When angry, count four

Hello, sailor!

2005-04-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

Take note that, certain reports notwithstanding, the military is not quite ready to decriminalize sodomy. Somebody better tell Churchill.

Intermission

2005-04-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

This portion of the program brought to you by all of Christendom, which is threatening to move, in entirety, to South Carolina.

This week's deconstruction

2005-04-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

As mentioned on these pages before, Puddinhead is a scientist. It's becoming increasingly obvious [to him, anyways] that so much voting and legislation regarding sciences, particularly the biological ones, are done by the laiety who don't necessarily know what they're talking about. One peril of liberalism these days is the anti-intellectual streak permeating popular culture - hey, it's been with us since Adlai Stevenson. Of course, so has the odd liberal sense that the group is nobly losing, and that as a collective it's getting cut down in battle. In terms of cultural mythology, this is a sort of interesting tack to follow. Unfortunately, we have slightly more pressing matters these days. It is certainly some hubris that accompanies this desire for change - I mean, we're right, aren't we? - that makes it a bit difficult for the self-aware to parse out ego from the demonstrably factual. That's part of the Hamlet idea, no? That it's noble to struggle with self-doubt? By and large, any self-doubt that tortures conservatives is done in private, where it takes such extremes as to be baffling when exposed to the light of day.

Shit, look at even me. I just blew a paragraph handwringing about seeming too arrogant because I think that facts ought to be considered when writing legislation.

Fuck that shit.

Where were we? Ah yes: one of Puddin's colleagues puts it, "More people in this country believe in the virgin birth than believe in evolution."

So let's examine some of the actual science, and underreported facts, behind recent legislative decisions. Today's topic will be stem cell research.

We'll examine some of the promises and blind alleys offered by working with these cell types below. However, the first thing that needs addressing is the conservative rationale for preventing the research. Here's Bush's statement on the matter. For some context, he's talking about how one derives stem cell lines from human embryos. Below, I've highlighted a few passages, emphasis mine:

When doctors match sperm and egg to create life outside the womb, they usually produce more embryos than are planted in the mother. Once a couple successfully has children, or if they are unsuccessful, the additional embryos remain frozen in laboratories. Some will not survive during long storage; others are destroyed.
...
As I thought through this issue, I kept returning to two fundamental questions: First, are these frozen embryos human life, and therefore, something precious to be protected? And second, if they're going to be destroyed anyway, shouldn't they be used for a greater good, for research that has the potential to save and improve other lives?
...
As a result of private research, more than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist. They were created from embryos that have already been destroyed, and they have the ability to regenerate themselves indefinitely, creating ongoing opportunities for research. I have concluded that we should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines, where the life and death decision has already been made.

The way in vitro fertilization works, as Bush says, is by fertilizing human eggs from a woman with sperm from a man in a dish. This fusing of two cells divides a few times, just like it would if it were the result of these two cells meeting under more hospitable circumstances [i.e., a womb]. When I say "a few times", I mean 2 or 3 times, for a total of eight cells. When IVF specialists do this for a couple seeking a baby, they tend to collect about seven oocytes, or eggs, and they fertilize them all. To increase chances of implantation [these things don't always take], they tend to put 2-4 embryos into the womb. This means the rate of multiple births in women undergoing IVF shoots through the roof [about 25% of these births produce twins]. Most of this is spelled out in the information page of any fertility clinic you care to visit: try here, here, or here.

However, those of you astute enough to do the math will note that if a woman has seven oocytes fertilized and four of them implanted, three go someplace else. In simple language, the IVF clinics tell you where [this one's from here]:


Q: What happens to any extra pre-embryos?: A: A maximum of four pre-embryos will be transferred to the uterus for possible implantation. Patients will have several other options regarding the disposition of the remaining pre-embryos. One option is to freeze pre-embryos for your later use. Other options are to donate or simply dispose of them. Excess pre-embryos, if any, belong to you, and you will determine what is to be done.

Read that? You can do whatever you want to with them. Except donate them in the hopes of curing disease.

Here's where it gets sketchy. Reread Bush's comments. He acknowledges that some of these things are being thrown out, but sort of glosses over it, and instead implies that these days, there won't be any more destruction of innocent embryos. However, it happens all the time. Every day. If you don't want to fill up racks and racks of freezer space at the clinic, you just thaw those four or eight cells out and pour 'em down the sink. If Bush were really after not letting embryos die, don't you think he'd, say, try to make it illegal for fertility clinics to dispose of the eggs? He won't, of course. Then we'd have thousands and thousands of embryos in freezers, waiting for some selfless woman to implant a stranger's baby in her womb.

Instead, Bush's administration allows federal dollars to pay for your IVF treatments, and the subsequent destruction of those embryos should you decide to take that path.

So is the President serious about this culture of life business? Not at all, at least in regards to stem cell research. While these statements of moral weight were made back in 2001, when the country had less serious matters to fret over, we should still recognize that potentially lifesaving research is being profoundly hampered in this country.

Is it potentially lifesaving? How would all this stuff work? I'll address that next post.

Somehow, I've always known

2005-04-16T10:27:00.000-07:00

Communications jamming devices hidden under the floorboards at the Vatican.

History repeating isself

2005-03-29T21:36:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of criticisms of George W. Bush. Here, read some salient examples, plucked from various news sources [culled by the inestimable Paul Slansky]:

"He was as vapid student as I can ever recall ... Nothing came out of his mouth that was worth remembering."

- Political science prof Robert Sedlack

On the domestic front, he declares that Republicans "understand the importance of bondage between parent and child," though, of course, he means "bonding".

- Paul Slansky

"A boisterous speaker whose face turns red and arms flap wildly when he gets excited about the issue being debated ... Frequently talks at length about issues whether he completely understands them or not."

- Sara Fritz/Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times

"There's something chilling about a hawk on defense who pronounces the word 'nuclear' as 'nucular.'"

- David Gritten, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Sound familiar? Of course. You could probably have made these quotes up in your head and still gotten them correct. However, there's one thing not quite right here: each one of those quotes refers not to President George W. Bush, but to former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle.

The parallels between Bush the younger and Quayle are striking. As you've probably read, Bush was a mediocre student, a drunk, received preferential treatment in order to avoid the Vietnam war, and traded on family connections his entire life. Precisely the same can be said of Quayle at every step. Quayle was a terrible student and a drunk at DePauw, just as Bush was a loutish Yalie cheerleader. Both enjoyed interventions on their behalf from politically-connected parents to avoid dangerous wartime service, both were let into professional school under the radar through affirmative action programs, and both consistently failed at their efforts at actual business and required constant bailing out. Even while in office, both men crowed on defense after their ignominious histories of shoddy service, praised the self-made despite their own dependency on highly-placed others, stumbled with language ["bondage" vs. "subliminable"] and had their images boosted mostly with media-savvy handlers despite their own efforts and antics.

Indeed, so strikingly similar are these men that Puddin sometimes has to wonder: Did George H. W. Bush, the 41st President, actually have a grander scheme in mind when he picked Quayle? It is almost as if Bush pere suspected that one day his chump son might want to run for higher office, and he picked somebody just like him to be Vice President to see if it could be done.

Keep paying attention to these two men. It's not like Quayle is in the news these days, so you'll have to rely on your own memory and whatever other resources you can dig up. Of course, Quayle obtained such a reputation for being so thick that some quotes attributed to him are apocryphal. Disregard those for the greater story: aren't Quayle and Bush II astonishingly similar? Why might that be?

Today's addition to our idiom

2005-03-28T09:37:00.000-08:00

There's an article in today's New York Times detailing an interesting, if little-enforced, law that exempts servicemen from financial obligations [e.g., mortgages] while they're in active duty. Makes sense. A substantial number of them are getting screwed, because creditors from non-military towns don't know anything about the law and are going around foreclosing everything. It's a shame. However, the silver lining here is that one of the military lawyers involved evoked the most brilliant idiom ever, which I'm sure made the Times reporter squeal with delight:

But these efforts are not enough, said Col. John S. Odom Jr., retired, of Shreveport, La., who is a specialist on the act. "What we need is a way to reach Joe Bagadoughnuts in Wherever, Louisiana," he said. "Because that's where these cases are turning up."

Joe Sixpack, I believe we've found your rightful heir.

In case you might be harboring any doubts

2005-03-25T08:33:00.000-08:00

From today's New York Times (emphasis mine):

Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurologist and medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School who has examined Ms. Schiavo on behalf of the Florida courts and declared her to be irredeemably brain-damaged, said ... there was no doubt that Ms. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. "Her CAT scan shows massive shrinkage of the brain," he said. "Her EEG is flat - flat. There's no electrical activity coming from her brain."

Here's how an EEG works.

Any questions?

Jesus lord

2005-01-20T16:03:00.000-08:00

It has been many moons since Puddin messed with this thing; he's been variously crippled and elevated, laid and laid low. He only really had two readers anyway and corresponds with both of them far more frequently. But anyway.

Bush got inaugurated today for a second term. He has opined that his reelection is a validation of his domestic and foreign policies, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

In Austin, various email forwards are requesting people to boycott consumerism today as a show of solidarity. One of Puddinhead's acquaintances asks, "Why hurt local business whose owners and employees probably voted for Kerry anyway?" Good point. One could stop buying gas, but it's not like Puddin drives anyway.

And, coincidentally, today I got sent something even more foul: this concept car design from Ford. Just look at it: are Ford's designers expecting the US to turn into a rioting Nairobi or Fallujah? The thing is designed to fend off attackers for hours at a time. It almost seems as if Ford itself is expecting a revolution, and it is out to arm the rich.

The other side of the coin

2004-09-07T14:58:00.000-07:00

Help yourself to a pro-Bush series of projections. Hey, I never said we weren't totally partisan around here.

And, while I'm at it, time for an amusing anecdote. As reported by Slate's Chris Suellentrop, a headline in the Greensboro [NC] New & Record read "Some gay men hook up at area parks."

I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you. I am almost as shocked as when I read that homophobic men exhibit significantly higher arousal [as measured, er, physically] watching gay porn than did ones comfy with Freddie Mercury or whatever. It's always the taboo that's the most inflaming.

Along the same line of thinking, I guess if gay marriage were legal, it would stop being so goddamned hot.

Bah

2004-09-07T08:30:00.000-07:00

Why does blogger insist on deleting posts? Motherfucker.

Okay, I feel just a little better

2004-09-06T13:58:00.000-07:00

Help yourself.

So a lot of shit goes down

2004-09-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

It's raining here on Labor Day, and, predictably, I'm at work. I'm also reeling from the announcement that the entire lab here is going, like it or no, to Seattle in about a year. Er, did I say "like it or no"? Maybe the more appropriate phrase is "if you're invited". Eesh.

Moreover, looking at the electoral math makes me queasy. It is disconcerting to see liberals stumble into that path that they're superior and let everyone know it, but at the same time frustrating to realize while they may not be right, the current regime is far, far wronger. I am getting the increasing sense that this country is one run by Creationist teachers, who are at that stage in their life when facts begin to undermine their ideology but they spend all their time stubbornly ignoring them. If you're a high school teacher, this has gentler repurcussions, say, that if you're a vaccine designer. The Bush administration seems to be designing vaccines these days, and the left's attempts to address this tend to be supercilious folk who aren't going to influence much.

Take a look at that electoral map again. Notice that if you don't live in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Florida, your vote doesn't really matter. Know anyone who lives there? Do you trust them with the rudders of the country? Just askin.

The darkness abates, a little

2004-08-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

And by that I mean I get to write again. Today's good news.

The psychology of sucking me dry

2004-07-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

I put in a post about being too tired, from work or age; I cannot say. But blogger deleted it, so now I don't even have that.

Motherfucker.

Two unrelated reasons to cheer

2004-06-22T10:59:00.000-07:00

Yay!

Woohoo!

Now this is just funny.

2004-06-20T09:20:00.001-07:00

Today's New York Times Magazine gives us a birds-eye of an interesting project. Turns out Metallica has been filming their group therapy sessions. [I know, the link requires a login, suck it up]

Not only that, but the reviewer gleefully indulges in the exact thing you or I would in the theater: mockery. Just listen:

Virtually everyone in the theater snickered like condescending hyenas, just as they did during every other visceral, meaningful moment in the documentary. And so did I.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I actually saw Metallica about a year ago, and it was the first time [God knows how it took me this long] to utter in public, "I just don't get white people." There were great heaving women who yanked up their tops and licked each other to audience hootings. The venue [some big roofed thing in Houston] stopped selling beer a full hour before Metallica even came on, suggesting to me that this was their only attempt at crowd control. And then the band came out.

My friend Ray was a bouncer in the Bay Area throughout the 80s, and he got a weirdly intimate look at that world. Humpty from the Digital Underground was a regular, and Ray observed lots of madness and busted heads. His name for Metallica is "The Glitter Midgets", which, having seen them in concert, is completely accurate.

How to tell? The stage is covered in stagehands and cameramen and light dudes scurrying this way and that. A cameraman goes up to James Hetfield or Lars and shoots for awhile, and you can't help but think, "Shit, that's a big cameraman." He's got at least a head on James, maybe a head an a half. "Fuck, that one over there by Lars is huge too! Fuck, they're all gi-normous!"

This is in fact actually not true. All the cameramen at a Metallica show look like giants because the band itself is probably 5'5". We're talkin James Madison small. Many celebrities are, turns out. I've met Lenny Kravitz, who can't be any more than 5'7", probably less. In "Zoolander", you can see clearly that Ben Stiller is even shorter than that. Tom Cruise, Van Damme, Stallone .. quite a pattern. I am shocked, shocked that persons who might have felt inferior in some way have sought out careers that commanded the adulation of millions. It's astonishing!

The final nail in the coffin of public protest as a method to effect policy change. That, and some nudity

2004-06-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

So this morning, after a misadventure in the mundane details of life [automotive, if you must know], I went to this. Embarrassingly, Puddinhead has a long history of public nudity, albeit usually more in the sense of gleeful shenanigans than actual protest events, and so he felt obliged to have one last go-around. Living in a city that still has a comparatively thick hippie population, I get treated to the occasional protest in the street against Bush or Iraq or Ashcroft or oil or whatever. I'm no great fan of Dubya, and I can understand the cultural momentum that underlies the genuine protest sentiment. Time was, one could get the people together and actually accomplish something. At one point or another, some folks decided that protests weren't actually going to get the job done. These days, in the United States, it seems pretty clear to me that protests don't do a damn bit of good, and, in particular, why this one with the naked people and the bikes was woefully flaccid. [If you skipped the first link, it was a "naked bike protest" to increase awareness of alternate forms of transportation.] There are several reasons for this protest impotency:

1) In terms of trying to influence the current President, you can't even get close enough for any policymakers to actually hear you. [Of course, it's not like they even bother watching the news anyway.]

2) Do protesters actually vote? I'm looking for numbers and am not really coming up with anything definitive. For the time being, I'm going to speculate "no", mostly because ...

3) Protests are no longer political events but social ones. Probably the greatest example of this is a lengthy New York Times article on the enormous grassroots to-do of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, yet somehow couldn't get past the notion that people who did this made social bonds and fell in love. Much was made of their social awkwardness and the seeming acceptance they found by volunteering in the organization, indeed, the article didn't really touch on Dean's politics at all. Is this what the movement amounted to? A cure for loneliness, as compared to a genuine thrust for social and political change? You bet.

4) Anybody who has any real power these days is a lobbyist anyway. Ever wonder why all the laws are slanted to benefit the rich? It's because they're better at bending ears! If the sorts of protests you see nowadays changed things, we'd have marijuana at the grocery store and free patchouli in your mailbox. Okay, we might have universal health coverage too. But the people who are pushing for these things are either a)not rich or b) really shitty at disseminating their message to the right people.

As you might well imagine, the naked protest ride flopped as a protest. Why? It was a social event. It invited lots of gawkers [a bunch of newspeople, the usual cadre of Girls Gone Wild-type photographers, several TV news trucks], got the front page of the local paper, and, let's face it, there's no way it would get that sort of participation without a gimmick. The "protest" element was restricted to yelling at streetbound pedestrians, either walking or waiting at bus stops, that driving sucks and one should seek alternate forms of transport. Er, like they were doing.

To add a tinge of nastiness to the proceedings, Austin both prides itself on being liberal but has gentle racial tensions unheard of in other, more "conservative" cities, like Houston. Which is to say, Austin is full of privileged white folks who are fine with the idea of recreational drug use and homosexual experimentation but are not quite so sure about making friends in the "bad" part of town. Despite having say, a 12% black population in the city, wandering anywhere west of the interstate that divides the town will net you zero sightings. While Austin's racial divide is a topic for another post, it was palpable to be in a phalanx of well-heeled hippie whiteys riding bikes, telling the poor folk and pedestrians that they should be bicycling when they're too poor for cars or almost anything else. There may have been some uneasy solidarity between the hippified Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers, but it sure don't seem that way now. Somewhere the hippies either got rich, or turned into crystal-bearing earth mothers, or both. In the meantime, brown and black folks got screwed. Again.

So, well-off naked people tending a social event and gentle exercise are not really going to get the US out of Iraq, no matter how loud they yell. They'll tick off the folks who might actually benefit from some of the policy changes they're proposing. And the female ones will get their images masturbated to later on that evening.

But hey, it was pretty cool to cruise through the Capitol in a speedo with a police escort.

Ding dong

2004-06-07T15:25:00.000-07:00

So Reagan died over the weekend. Not to be morbid, but he's been at the top of my dead pool for some years now [sharing the throne with the Pope]. And, as I wasn't savvy enough to write his obituary a long time ago and slacked off this weekend, pretty much everyone beat me to the punch. And all of those responses are only on one lousy site! We've already descended into sufficient meta-analysis that commentators are already bitching about the coverage.

It was bad enough when Reagan was actually in office in terms of the country's divisiveness, let alone now. And considering that his love of deficits and contempt, or at the very least indifference, to inconvenient facts are but a mere antecedent of today's regime. I hated Reagan from the beginning, despite being only six years old at the start of his first term. Time and time again, folks from different venues strenuously disputed the facts upon which Reagan's policies were based, and at various points asserted that he was unable to tell movies from reality. Perhaps the day will come when public servants set policy on empiricism, which is to say, facts. But that day has been postponed by Reagan, and even more so by Bush. We'll see how ugly things will get before they start to get better. I try not to listen to this guy too much, but I'm a little worried that he's right.

The descent into darkness slows just a wee bit

2004-06-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

Puddinhead normally doesn't traffic in these circles, but this is a bloody godsend.

Eau du smack and bisexual implications in the beltway

2004-06-02T15:49:00.000-07:00

One of the more odious words to come out of this business is "blogosphere". It seems to be on the lips of pundits everywhere, especially ones that traffic in would-be political analysis. I guess the idea is that this wing of the internet is an echo chamber, and, while a fairly closed one [a news.google search for "blog" gives us a paltry 1600 stories, as compared to, say, 19,000 for "horse"], every once in awhile things bust out.

I had pretty much considered the punditry migration to the internet to be the ultimate in self-insulation. Last year, I was teaching a science class to a bunch of business majors, when the most idiotic of the bunch confided to me that he was a "budding pundit". Really, I mused. What exactly does a pundit do? I might be wrong, but it sounds like such a person gives advice to people who are unable to affect public policy. Which is to say, entertainment. Which is to say, such people shouldn't take themselves too seriously. Especially since it seems that the blogosphere is a place where each political blogger reads the other one, quotes it, and links back, resembling nothing so much as an internicine, google-linked sewing circle. Which, really, seems entirely appropriate, given the pundit's role as an entertainer and impotent architect of public policy.

Indeed, the most recent [and only, so far as I can recall] explosion from that land of nod to the actual news is, predictably, a sex scandal. A low-level staffer, Jessica Cutler, dubbed herself "Washingtonienne" and had written a naughty blog wherein she details sleeping with a variety of men, some politically-connected, some, not so much. If there's any mistaking her for a serious political analyst, here's a taste: "A man who tries to fuck you in the ass when you are sober does not love you. He should at least take you out for a few drinks to spare you the pain. Now I know that W does not care about me, only my asshole."

Profound, yes, but Jim Lehrer it ain't.

Anyway, this tripe [she coos approvingly about marthastewart.com at one point] gets picked up by a variously celebrated and denounced blog, Wonkette. Eventually the story breaks, because everyone wants to know about Bush-appointees and assfucking, and it becomes a big to-do. Wonkette herself, not a bad-looking woman, scores an evening of drinks with Washingtonienne, and produces these rather unfortunate pictures. Of course, this was after the actual fallout from her writings, so a juicier part of the scandal, that of a potential lesbian romp between a well-known Washington blogger and the roundheeled staffer she outed, had missed the Post entirely and was restricted to the reverberations of the echo chamber. [Bear in mind that this post would be chock-full of Washingtonienne links if I bothered to rigorously sift through the literature, but there's only so much shit I can give about this topic.] And, predictably, it has fallen from, and I quote, "Damn. After seeing that picture, I wanna be the white meat in a Wonkette-Washingtonienne sandwich," to something a bit more insidious than your typical male fantasy: the niggling idea that these two women had orchestrated the whole thing to get attention. The nerve! Anyway, that's what Wonkette told me:

puddinhead: props for the hasty Washingtonienne exit.
tipwonk: i am happy to be rid of the story
puddinhead: Yeah. One needs to know the proper time to leave.
tipwonk: no regrets (except maybe the pix) but i hated those last few days
puddinhead: Figured you got porn requests from across the country. Feh
tipwonk: exactly
tipwonk: mr. wonkette was exceptionally supportive and good humored about it
puddinhead: Cheers to him. I mean, it's not as if you planned this one
tipwonk: that is not what some people think.
puddinhead: Hm. Interesting conspiracy theory, if you were after publicity as a beltway sex goddess
puddinhead: Somehow I kinda think you weren't, though
tipwonk: no. i wasn't.
tipwonk: i don't complain about any press, but that's not what i was aiming for.
puddinhead: So it's progressed from adulation to snippy accusations of scenestealing? That was quick.
tipwonk: well, it's the internet.

[Before I take any credit for actually knowing this person, you too, can bug her: "tipwonk" on AOL IM. Go for it.]

Yeah, it's messy. I was about to tell her, the gossipy blogger, "Hey, honey, live by the sword, die by the sword," but it struck me that, as a public [?] figure who's an attractive woman, it might be more apt to say, "Live by the sword, die by the howitzer." There are plenty of reasons women don't get props for fulfilling public roles, and I fully expect this one to cartwheel into nastiness in the future. For those of you into this sort of thing, be on the lookout in the upcoming days for outraged ugly male bloggers impugning her wantonness or accidental wiles.

Then, there's the rest of us, who could give a shit. Is the outrage coming? Yes, it is. Is there a moral here? Yeah. Don't read blogs.

The predictable outcome of an afternoon spent sputtering about my financial status

2004-06-01T15:28:00.000-07:00

I forgot to the pay the rent today.

Oops.

Productivity in the workplace. Or is that satisfaction? I can't recall

2004-05-31T11:03:00.000-07:00

Seeing as how I got to spend 14 hours of Saturday, 3 of Sunday, and then another 7 on today, Memorial Day, at work, it seems only appropriate to bump into this in today's Times. Lots of people lament about working and working conditions, and it seems as though the landmark cultural contributions involving the workplace have rollercoastered quite a bit [witness the plummet from 9 to 5, which was arguably more about sexism than working, to Office Space]. (For a dimestore cultural thinker like me, using movies as a benchmark to assess particular trends can be risky business. I haven't had anything to drink yet today, so forgive this sin.) So, is "Office Space" representative of the American working experience?

There have been lots of attempts to suggest that modern culture is killing us, and lots of them are mighty old. Think Modern Times or that bit in "The Grapes of Wrath" where the man on the tractor takes on an eerie, automaton quality that is described as inhuman [predictably, while looking for a quote of this, all I got were Cliffs Notes sites. Sigh]. These works suggest that humanity is stuck being cogs in some machine, as compared to some vague sense of free individualism and connectedness to the land or whatever. However, there are also usually some counterbalancing works that suggest things aren't all that bad or foster hope in some way. Which view is correct? Since there have always been movies or books criticizing the modernization of humanity [well, okay, at least since the Industrial Revolution], are we to ever really listen to their pleas? How can we tell if things are actually getting worse? Predictably, forays into the usual places won't even give you average hours worked per week, only % changes month-to-month. And examinations by other folk will suggest that there are few large-scale reported changes to the feds. So much for finding concrete evidence of work-related insanity. Be that what it may, you can find lots and lots of people point out that folks are working longer hours that are unaccounted for, only in their stress levels and neglected home lives. I'd toss out more, but this is all I get to go on today, having spent an hour wandering around the aforementioned Bureau of Labor Statistics site and found almost nothing to support my argument. Fortunately, we have lots of documentation on some of the trendsetters of American society, both in culture and management policies, to suggest I'm right. Given that the most competitive chains stoop to this sort of activity, ought we be surprised when everyone else does it? One can imagine capitalism as a microcosm of evolution: there's a lot of variation in the players, and natural selection on a subset of that variation [in the form of economic success]. Until government steps in, increasingly ruthless organizations will win out in the end. And, of course, are we to realistically expect that this government is going to do anything like that?

Of course not. Back to my 60-hour-a-week, $19,000-a-year-paying job.

---

On a side note, this was actually the first time I'd ever blundered onto the RNC website. On the front page is an "amusing" game, Kerryopoly, which tries to suggest that the player can't hang with John Kerry's lifestyle on a $40,000-a-year budget. How exactly does the Republican Party think that it can align itself with working-class Americans? Their point man has spent about eight months of his presidency on vacation. Must be nice!

Not that I'm any huge fan of the Democrats, but I think Jimi Hendrix's dad said it best: "A black person voting for a Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders."

All aboard the masturbation train

2004-05-29T14:17:00.001-07:00

At the moment that mocking bloggers became so passe that blogging itself might almost, but not quite, be cool again (for examples see foam trucker hats or reality television. Mullets are an extreme case, having gone around this turntable at least four times), I decided I might as well throw down. It will take work in order for this not to be a rehash of everyone's favorite esoteric links, and, frankly, probably more work than I can reliably produce. But hey. What the fuck. At some point writing a screenplay will be so dorky it's cool again, and I'll try that next.