they’re going to do anything better than saying “fix, fix”?

Another example: We just had a new terrorism scare. Two bombs equipped to detonate by cell phone were literally Fed Ex’ed from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago, and the only reason we stopped them was because somebody among the terrorists snitched in time.

An aspect of this attack that’s not getting much attention is that it demonstrates it’s now possible to Fed Ex bombs anywhere in the world and explode them by long distance phone calls. This technology was gleefully created and installed by your very own Department of Homeland Security and its predecessors, who wanted a way to track you wherever you took your mobile phone! “Fix, fix, fix!”

Good luck to the winners of the election! May they be real Doctors and not the play kind!

We Are Not Brad Pitt

2011-01-17T10:58:00.000-08:00

[from 10/27/10]

Having received a numerous accolade for last week’s History of Culture, I have decided to favor all with a History of Halloween this week. I began my research yesterday after dinner, so I should be finished by the end of my last paragraph.

There’s a lot of confusion about whether Halloween is a Pagan holiday or a Christian holiday. The name means “the day before All Saint’s Day,” which is the day Christians celebrate all the spare saints in the spare saint bin, all your Tom, Dick, and Harry saints. By that account it’s a Christian holiday.

But there’s also those who say Halloween is leftover from the Pagan Celtic holiday called Samhain. Samhain is a Gaelic word written with Gaelic spelling rules, so it’s not pronounced the way it looks. I believe it was pronounced “tooth decay” (silent final “n”.)

Samhain was much different from today’s Halloween, however. For example, there were no Jack-o-Lanterns carved from pumpkins. Instead they made Sean-o-Lanterns from hollowed out turnips. You probably think I’m kidding! We’re having fun now!

The Celtic year was divided between a dark half and a light half, with Samhain one dividing line. It was a time to let the dark and the dead mingle with the light and the living. That’s good reason to have people walking around pretending to be ghosts. It is not good reason to have people walking around being sexy cats, or dressed as packs of cigarettes, as Mario and Luigi, as an M&M, or as Karl Rove.

Samhain coincided with the turnip harvest. They had games like Bobbing for Turnips and Pin the Tail on the Turnip. By the end of Samhain, huge piles of turnips were set fire and people danced around them with glee, because by that time everybody despised turnips.

This brings us to the reason Trick or Treating started, which is the core of what we now think the holiday is about. It all began when the Celtic middle class vanished.

One day, the Celtic people looked around themselves, and there were no middle classes. There were only rich people and poor people. The rich people had candy and coins and fancy clothes and candles and soap, and the poor people had soot, sheets, and turnips. The poor people put their sheets on with the holes cut in them for their eyes and went door to door in the rich people’s neighborhoods, doing clever poor people dances to improvised armpit music, and expected candied turnips. When they didn’t get them, they shouted “Treat! Treat!” and burned the rich people’s houses down.

No, they didn’t burn the houses down. That was a fantasy of mine. Instead, having no toilet paper, only turnips, they “turniped” the rich people’s houses.

Today’s Halloween doesn’t look anything like that. We use Halloween to prove we are culturally savvy. It has nothing to do with dark versus light, nothing to do with the fact that we are not yet dead, and everything to do with the fact that we are not packs of cigarettes, not Brad Pitt, and not Karl Rove. We barely notice that it’s harvest season. Our Trick or Treaters don’t dance for their candy. They are lazy.

In spite of all that there are still those who persist in thinking that Halloween is a Christian holiday that somehow remains contaminated by Pagan influences, in much the same way that yoga is contaminated by demonic influences, and democracy is contaminated by Democrats.

What the Christians need is a Christian Halloween that gets rid of all Pagan influences once and for all, so there’s no more confusion about it.

My recommendation is for everyone involved to realized it’s just about what you’re afraid of, so if you are like Christine O’Donnell and you’re afraid of witches, then by all means dress as a witch for Halloween, just like old times. It isn’t contamination, it’s just something to fear.

The rest of us can Trick or Treat in Christine O’Donnell costumes.

Custom History

2011-01-17T10:52:00.000-08:00

[from 10/20/10]

This week Angela Merkel, the hot Chancellor of Germany that George W Bush couldn’t keep his hands off, said multiCulturalism has failed in Germany. She didn’t say it has failed elsewhere, raising the possibility that it might rather be Germany that has failed multiCulturalism.

I am going to prove that neither has happened. The sentences “MultiCulturalism has failed Germany” and “Germany has failed multiCulturalism” are both logically equivalent to “We lost in Vietnam because the Earth is as flat as a plate and held aloft by a giant French waiter.”

We need to understand what German-ness and “A Culture” are. We’ll look back into history and see how those things were invented.

It started when some tribes overran sort-of northern Europe from the even-more northern Europe and were caught by the Romans in the midst of doing it. The Romans said, hey, this is OUR Europe. They named the land the tribes had already overrun Germania, because they felt like it. To this day, Germans don’t really call themselves Germans, but that’s beside the point.

The Romans were all about kicking the “Germans” out of Germania, and the “Germans” were all about sneaking around into Austria and other places like that, whose spellings I don’t feel like looking up right now. Then the Roman Empire fell, and what was left was a whole bunch of little countries where people spoke German types of languages and enjoyed oom-pa music and ate too much sausage.

Around 1815 these little countries formed a confederation. This was way hard. They had to confederate not only Austria and Hungary but an additional 4 “kingdoms”, 10 “principalities”, 14 “duchies”, 6 “grand duchies”, 4 “free cities”, 1 “electorate”, 1 “landgraviate”, and a partridge in a pear tree.

In order to pull off this confederation all involved had to be convinced that they were all in one club. This provided work for philosophers just at a time when it was getting hard to make a living philosophizing, what with the Industrial Revolution and science getting all the glory.

Where would this club come from? Going on many years, the big idea was the Holy Roman Empire, modeled on the Profane Roman Empire, based on the idea of citizenship. You were expected to know Latin for formal occasions and hearings and such, but you could speak anything you liked at home, and people did.

So came the big breakthrough: Kultur. I mean, A Culture.

Long before all this, you grew stuff in cultures. Then people started using it metaphorically. There was the social culture, consisting of language, literature and customs, that children grew up in that made them who they were. But that was still a local thing. I grew up in a culture. That guy, who lives in that village over that hill, grew up in a different culture. No two people could experience exactly the same social soil.

Thus the great idea was, hey, we’ll pretend that all of these artifacts of culture, spread throughout all of these lands, are all manifestations of One Culture, A German Culture, characterized by One Language, but including disparate non-linguistic cultural characteristics as well (because simple linguistic identification wasn’t considered enough, especially in view of the fact that some of their dialects were so far apart that not all “German” speakers could understand each other.)

German-ness and the concept of A Culture (as distinct from cultural influences) were thus born together, and the latter idea was the export version of the package.

It was accepted all around the world, though embellished. The United States didn’t leap back into England’s arms just because we all spoke English here. It was figured that because of a revolution, we had created A New Culture, better than English Culture.

But wherever the idea has been adopted it’s been as stupid as it was in the beginning. There is no such thing as A Culture. So, no such thing as multiCulturalism. So of course it fails. It gets a big fat goose-egg.

So, Bill Gates Is a Communist, Then

2011-01-17T10:42:00.000-08:00

[from 10/13/10]

Lets talk about I-1098, so we can sound communist to people who’ve forgotten what communism is!

I-1098 would institute a state income tax on “rich” people, namely those with incomes $200,000 or more if individuals, $400,000 or more if married filing jointly. In return, it’ll crank down statewide property taxes and Business and Occupation taxes. That’s really generous, since the “rich” people have most of the taxed properties anyway. It’s a little give and take.

Susan Hutchison, who wishes she were King County Executive, said, while making a sad “please don’t make us be communist” frowny-frown face, “I don’t know a soul who makes $200,000 who considers themselves rich.” Ha! They’re all soul-less!

Ms. Hutchison misses a key point. It’s not important whether her friends consider themselves rich, or not rich enough. What matters is what other people, those people who DON’T live on 6-8 times the state’s median income, think.

The best part of the initiative is that 70% of the income tax has to go toward education, and the rest toward health. This is very important.

They could have written the law so that 70% went to buy crackers and brie for Susan Hutchison’s friends. Or they could have written it so 95% of the money collected would be burned, and the other 5% used to buy the lighter fluid, wieners and marshmallows. Those would be interesting choices. But instead it’s to fund education and health.

“Why is that important, Wes?” “Why don’t poor people work hard to buy their own educations and healths and leave rich people alone?” “Gasp! Isn’t that communist?” These are the sort of deep questions that make me proud to be an American in these times of deepness.

For one thing rich people don’t get rich by trading each others money back and forth. They get money by paying people to work for them and keeping a share of the profits, or by loaning their money out at interest and keeping the interest, or renting property out, or by selling goods to people. All these methods require solvent less-than-rich people to feed the machine of wealth! That’s not communism! That’s how capitalism works and I JUST LOVE IT!

Educations and healths cost too much now, so there’s getting to be a shortage of solvent less-than-rich people! Pretty soon there won’t be any solvent less-than-rich people, there will only be the non-solvent kind, otherwise known as poor people. When there are only poor people, rich people can only get so rich and no richer. The machine of wealth starves! Boo.

Housing costs too much now, too, but we’re capping the property taxes lower, OK?

So here’s the deal: in return for a tiny bite of income taxes at the high end (not near what the feds take) rich people get more educated and more healthy solvent less-than-rich people to employ, loan money to, rent and sell to. The result will be richer rich people!

If you don’t think I’m right about that, ask yourself why both Bill Gates, Sr. and Bill Gates, Jr. are for this initiative. (Hint: they know how to get really rich!)

Further questions to tax the credulous

1. In 1960 just the rate of federal taxes alone for a married couple on the equivalent of today’s $400,000 (around $54,000) would have been more than 50%. The combined effect of today’s federal tax and I-1098 will bring that rate to only 38%. Remember the Seattle World’s Fair? Good times, huh? Too bad we were a communist country back then, paying for all those good times on the backs of the rich.

2. Consider a central planned economy where all the industry is owned by the state, and a system of “taxation”, where the industry is relatively free of state controls, but profits are taxed. Find at least one difference between them. Lose the difference. Find it again. Lose it, find it, lose it, find it. Until you can’t lose it any more. Please.

Green Bleak, Next to Bleakish Green

2011-01-17T10:36:00.000-08:00

[from 10/6/10]

“McGinn has said higher prices for street parking would free up parking slots more often, so drivers would circle the block less, reducing congestion and emissions” -- random excerpt from a Seattle Times article on the subject.

Hooboy! But you have to love his commitment, don’t you? He’s all up in there!

Let’s see if we can do the math ourselves. Never mind raising the parking fee from $2.50 per hour to $4 per hour. Let’s push the argument to its limit and say the fee has gone to $150 per hour. That’s 60 times the old rate and a nice round Babylonian multiplier that happens to be the number of minutes in an hour.

So you could figure that if people were stretched financially to the limit, by, say, a recession, then they would park only minutes downtown when before they had parked hours. What will drivers do differently? Will they circle the block more? Will there be less congestion? No! They’d just park and not pay and wait in the spot they’re in for the tow truck to arrive, because parking on impound lots is cheaper!

Seriously, why should we subsidize the middle-men? Let’s just do away with street-side parking altogether and get people to drive their cars onto the impound lots themselves. It will adversely impact the tow truck industry, but they’ll get over it. OK, I’m projecting. I’ll get over it.

With everyone parking on the impound lots, collecting for tickets for overtime parking will be easy, because the lot will still hold your car hostage. Which means you’ll still be parked, so it’s a win-win!

I wish Mayor McGinn had consulted me, I have so many brilliant ideas for how to improve the parking situation in this city, I could have spared him the embarrassment of revealing his.

For example, here’s one that was inspired by a short story I must have read in the New Yorker before I was born. The whole idea is to raise $20 million more for the city to spend. What we do is, we let everyone park anywhere they can. Then January 1 we pick a parking space at random and charge the owner of the car in it $20 million. If they’re rich enough, and they can pay, great, we’re done for the year, nobody else has to pay. If they can’t pay, we stone them, use them to fertilize our crops and appease the Arugula Goddess, and then we repeat the process January 2. And so on.

Eventually, either someone will pay for all our parking for the remainder of the year, or all the stoning will be a disincentive to parking, which will result in more bus and bicycle use, less congestion and less fumes, and an all around greener city. Bleak, but a green bleak. Greenish-bleak is a gorgeous color, now available in boxes of 256 crayons.

Here’s another idea that’s better than the mayor’s: Bidding!

That’s right, we auction space off! All the street parking is to be paid for annually. You want to park on the street in a formerly metered space? You purchase an annual permit and you can display it to park anywhere, anytime. The catch is there’s only going to be a tenth as many permits as drivers that want them, so we’ll auction them off one-by-one. Get yours early ‘cause the last few are going to be really pricey!

I’m on a roll! How about this? We go ahead and we outdo the mayor and charge a whole $10 an hour per space, but we’re tricky about it -- we make one area of downtown absolutely free every day. This doesn’t solve anything except for the lucky stiffs who get there early and hog a space all day, but it gives everyone else hope that they’ll be lucky some day, too. Welcome to Seattle, the City of Hope!

One more: You want drivers to circle the blocks less? Make them pay a turn permit!

Temerarious, I Say!

2011-01-17T09:51:00.000-08:00

[from 9/29/10]

Sometimes I see a story in the news that is so audacious I immediately think “Whhaat?” and I think, “I have to write about that,” and then I think, I can’t. It’s so audacious it’s not of this world.

Here is an impudent example. This story was in the news six months ago, and I passed it up. A girl was expelled from a “Catholic” preschool in a place called Boulder, Colorado, Planet Z, Galactic Sector D, because she has two mommies. I have placed quotes around “Catholic” because this is surely one of those alien varieties that strains the sense of the word small c catholic to the breaking point.

What would Alien Jesus do? The Earth Jesus certainly wouldn’t deny a preschooler an education because she has two mommies.

What’s that, you say? They didn’t deny her an education? They only denied her one at their school? Well, there we go stretching that word catholic. The THEORY is, that what this school does in the name of ITS religion, is what they expect all of us to do. That’s a corollary of catholicity. So their way would deny educations to all little girls that have two mommies, from preschool on. Nothing special about preschool, that’s just where they nipped this little girl’s non-standard parent-having behavior in the bud.

In another story I HAVE ranted about, two 16 year-old high schoolers were expelled from their private “Christian” high school for being lesbians. My previous rant had to do with the fact that the principal had no business inquiring into their sexuality. But there’s another side to the story, a more impudent side, that begs for additional ranting. Since when do minors even get to have sexual orientations?

OK, I get it, if instead of playing cops & robbers, Johnny plays interior decorator, you can guess which way he’ll swing. But, you only get to guess. The kid’s not fully formed. He can’t know himself, yet. The girls are alleged to have kissed. You’ve kissed your grandmother. Does that make you a grandmother-lover? The answer is probably no, and you are sure because you’re old enough to have sorted it out. If you’re 16, you don’t know what you are, I don’t know what you are, the principal doesn’t know what you are, court is in recess, everybody shut up.

As I say, these stories are so impudent and temerarious, that I ordinarily would pass them up. The only thing that got me to change my mind this time is the contrasting case of Major Margaret Witt. She is the US Air Force nurse who served as a lesbian adult for 17 years, and knew it, and never told. Instead, someone else told, and she was discharged anyway.

My first thought reading that was, am I the only person speaking English here? What does “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” mean to these people? Then I learned the real answer. Not only is the idea to require servicemen and women to be dishonest about who they are, the idea is for the military itself to be dishonest about their own policy.

In public they persist in identifying the policy as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. But actually 10 USC § 654(b) doesn’t really say “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It says don’t ask, don’t tell, and don’t be outed by a third party, unless you want to prove in court that you AREN’T a homosexual. But, if you are and you say you aren’t in court, that’s perjury (and grounds for discharge), and if you are and you admit it, that’s “telling,” and grounds for discharge.

So, in other words, the law that everyone has been bandying around, calling it “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and claiming it has some kind of relationship to Bill Clinton’s original presidential order actually has no different effect than the law had before Bill Clinton. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has just been one big long propaganda campaign. Thanks to Maj. Margaret Witt, we now know that!

The Author Connects Everything to the Toilet

2011-01-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

[from 9/22/10]

Brace yourself for a truly awful column written by me, © Dr. Wes Browning. Worn out complaining about police brutality, homelessness, and wars, I’m reduced to sputtering about Christine O’Donnell and what she has to do with generalities. You might want to “go potty” before reading further.

I can’t get O’Donnell out of my mind. The devil will get me.

First thought: How did Bill Maher know way back in 1996 that, 14 years later, America would want to know how Christine O’Donnell felt about masturbation, or being a phony high school witch? I wish I had that kind of prescience.

I’d never ask a 27 year-old what sexual practices she approves. Who cares, I’d say. Bill Maher cares. That’s why Bill Maher gets the show and the fame and the money that comes with it, and I get to watch it on the TV with my hand down my pants.

Second thought: Let’s be fair. That was then, this is now. She’s come right out and said that she won’t govern based on her religious beliefs, she’ll be a strict Constitutionalist. Regarding her brush with what she now calls Satanic beliefs, she says she’s learned from it. “I know what it's like to live a life without principle.” Something to fall back on.

Since she wants to be a strict Constitutionalist I’d prefer she’d know what it’s like to live with principle. But let’s give her credit for meeting us halfway.

“What does she have to do with generalities, Wes?”

A. Look at ugly bell peppers.

Do it! Go to your local supermarket. Find the produce section. If it’s a good supermarket you’ll find what they call heirloom peppers. They come in a tray, all different colors and there’s always a fugly one. What’s that about? They’re the exceptions, that’s what.

Generalities, as opposed to exceptions, is about McDonald’s. It’s about Monsanto. It’s about Foster Farms chickens, homelessness, Texas textbooks, No Child Left Behind, WASL, Demopublicans, NAFTA, global warming, bed bugs, Fox News, talk radio, and the Real Change Cat, Sid Vicious.

What do these things have in common, you ask? They’re all constipated or signs of constipation, that’s what.

It’s simple mathematics. It’s starts with anal retention. You hold in the nasty. You “miss your train” as they say. More accurately, you partially derail the train, another gets jammed up behind it, and another, and they all get squeezed trying to use the same tunnel.

Your general modern world is anal. Christine O’Donnel is both anal and exceptional. She wants to be a strict Constitutionalist, but she can’t be, because Constitutions and strict don’t go together. That’s how you get backed up, trying to be con-stricted and well-Constituted at the same time.

Everybody wants everything just so. Nothing can be messy. Monsanto doesn’t even think plants should be allowed to reproduce by themselves. Fox News can’t stand the thought that any liberal might have a good idea now and then.

Everything has to be under control, and there’s two ways to do that, one expensive, and one cheap. The expensive way is to force everyone to do it your way. The cheap way is to get everybody wanting to do it your way.

Here’s an experiment. Say to your spouse, parent, child, best friend, “you want to go to the frig and get me a [insert beverage of your choice]?” Later on try telling them, “do it or else.” They might do it both times, but you’ll pay in grief for the second approach.

The general world is being constipated to death by corporate propaganda telling you how to live & what you want, for the convenience of anal controlling corporations, who don’t care about the long term consequences. Just because it’s done with nonviolent persuasion doesn’t prevent the inevitable disaster.

Eventually something has to give. You can’t control everything. If you try, like the Demopublicans have been trying, something exceptional is going to leak out. In this case she’s prepared to out-anal us all.

Pastor Jones Thinks This Rant Is About Him

2011-01-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

[from 9/15/10]

Last week I went on honeymoon with Anitra “Kisser Ichiban” Freeman. I say this like I had a choice, like I could have gone with Lady Gaga, or maybe Larry King. Anyway, I enjoyed it, which meant I couldn’t enjoy it.

I need rant material! How can I be happy if I’m too happy to rant?

After we got back, things picked up a bit. The Pastor Terry Jones was threatening to burn a bunch of Qurans (spelling optional). I could envision an entire column consisting of paragraphs beginning, “How stupid is Pastor Terry Jones? He is so stupid that... “

A taste: Pastor Jones is so stupid he hates a book he’s never read. Pastor Jones is so stupid he closes his eyes when he drives through a Muslim neighborhood. Pastor Jones is so stupid, every morning he burns his pancakes, because he prefers toast.

By the way, the word pastor comes from the Latin expression for “he leads us to pasture.” Some pasture it is, that’s warmed by bonfires of burning books. “Hey! We need more pitchforks over here!” “Is that sulfur I smell? How pastoral!” We were going to let him burn books on the grounds that we have freedom of speech in this country. Free to write books, free to read books, free to give books away, and with all that freedom Pastor Jones is so stupid he would rather burn books.

Meanwhile, a 23 year-old in Texas sparked debate on this very issue of free speech by skateboarding up alongside another would-be Quran-burner and snatching his Quran from him. Did he violate the Quran burner’s right of free speech, by depriving him of his fuel?

I’m reminded of the law in Seattle that prohibits taking, say, cut flowers from a dumpster behind a florist, because, the legislative reasoning went, they aren’t yours. As I recall, when the law was applied to an actual dumpster-flower thief, the judge fined the miserable thief one dollar, and then ordered the florist to pay all the court costs, because the judge said it was frivolous to go to court over a “theft” of something rejected and tossed away.

There are those who say that when they throw anything in the trash, it’s still theirs. A former acquaintance, when he had to get rid of a TV, smashed it before tossing it in the alley. “This way,” he said, “at least if they steal my TV, they won’t get any use out of it.”

The trouble with applying this extended ownership theory is that if you can extend your ownership forward past the point at which you have thrown a thing away, that opens up prior claims on the same property. In this case the former acquaintance had actually retrieved that very TV from someone else’s trash, so by his own theory, his TV was not actually his, and therefore it was not within his rights to smash it.

The way I see it, if there’s such a thing at all of violating someone’s freedom of speech, there has to be such a thing as violating someone’s freedom of speech in a frivolous and inconsequential manner. And specifically, that thing would be, snatching a Quran away from someone who was only going to burn it.

Exercises to Facilitate Auto-Entertainment

1. Pastor Jones doesn’t read Arabic. Outline the pilot episode of the sitcom based on that fact. Hint: Jones buys what he thinks are 500 Qurans for a BBQ, but his happy-go-lucky Arab neighbor “Ahmed” can see they are actually Arabic New Testaments. As Ahmed debates whether to tell him, comedy unfolds.

2. Since 1999, we haven’t had freedom of speech. We’ve had free speech zones. Where should we put the free Quran-burning zones?

3. Take two pieces of paper. On one, list all the rights we’ve been denied because “we’re at war” and “it’s a post 9-11 world”. Feel sad, don’t you? OK, now on the other one, write “meh can burnz Qu-ranz, LOL!” Feel better?

When Right Is Too Durn Complicated

2011-01-17T09:35:00.000-08:00

[from 9/9/10]

I was impressed this week by Tony Blair’s characterization of George W Bush. He said Bush has immense simplicity. That is some humongous accuracy.

I’ve been thinking about that, and how George was a “git’r done” kind of guy, and realizing that there’s a lot to be said for that. I mean, I never much cared for what he got done, but you know, sometimes having things happen that are bad is better than having nothing happen at all. At least you can react.

One of the things George W Bush got done was “No Child Left Behind,” an immensely simplistic law with an immensely stupid and offensive title (it’s a veiled reference to Christian end-times mythology). In fairness, Ted Kennedy supported it, and it passed both houses overwhelmingly, proving immense simplicity doesn’t only belong to conservatives.

The liberals liked NCLB because it gave more federal money to schools. The conservatives liked it because it promised to shut off funding to schools that performed badly based on the immensely simplistic measures of standardized tests.

So why am I talking about all this now? Since when do I care whether other people’s spawn get good educations or not? Hah! Never!

But I know a winning idea when I see one, and I’m going to run with it! Here’s my proposal: A “No Civilian Left Dead” Act.

There’s already a lot of federal funding for state and local police. That’s because Homeland Security funds “first responders” and part of the whole “terrorist/ bad guy / foreigner” thing that we have simplistically decided to respond to is the drug distribution that we’ve simplistically decided to make illegal. So let’s say your police department wants more cool guns. You tell the feds you need them to “defend” yourselves from drug dealers, they might just give you the money to buy them.

But guns aren’t everything. You also want money to pay you and your cops more, so you all can take in an opera or a musical, time to time, or buy toaster ovens.

So here’s the plan: We pass out way more federal money to state and local police departments. We suggest they use it for “peace-keeping,” wink-wink, but really they can use it for anything they want, even live Chippendales revues, if that’s how they roll. This will get the conservatives aboard, they love throwing money at people in uniforms who order other people around. So long as they’re American uniforms.

But here’s the catch that’s going to make the liberals happy. We keep track of all these police agencies, and count how many civilians they blow away in the course of any given year.

We don’t let them say, “No fair, our district has more criminals than other districts, that’s why we have to kill more.” We tell them, “If you have more criminals, it’s your own fault. We gave you the money to keep the peace. The more people you have to kill, the more you prove you are failing your mission.”

Of course, where the immense simplicity figures in, is that when we decide a police department is failing their mission, on account of having to kill too many people, we will just stop funding them altogether, as if that was all it took. Hah, hah! If only! But that kind of stupid thinking was good enough for the Republicans and Ted Kennedy and “No Child Left Behind,” so it’s good enough for me!

Hypothetical questions for further provocation:

The Soviets allegedly had so-called Potemkin villages where spies could immerse themselves in American culture before trying to operate here. Do you think US police departments should have training programs of that kind to teach law enforcement officers how human beings act? If there were such programs, might cops be trained to know what carving is? Or is that beyond their natural abilities, akin to trying to teach a dog how to finger a clarinet? Are you like me, and thinking of the word “finger” a lot lately?

Down & Out of the Market

2011-01-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

[from 9/1/10]

A lot of people think the United States is a collapsing empire. For example, Chris Hedges, some guy I heard of, said recently, “Our empire is imploding. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague.” Gee, Chris, try to look at the bright side. The Empire is imploding! Yay! Cue the dancing Ewoks!

I was poking some facts the other day and made an interesting discovery, relating to the disparity of income in the US and the cost of living. I have to explain a bit before I can get to the discovery. Please hang on.

That the cost of living in this country for poor people is high is only partly due to inflation. Much of it is due instead to the loss of affordable goods and services. Faced with a choice between marketing to the rich or to the poor, with fewer and fewer people in-between, corporations looking at the bottom line naturally choose marketing to the rich. So poor people can’t find Piggly Wigglies. JC Pennies vanish, to be replaced by JC Benjamins. Pay phones disappear. Dollar stores soon sell actual dollars, and nothing else.

The result is an economy in which poor people can no longer scrape by on the scraps they can buy, because there are no scraps that cheap available. This is not true yet with regard to clothing, but will be if the trend continues. It is true with regard to decent food, that’s why there are food banks, food stamps, soup kitchens, and indecent food like Chicken McNuggets. And it’s true big time in regard to housing and health care.

There are three ways out of this mess. Two of them require the rich to make sacrifices: Either accept higher taxes and let the state subsidize the poor, something that’s not politically popular, or correct the wage and salary disparities that got us here. That last approach would be the logical and moral thing to do. Unfortunately, it takes more from the rich to pay themselves what they are really, truly, worth, than it does to tax them enough to enable poor people to merely survive.

What’s the third way out? Well, you could put underpaid poor people who can’t pay their own way in a ruined economy into work-prisons.

This last solution has been trotted out lately by a Tea Party candidate for governor of New York, Carl Paladino. His idea involves making the imprisonment “voluntary”, but, you understand that as prison becomes a voluntary option, decent wages and/or state subsidies (the other two solutions) will not be happening. So the choice will really be, go voluntarily, or when you break the law just surviving because no other option was left to you, you can go involuntarily.

Paladino’s approach has been used before in this country. The last time it was used it was called Jim Crow.

So, anyway, here’s what I discovered, crunching the numbers. My first thought was that Carl Paladino’s idea could be shot down by a simple cost-benefit analysis. I thought it would cost more, marginally, to the rich, to imprison the poorest of the poor, than to either fix the economic disparity or pay the taxes to correct the harm the economic disparity cause. So we could stop the rich and the corporations they rule us with from using this approach, because it would not further enrich them.

Instead, I found, today’s modern prisons are relatively efficient, and imprisoning everybody in the country who makes less than 50% median income would save the rich money. They can be more rich!

Well, you know what they say. Corporate boards have fiduciary obligations. They may not want to do a thing, because it’s wrong, but you know, their hands are tied, they have to look out for the stock holders.

So let’s celebrate the imploding Empire! If we’re lucky it will implode before we have to volunteer for prison.

The Lions Will Lie Down With the Lambchops

2011-01-16T21:01:00.000-08:00

[from 8/25/10]

Let’s talk about justice, equality, ethics, and decency!

Ha, ha! Did I get you going? Actually, we’ll abuse wishy-washy liberals today. First, let’s define “wishy-washy” in the context of “liberal”. This may take space. I sure hope so.

Here’s my great insight. People of all political varieties, not just liberals, when faced with a situation that calls for a judgment, may miss the crux of the matter by letting themselves get lost in side issues. It only tends to look “wishy-washy” when liberals do it.

Take the “Mosque at Ground Zero” debate. The Republicans wrote and got passed a law that prevents New York or any one else from stopping the Islamic Center. When Newt Gingrinch misses that central crux, he misses it much the way a tank rolling down the road overlooks a lame pigeon. There’s a crunching sound. We don’t call the conservative Newt “wishy-washy” when he annoys us in this way. We call him “belligerent” or “jerk-tastic”.

Whereas, when liberals annoy us by missing some point, we discover them playing in the liberal sandbox of ethical relativism respectfully disagreeing amongst themselves over whose rights take priority over whose needs, historical patterns of oppression, and whether one person’s offense offending another person’s offense is more offending than the offenses going the other way around and backwards.

So President Obama reminds us that the Imam has the right to build the center, and then turns around and says that saying so doesn’t necessarily mean building it would be the best thing to do. The best thing for who to do? Pee Wee Herman? Shut up.

So, by “wishy-washy” I’ll mean, that particular losing sight of right and wrong that happens by being blinded by dreams of a liberal paradise in which all that is best and perfect will poop out of a grand consensus that even conservatives will join in. The lions lying down with the lambs, as it were, frolicking with them in the clover. And even the clover sees that what we, lions and lambs, all of us, will have decided, is for the absolute very best for every living thing in the world.

Conservatives rarely appear wishy-washy, simply because the conservative paradise doesn’t involve consensus. The conservative paradise involves you doing what you’re told. So conservatives that get sidetracked merely forget their own principles & tell you to do what they wouldn’t, if their heads weren’t also sidetracked to where the sun don’t shine.

“Hey! What brought this on, Wes?” Well, Anitra “Legal As The Day She Turned Eighteen” Freeman was playing with conservatives on the Interwaste the other day and dredged up a year and a half-old story of two girls being expelled from a private religious high school, having been both successfully accused of being lesbianic, and she thrust it out, asking the right & wrong of it.

By the time I found the discussion Anitra began, there were some thirty interweaving comments all along the lines of, golly, freedom sure is complicated, isn’t it? How will we ever sort out the competing interests here? Freedom of religion versus the right to one’s sexual orientation?

Here’s how you sort it out. Forget the liberal sandbox. Forget freedom of religion. Forget sexual orientations. Forget competing interests. Forget that it was a school and a school principal.

When do adults have the right to traumatize minors by conducting inquisitions into their sexuality or their sexual feelings for one another?

If the religion sanctified child-rape and the parents consented to have their children go to a school that meted out rape in the principal’s office, would the parents’ consent stand in for the consent of the children? Newsflash: Grilling teenagers with prying questions about their sexual feelings amounts to emotional rape.

A judge ruled that the girls could be expelled based on grounds of religious freedom to believe that lesbians are “wrong”. The judge was wrong to allow that to even be the issue. The issue was and remains, you don’t harm children that way.

Feed Your Head

2011-01-16T20:55:00.000-08:00

[from 8/18/10]

I want to advocate for better education in our public schools.

During the recent heat wave I could keep cool and comfortable because I learned years ago how to move about in downtown Seattle almost entirely indoors. Great trick when raining, too! It’s even easier now, with the bus tunnel. They should teach such Architectural Exploitation Technology in schools.

Or consider this: You learned in your Civics Class that it was your responsibility to keep abreast of the news. Even though you laughed because the teacher said “a breast” you knew it was right. But how do you keep abreast of so much annoying stupidity without going crazy or being bored?

The answer I’ve learned is, turn the news into a sitcom or movie in your head, and you’re suddenly being entertained, just like you were brought up to be!

Here’s a recent example from my own life. I was reading about the opposition to the “Mosque at Ground Zero”. This news is stupid on several counts. 1) It’s not a mosque. 2) There’s already been a mosque in the neighborhood for decades. 3) Muslims were killed in the WTC attacks. 4) Give me a break, we’ve got a First Amendment. 5) You don’t need 5 reasons, those 4 were enough.

The place is really going to be a community center. It’ll be a Muslim alcohol-free Cheers! People will come and go all day ribbing each other and playing practical jokes on one another. There would be very amusing sexual tensions between regular characters. Since the center will operate pretty much like a YMCA, there can be a running feud with an actual YMCA uptown. In one episode a challenge between the rival community centers would end with the Islamic center filled with goats.

Another example is provided by news associated with Seattle’s own People’s Harm Reduction
Alliance. They got national attention recently when it was reported that they not only were distributing clean needles, but also safe(r) crack-kits. It led to a spot with Bill O’Reilly and FOXNews.com ran a piece on how the crazy liberals in Seattle were running amok.

A comment to the FOXNews.com story simply said, “That’s why I pack whenever I go to Seattle.”

Dawn of the Living Liberal Crack-Addict Enablers! So we have a busload of tourists, all but one of which is a wishy-washy liberal. Their idea of packing properly for a trip to Seattle is to bring rain-gear and a change of socks.

Not our hero, played by your favorite tough action ass-kicker. Since I’m old, I picture Bruce Willis, Schwarzenegger, or Clint Eastwood (a la Dirty Harry). He knows what “pack” means. He’s got enough hardware in his luggage to take on the entire city. All he has to do is persuade the other tourists to get spines, aim and pull triggers.

At first the others just want to turn tail. They stop and ask directions to the airport. Polite Seattle liberals are glad to tell them the best way out of the city, but as more and more arrive to give directions, Bruce/Arnold/Clint sees through their courteous facade and mows them down with two M2s, one in each hand.

Pretty soon hundreds of helpful Seattle lefties are bearing down on the tourists, offering them crack pipes, sterilized needles, directions to Pike Place Market, and eating their brains. Eventually the tourists come over to our hero’s way of looking at things, when too many of them get bit and themselves turn into extreme left-wing nut cases.

Hearing about the new Seattle Founder’s Festival I thought of a remake of Here Come the Brides. It would be a reversal on the Three’s Company premise. Asa Mercer didn’t know it, but all the male pioneers in Seattle were gay. Why else would they have come to Seattle, knowing there were no women there?

Try it yourself! It makes the news easier to follow and seeing movies and TV shows in your head prevents eyestrain!

There Is No What, Only Duck

2011-01-16T20:50:00.000-08:00

[from 8/11/10]

I’ve found over the years that an awful lot of people are not at all amused when I ask them the difference between a duck. They’re supposed to say, “One of its legs is both the same,” or “Why is a mouse when it spins?” or at least, “Huh?” Instead they scowl at me and say, “What’s the difference between a duck and what?”

There is no what, only duck. Anyone who isn’t amused by this surely is in for a hard life. Apart from there being no what, what else is there to laugh about?

Sometimes people refer to the Existential Choice. The thing that’s important to understand about the Existential Choice, the thing that makes it of note, is that there is no Existential Choice. It’s usually presented as a choice between being animate or being inanimate. That isn’t it. The choice is: You are, or you are.

Yesterday, a Real Change vendor was at the office and wanted to know how to get somewhere by bus. She used one of the Real Change computers to access the so-called online Metro trip planner, and entered a starting location and destination to get an itinerary. The so-called Metro trip planner then asked her to select which of one possibility she might have meant her starting point to be among.

It’s like being at a Chinese restaurant, and there is no column A or C, there is only column B. But the menu still says “choose one from column.” You can ask, “One from column what?” Sorry, there is no column what.

Most Americans are used to choices. If anything, they’re used to being inundated with choices, to the point of being unable to make decent decisions. But in reality -- that is to say, in the ordinary world away from the fairyland-Disney-World knockoff we’ve made of this country out of all the wealth we’ve grabbed -- in reality, there is no what, there is only duck, and you should laugh.

There are few choices, and few differences, in a life lived to the bone, which is the kind of life most people live on this planet. And those differences as there are, are choices between window dressing, and colors of tinsel and wrapping.

We forget that Hamlet was a stinking Prince. It isn’t “To be or not to be” for the majority of us non-Princes. It’s to be woke up on just another cold wet morning, and it’s not even my rooster to strangle, and it’s not my land, and it’s even not my morning, my cold, nor my wet, and “move on, buddy.”

When Americans think luxuries they tend to think of things. Yachts, Lamborghinis, champagne, stuff you could get in principle if only you could afford it. But the real luxury is the luxury of going to war against anyone you want, any time you want, just because you’re afraid of them.

“There is no try, only do,” said the toy of a rich director. In the real world, there’s no do, either. There are no roads there, the spaceship don’t fly, and you’re not endowed with the ability to channel the power of all life.

America, on the other hand, can kill and kill and kill, and not even be required to tally the innocent dead children that result. That’s luxury. That’s making a difference in the world, one that you don’t need to make.

When Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary I braced myself for the predictable counter-attack. I knew the government would say that the information compromised the security of our soldiers and allied soldiers, agents and informants.

Isn’t it nice though, to have the luxury of a security to be compromised?

Isn’t it nice, to have so much security that the prospect of other nations dropping cluster bombs on our citizens is almost nil? America has the luxury of continuing to manufacture, sell, and use cluster bombs, in the face of a world-wide ban that our government refused to sign.

Statusability?

2011-01-16T20:39:00.000-08:00

[from 8/4/10]

Ordinarily I don’t like to talk about my personal life in this column. I try to think of something that concerns everyone. Then I start to talk about it, and realize that in order to squeeze 666 words about that subject, I’d need to make up too many facts and examples. So I give in and write what I know about. Me.

This time it’s different. The Personal and the Universal collide, as it were. They get close and sweat all over each other, as it were. Then, 13 years later, they get hitched, as it were.

Anitra “On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept, She Of Many Associations, She Who Erotically Stimulates Tomato Plants, She Who Needs No Last Name” Freeman, and I, will be getting “more married” this week.

We are expecting to be married, or mix-married, by 8 or more officiators, representing 6 or more faiths, depending on how you cut them.

“How is that Universal, Wes?” -- you might well ask. Not everyone is marrying my Ducky. My Ducky! Not your Ducky!

True, but other people marry. And, more to the point, still other people mess with other people’s marriages and mess with other people on the basis of their marital statuses and non-statuses, and they mess with other peoples’ statusability even, through support and/or lack thereof of public policies concerning such, through their lawfully elected public officials.

For instance, I was looking forward to Anitra or I being able to collect the other’s Social Security after I or Anitra, respectively, were dead. I was just now horrified to learn that to do that, Anitra or I would have to wait a whole ten years to kick the bucket. No fair, we’re both 61! That law discriminates in favor of whippersnappers! Goddamn whippersnappers! Get off my lawn!

Where was I? Oh, yeah, and get this: Anitra just told me I can’t collect even if she lasts ten years and then I push her off a cliff. This totally flies in the face of reason. I mean, dead’s dead, right? Shouldn’t that be all that matters? But no, it’s against the rules.

Here’s another example of irrational rules regarding married people. I wasn’t thinking of applying for Food Stamps for us, but I decided to look up the rules anyway, just to find something stupid there to write about now, and as usual I wasn’t disappointed!

A single person making $400.15 per week or less can get food stamps. For every additional person in your household, starting with the spouse, the cut-off income goes up not $400 a week per person, but only $138.46 a week per person, give or take a penny.

So the law assumes that there are no additional living costs at all except the additional cost in food. You wouldn’t need maybe a larger apartment to put all those bodies. What about the live-in mother-in-law? The new kids from the previous marriage? What if I don’t have enough closets to stuff them all in?

Fortunately, Anitra and I won’t have a live-in mother-in-law, as they’re both already dead, but I worry for others who aren’t as fortunate as we are.

Likewise, Anitra and I are of almost the opposite sexes. (I cook and do the dishes.) I wish everybody could be of the opposite sexes, but alas, that would require nearly 7 billion sexes, all of which would have to be totally opposite.

Were it always so, internet porn could never have come into being, and, as a result, the tools that made Facebook and all other life as we know it today would not have been possible.

Indeed, God, in Her infinite Wisdom, made us two sexes in order to enable the marketing of porn, and so stimulate media innovation.

Therefore we have only approximately two opposite sexes, and so there are not enough to go around, and some people are caught without.

That isn’t right. Let’s make marriage more Universal than ever, now!

Drunken Space-Giraffes Are As Good As You

2011-01-16T20:27:00.000-08:00

[from 7/28/10]

I was going to talk about the Afghan War Diary, but the book was too long and too repetitive, like most diaries, so I decided to go with the next best thing.

Let’s talk about death & taxes!

I’m being taxed more than ever lately, as I enjoy the occasional commercially brewed beverage. If, by occasional, you mean nightly. If, by nightly, you mean morningly.

Whatever you mean, I’m not going to complain. In fact, I’m glad to pay to keep the ship of the state afloat. And how better to float Washington State than on beer? I can enjoy the poetry of it as much as the next guy.

At the same time, I worry we’re overlooking other good revenue sources. We’re not taxing enough. We’re especially not taxing the dead enough. We should tax them at least till they howl.

Also, supposedly sometime in September, Democrats in Washington D.C. will get around to deciding whether to drop Bush’s tax cuts. You remember Bush’s tax cuts, right? Those were the tax cuts we got in order to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yes, I said support! The theory was that taxing rich people undermines the economy so much that you end up getting less money in taxes from everybody else. But if you hardly tax the rich at all, the economy gets souped up, there’s a middle class to tax, and you can buy all the tanks you need.

That theory didn’t work. It was the economy that tanked.

OK then, let’s try something else. Here’s my idea: Every time there’s a war, anywhere in the world, rich people everywhere get richer. Don’t ask me how. It just happens. I’m a mathematician, not some brainiac.

So we should do this: Whenever anyone dies in a war on either side, no matter what war or where, whether civilians or not, we increases the taxes on rich people by just a tad. Ideally worldwide, but it won’t hurt to start unilaterally in America, since we start most of the really long wars anyway.

We’ll exempt, say, farmers who actually get rich growing food, if we can find any.

By a tad, I’m thinking, it would be enough to ratchet up the taxes on income by a measly 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent per dead person on people making more than 10 million US per year. That’s only $10 per year per dead for someone on the margin. I’m thinking that little bit is all it would take, because it will add up fast.

The idea is, for the stinking rich, war is great, because it generates investment opportunities that they can leverage into more wealth. So they need a disincentive in order to cut back. It’s like cigarette taxes. Don’t think of how much the taxes hurt, think of the lives you could save.

Questions for extra credit. You want extra credit, yes, you know you want it.

1. It’s been said rich people should keep their money because what they do with it improves the economy. The hidden assumption is that what poor people would do with money, if they had any, wouldn’t improve the economy. Whose economy are we talking about, anyway? Present your answer in the form of a question, for all the good it will do.

2. Fact A: Some people don’t like us to tax the absurdly rich, because they dream of being absurdly rich themselves. Fact B: Some people think the Barefoot Bandit is cool, because they dream of being equally huge jerks. Create a diorama relating these facts. If your Dad won’t help you make the diorama, you may instead write a 500 word essay on how much he sucks.

3. Ayn Rand says that if her heirs don’t deserve her money, because they didn’t earn it, well, neither do you. Prove that is not a valid argument. Hint: Substitute “drunken space-giraffes” for “her heirs.” Should drunken space-giraffes have inherited Ayn Rand’s wealth? Did they?

Seattle Is About to Be Bored

2011-01-16T19:59:00.000-08:00

[from 7/21/10]

So, we’re about to have a tunnel project!

A boring tunnel machine is going to nuzzle his way two miles through our city’s underparts and I couldn’t be more excited! I will pay whatever it takes in taxes to see that try to happen.

This is much better than wasting my money on beer, or strippers, or ending homelessness. None of those things can ever satisfy me like the slow-motion creation of a vast sideways pit to pour cars through, under, past Seattle, and out of sight.

Some people are still saying it’s a bad idea to build the tunnel to replace the viaduct, but those are sad ignorant people who don’t understand how bad the alternatives are. To help them I will run through the alternatives now, so they can begin to grasp the fact that the tunnel is the best of all possible solutions to the viaduct replacement problem as well as I do.

Alternative 1. Fill in Elliott Bay, pave it, and make it a giant “all ways, all times” intersection. This solution would shut up those folks always squawking about the “decaying sea wall”. It also would provide a great place for teens to practice their driving, and it would be a hell of a tourist destination, akin to the Bonneville Salt Flats. Great, except for one thing: Potholes. We couldn’t afford the maintenance.

Alternative 2. The whole point of the viaduct is connect what’s south of downtown to what’s north of downtown, right? So what if we just got rid of one of those, quietly, in the middle of the night? I tried to work the details out on this one but got stuck on some seriously fatal legal issues. Also: There’s no such thing as “quietly” when it comes to West Seattleites or to Magnolian hordes.

Alternative 3. We make downtown Seattle so attractive no one will want to pass through. Mayor McGinn is getting on track toward this goal with his vision of Seattle as a 24-hour bar-hopping Mecca. But let’s face it, years of making downtown Seattle inhospitable to homeless people have had the side effect that it’s also that much less welcoming to anybody who can’t shell out hundreds a day to amuse themselves. You’d need to install benches and public rest rooms, etc. It’ll never happen.

Alternative 4. Ferry cars across the bay. Ha! Stupid, stupid idea! Putting cars on boats and floating them from place to place? Get real. Besides, ferries cost money, unlike magically free state-built tunnels.

Alternative 5. We take Seattle apart and put it back together someplace where it won’t be in our way anymore. Paul Allen could figure out how to get us to pay for that with our own money while somehow making himself richer, and then ingratiate himself to us by giving back half of the profits our money netted him. The only drawback to this one is Seattle would find out what it’s like when nobody wants you in their backyard.

Alternative 6. This is the very attractive idea to accept the tunnel idea whole, except for the tunnel part. In other words, you don’t build the tunnel, but you charge people the same amount in tolls to drive through the city as you were going to charge them to use the tunnel. This will so reduce the traffic through the city that no viaduct replacement will be necessary.

I have to admit that it was really hard to find the downside to Alternative 6. But here goes: Seattle, see, has this undeserved reputation for being one of the friendliest cities in the country. Those of us who live here know that’s nonsense. We’re the passive aggressive capital of the world. We love to give visitors directions, to the airport. We’re courteous to a fault, and that fault is ready to slip at a moments provocation.

We can’t afford to blow our cover. If the world finds out how unfriendly we really are, who will buy our condos?

Take Me To Mexicotown!

2011-01-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

[from 7/14/10]

Let’s talk about immigration reform!

Why the heck not? Everyone else is talking about it! Obama is talking about it. Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin are talking about it. John McCain is talking about it. They’re talking about it on the corner by Home Depot.

But, NO! On closer inspection, no one is talking about what matters. As always it is up to ME, © Dr. Wes Browning, to get down to the heart, or the corazon, of the immigration issue. Namely, 1) how do we profit from it for now? and 2) when do we throw in the towel?

As always, please, PLEASE, do NOT hurt the “humor” columnist!

All right. By “we” I mean of course us, the non-immigrants, as opposed to them, the Mexicans and the Arabs (I’m being inclusive here so, for example, I'm counting Blacks as part of “we” unless they’re Jamaicans = French Mexicans.) We are already profiting from immigration.

If it weren’t for immigration, we’d find out that individual Russet potatoes, properly grown and raised by individual proper born grown and raised Americans, would cost more than individual US dollars, and broccoli would be $20 a pound. We couldn’t therefore afford to eat, so we’d be a starving Third World Country, so the Mexicans would stop coming here, and go to Belgium instead, problem solved, at our loss.

But we need to find better ways to exploit immigrants. I am going to go way out on a limb here and heartily recommend something we’ve already done. I’m recommending Mexicotown!

Every large city should have a Mexicotown! They’ve had one in New York for years; they built it for Puerto Rican Mexicans. They have one in Los Angeles; they call it “LA”. They have one in Detroit, specially designed for Arab Mexicans.

Here in Seattle we believe in diversity and multiversity and inversity and reversity and all those fine versity-things, so just like we let all kinds of Chinese in our Chinatown, even Kamchatkans, so we should open up our Mexicotown to all kinds of Mexicans from the get go, even Lebanese Mexicans.

The advantages of having a Mexicotown are multitudinous. It would be a tourist magnet. Who wants to come here to see people like us? They have Starbucks everywhere for that. It might take awhile, but eventually I’d expect to be able to find a decent burrito in Seattle, if we had a Mexicotown.

It would make living in Laurelhurst more bearable (a place to get away from Laurelhurst).

Now let's get to the other really important question: When do we give up?

I think the answer should be "soon." I say we suck this Mexicotown idea dry until that cash cow goes belly up, then we admit to ourselves that this whole Anglo culture business is a bit of a fraud (what culture?) and pack it.

I'm not necessarily saying we go back to England, Ireland, or Africa, or wherever we came from. I'm saying we quit Christianity for Catholicism, and learn to speak Mexican.

There's nothing special about Anglo culture that makes it one damn bit better than anyone elses culture. We all know deep down inside that the real reason we're dragging our feet on the whole immigration issue is we don't want to face that fact squarely and stop denying it.

Stop thinking that if the United States became Hispanic we couldn't have a manned space program, because you can't do a manned space program in Spanish. Hello? We don't have a manned space program in English.

Stop thinking if we all had to learn Spanish in school it would stop us getting into Yale. If you didn't need to know fifteen pronunciations for the spelling "-ough", you wouldn't need to go to Yale.

Stop thinking that without English we couldn’t follow Craig Ferguson or understand Ludacris. We don’t do those things now.

Whereas, in Spanish we’d get ten times the soap operas!

Being PH Neutral

2011-01-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

[from 7/7/10]

We here at Real Change are nothing if not organized. Organization is our middle name. That’s right: “Real Organization Change” is what our Mama calls us when she’s mad at us. “Get in here right this minute, Real Organization Change!” she says.

So I have to go to meetings to find out what I need to know in order that all of the others organize me. This is why I know that this rag is going to print something or other about mental health parity, or “MH parity.” If it isn’t in this very issue here, it will be in the next one, or the next one. I learned that at a meeting.

Mental health parity is a very important parity. Mental health parity is the parity you get when you make mental health care more like its big brother, physical heath care. Since we will read all about that in a legitimate article here, I would like to use this illegitimate space to discuss what physical health (PH) parity would look like.

We will have PH parity when physical health care is brought in line with the standards of mental health care. Note the ironic humor: I said “standards”, ha!

The most important thing we need to do is get GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer and Eli Lilly to come up with more pills for us to buy from them. With PH parity, you will mostly get pills to help keep you from “acting out” your ailment. So say you lose your favorite thumb in the shredder at work. They could put you on a pill to stop your complaining about it, so you can return to being functional right away.

The pills will cost $10 each and have to be taken daily for the rest of your life, so getting you functional enough to make that kind of swag for the drug company will be essential to keeping our PH system operating smoothly.

Your anti-complaint meds will also make you impotent, overweight, joyless, and boring at parties, so you’ll have no reason not to throw yourself into two full time jobs to keep paying back your drug company for its worthy investments in research.

PH parity means that if you “present” one broken leg to your health care provider, he/she would put them both in a cast, for fear you’d break the other one.

PH parity means whatever is wrong with you will get you referred to a social worker, who will empathize with you and help you address your issues.

Let’s say you have an issue with lying on the floor convulsing in pain, The social worker won’t know anything about people presenting that issue, because social work schools will only teach what to do for headaches and gonorrhea. So you’ll be counseled in safe sex practices, given condoms, an aspirin, and a pamphlet, made to list all your partners, and sent down the hall for a penicillin shot.

Have you ever noticed how some people, when they find out someone is blind, speak louder and slower to them? That’s what mental health care is all about, treating every kind of symptom as indicating one kind of disorder, namely “mentally ill.” If we had physical health parity, people with cancer would be treated as if they had rabies. They’d all be the same. They’d be the physically ill.

Instead of hospitals, there’d be institutions for the severely physically ill. You wouldn’t get treatment there, but you wouldn’t notice, because you wouldn’t have got treatment anywhere else either.

In jail, if you told your jailers you were physically ill, they’d put you in your own private cell and take away your belt. But you still wouldn’t be allowed to have your medicine.

If we had PH parity, Cheney would never had been vice president. In fact, after his very first heart attack, back in the Middle Ages, they’d probably have given him a prefrontal cardiotomy and a nice room with a view of four walls.

No One Challenges Boring

2011-01-16T19:24:00.000-08:00

[from 6/30/10]

Let's talk about something incredibly boring!

Even the title of "Open Doors/ Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness", which I'll abbreviate as "OD" (because OD/FSPP&EH is stupid) is stunningly boring. It reminds me of my 1979 PhD mathematics thesis, which I titled something like "On the Classification of Some Types of 2-Dimensional Dealies of Some Certain Description or Other." Cleverly, it said it was ON the classification of dealies, it was not THE classification of dealies, that being something I couldn't do. Also, the title made sure no one would ever read it, so I wouldn't have to be bothered by their bound-to-be boring questions about it.

I'm sure no one at the department of the federal government in charge of putting out this snoozer wants to hear your bound-to-be boring questions, either. Remember when the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness came out? Remember how excited everybody was to hear that we were actually going to end homelessness in ten years? Remember all the questions that were raised in the course of the excitement, and how it emerged that the title was a fraud? Well, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness doesn't want that to happen again.

Now they're being up front in emphasizing the Plan part of the Plan. We're planning it, we're not doing it. It's a plan of action, not an action. For example, when the OD document gets down to stating the goals of the Plan, on page 11, bullet number 4 is NOT "to end homelessness before the End Times end it for us," but instead merely "Set a path to ending all types of homelessness."

You'd think after 6 years of the Ten Year Plan to Plan Planning to End Homelessness, these people would be past the trail blazing stage. But, no. Apparently no one had thought of setting a path before. So we've spent the last 6 years tangled in brambles up to our nostrils? Whoops!

Following the stifling bit about setting the path, OD goes on to set forth 5 themes of the strategic plan, of which 3 consist of two objectives each, one consists of 3 objectives, and one other consists of one objective. That's ten objectives altogether, so the number ten still looms large in the homelessness end-planning business, speaking sarcastically.

None of these objectives goes quite so far as to call for the creation of new housing. The closest we get to that is under the Theme "Increase Access to Stable and Affordable Housing", where we have 2 objectives calling for providing 1) affordable housing for those needing it, and 2) permanent housing for those really, really, really needing it (the "chronically" homeless, an arbitrary manipulable category lacking natural definition). In other words, those only needing housing would get provided housing, but not necessarily permanent housing. And no one gets housing created for them, only provided. You can easily provide everyone in the country housing, if most of it's not permanent. And you can provide some housing permanently, without creating new housing, by simply making the same housing temporary for other people.

Even the Vision of the OD plan is boring. Visions are supposed to be inspiring and forward-looking. The best they could come up with was that there shouldn't be homelessness. That's about it. Homelessness bad. No, I said it wrong, their vision is that no one should experience homelessness. It's alright if people ARE homeless, it's only a shame they have to be conscious for it. They could realize their crappy boring vision by passing out bottles of Jack Daniels on the streets.

"Objective 10: Transform homeless services to crisis response systems that prevent homelessness and rapidly return people who experience homelessness to stable housing."

When someone tells me they'd transform a thing to a thing, they're saying they don't need to create anything new. They're just going to turn lead into, ah, metal.

If only it all were interesting enough to induce people to ask, "What?"

The Author Manifests Anti-Authority Tendencies

2011-01-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

[from 6/23/10]

I've been frustrated in my dealings with a certain Seattle housing agency lately. I was going to keep my frustration to myself. Then I noticed a deadline approaching. I considered what else I could write about. It was all oil and soccer and Lady Gaga and oily soccer balls and Lady Gaga and balls. Dwelling on my own personal frustrations actually began to look good.

"Hey, Dr. Wes, how frustrated are you?"

Well, let me relate an incident that happened to me in the fine state of New Jersey 30 years ago. I had a beat up old car parked in front of my slum building overnight. I had to move it by 9 AM to avoid a parking ticket. I overslept exactly one hour and came out to find not one but five parking tickets, all from the same meter-maid/meter-lad, who must have just driven around the block between ticketings. I imagine his/her glee at discovering my crap car still there at each pass, seeing clearly how utterly poor I had to be driving such a piece of trash, and knowing with joyous certainty that each additional ticket would grind me that much further down.

So I gathered the tickets, walked calmly inside to my hovel, screamed, and broke my own hand punching my own knee in anger.

That's how frustrated I've been lately in my dealings with this particular Seattle housing agency of which I speak.

I won't tell you the name of the agency, because I'm still having dealings with them and I'd hate to mess those dealings up, but the name of the agency has the words "Seattle" and "housing" in it, and the agency calls itself not an agency but an authority. This is apt, as an experience in authoritarianism is definitely a component of my frustration.

I want to move out of where I am now into a place where I might not be kept awake all night by sirens. This agency offered such a place to me back in April. I use the word "offered" loosely. Real housing agencies show you the apartments they are offering, so you can say whether or not you'll accept the offer. This agency, not being a real agency, but, rather, an authority, said the apartment isn't ready, so you can't see it. Then they said, "You have to give 20 days notice at your current apartment building." They said, "Now." They said, "You have to."

The way it works when you rent from real housing agencies is, they not only show you an apartment, they show you a lease, you negotiate the terms, you sign the lease and pay deposit and initial rents agreed upon, THEN they give you your move-in date, and THEN you tell the place you're at what that move-in date is. That's your notice.

Otherwise, without a lease, the deal could fall through, 20 days later you could have no place to move to, and your current landlord could say, "Sorry, but since you said you were going to move out, we've promised your apartment to someone else, so you have to leave." This, by the way, is one of the ways people in the real world who don't wait to see a lease find themselves out on the street.

The way it works at the authority, they repeat, "You have to." There is no why.

The day came when I'd been shown the apartment and the lease was ready. Surprise! I was expected to move in immediately. I was even given the keys for two hours. Then I was told I had to give them back because it was discovered that I never gave 20 days notice at the old place. That's the why of it.

It turns out, 20 days notice means nothing to these people, it's just a formality. It would have been decent of them to tell me that before cruelly dangling an apartment in front of my face and snatching it away.