Entries Tagged 'Tangential Ranting' ↓

On the way home Friday, John and I talked briefly about shifts of power. He argued that if World Power A and World Power B were feuding, whichever of the two who recruited Regional Power C would be the victor. Therefore, C would always be the winner. My take on it is that A and B would work together to nullify C in order to assure their stalemate and keep the power-struggle under their control. John commented that at that point, A and B had might as well be one and the same.

I immediately drew a parallel to the US political system. Democrats and Republicans hold all of the cards in our winner-take-all system. Which of them wins is not as important to them as keeping other contending parties out of the mix. Democrats block Nader. Neocon Republican organizations block Ron Paul. They are terrified of option C, that people will choose it, and that they will thereby lose their combined monopoly on political power. After all, what good is a Democrat or Republican who cannot make good on promises to their various corporate interests?

The “Ron Paul revolution” is important to this country because he represents that third option and its struggle for survival. Not only the struggle, however, but the wide appeal for more options than typical-Democrat and typical-Republican — both of which had might as well be collectively referred to as “typical-politician.”

This country does not need consensus. We do not need to stand united while ignoring the blood pooling at our feet. We need a dozen splintering points of view to choose from and determine the way to move forward for the moment. Only with this dilution of political power will we be able to regain a reasonable notion that said power is being used properly. Concentration of that power brings us only mass corruption — both in depth and breadth.

Those in power will never vote themselves out. It is up to us to ignore option A and option B and write in our own option C.

It is your responsibility to protect yourself and those you care about. It is not the responsibility of the police to protect you from anything. They are not knights in shining armor — they are often the janitors who clean up after the crime is committed. They are not legally culpable for crimes being committed and not legally held responsible — rarely even for crimes they commit themselves.

And so, in these great states you must fight for your right — your responsibility — to protect yourself. Minnesota and Washington are both “shall issue” states. This means that the Sheriff “shall issue” handgun conceal/carry permits to all who apply, unless there is danger in doing so as defined by law. Typically the danger is described as a history of mental illness, violent criminal convictions (including domestic abuse), etc. This is to prevent the crazies and crooks from getting permits to carry guns. Of course, they will carry anyhow if they have one, but won’t be doing so legally.

What does it mean if you don’t live in a “shall issue” state? It means that the Sheriff may — and most often will — deny your request for a conceal/carry permit for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Before Minnesota passed its “shall issue” law in 2002 or 2003, Hennepin County Sheriffs would refuse anyone without a law enforcement background regardless of an absolute lack of criminal record, mental illness, or any reasonable reason to deny a permit. The logic is nonexistent.

I got home today and read the following on SLOG:

So last night, I was innocently minding my own business (and maybe a little bit of the business of my friendly companion) when I experienced the most terrifying interaction I have ever had with a street person.

I was walking on Broadway to the Harvard Exit to see Persepolis and I was walking in front of the old, closed down QFC. A man approached me and asked if he could have some money. He was about 6’3”, Asian or Native, and wearing the typical uniform of a street person—dirty baggy clothes of an indeterminate blue-green-grey-brown-tan.

I refused to give him any money. Walking down Broadway, I’d already been asked for money four times. I didn’t have any money to give. Just cards. And, in any case, I don’t give panhandlers money. Sometimes I will buy traveling kids some food, but that’s it.

In any case, he began to follow me, calling me names.

“Fuck you, bitch!”

I rolled my head back on my neck and groaned to my companion. I can deal with “Fuck you, bitch.”

“You fucking slut!”

Again, been there, done that.

“I’m gonna…”

This is where it started to get truly obnoxious.

“I’m gonna grease your asscrack up with Vaseline and fuck you like the bitch you are!”

This is the part of the conversation where, if I had been born the way God originally planned, I would have reared my big fucking tall head around, asked this motherfucker to repeat himself, and when he did, beat the living shit out of him.

But through some freak accident, I was born into the body of a tiny little girl. And we were late for the movie. And my friend is probably not into confrontation (I didn’t ask). So I did nothing. I just kept walking.

I regret it. Generally, I don’t like to let people get away with threatening to violently rape me.

But here’s where I start to run into problems: What could I have done? Told him off? Probably a bad idea. He was obviously fucked-up and a lot bigger than me and my friend. Called the cops? Then, I would have had to wait until they got there to give a statement, if they ever came. What if he just walked away while I sat in Pagliacci’s and waited?

They all seem like dead ends. The only thing I could come up with is taking a picture of him with my cameraphone next time I see him and putting it on Slog.

This is absolutely abhorrent, particularly with the recent shootings and stabbings in Capitol Hill and nearby. If the Seattle PD doesn’t take unprovoked threats of violence seriously, no one should expect them to take actual violence seriously. No one will protect you from this guy or others. You must take into your own hands the responsibility to protect your life (and/or anal virginity.) Buy a pistol. If you live in a “shall issue” state, get yourself a conceal/carry license. Learn how to use it. Visit a pistol range often to get comfortable with it. Learn how and when not to use it.

As stated by someone in the comments of that post, someone who has less to lose than you is a potential threat — especially when they are threatening to rape you. Do not settle for pissing them off by attempting to spray their eyes with pepper spray unless you don’t feel capable of carrying (legally) a gun. In either case, you must follow through with reporting the incident to the police. Failure to do so is a breach in your responsibility to maintaining the safety of your community. Standing by and doing nothing when someone is violently threatened is a breach in your responsibility as an onlooker. The streets will be ruled by Those People™ unless law-abiding citizens stand together united against them. But first, individuals must be willing to stand up, themselves, to the trash that threatens their safety.

Learn the law. Arm yourselves. Defend yourselves, then we may defend ourselves.

In related news, Friday morning I will be applying for my Washington conceal/carry permit.

At my prodding (surely..), Macworld has done some less starry-eyed reporting on the MacBook Air and compared it to previous Mac models.

Yes, it is in every way, the slowest Intel Mac ever released.

Of course, the MacBook Air’s appeal is not about blazing speeds, but about small size and weight. However, these tests do give some indication about what level of performance users will have to give up if they’ve decided to forego a MacBook or MacBook Pro for the thin embrace of the MacBook Air.

After revealing the expected results of their testing, Macworld sputtered about how “b..b..but.. people expect portability from the m..m..MacBook Air, not performance!!1″ and failed to mention that the MacBook Air is not more portable than the vanilla MacBook, simply thinner. It will take up just as much room when you attempt to use it on an airplane in coach. It is only thinner. But, for those of you especially eager to enjoy UT2004 (p.s. it is now the year 2008) at under 20 FPS, the MBA is only $1800!

Oh, and it’s thin.

The “Cult of Mac” is a group of Apple fanbois that refuse to acknowledge downsides to Apple products. While I own a MacBook Pro, use a MacBook at work, and talk/listen/play on my iPhone, I am not a member of that cult. To be a member of the Cult of Mac, one needs to be able to ignore the shortcomings of Apple products while blindly praising those same faults or flaws as “innovative design.”

Case in point, the MacBook Air. It has worse specs than a vanilla MacBook, costs nearly twice as much, has only one USB port, no RJ45, no firewire, no optical drive, a slow-ass 4200 rpm harddrive, and a user-non-replaceable battery. Look at everything that you don’t get for $1800! Oh, but it’s thin. The only up-side is that it is the first MacBook available with a solid-state harddrive. Unfortunately, that would bring the cost up to over $3,100. At that price you could get a 17″ MacBook Pro with FAR better specs, ports, massive fast harddrive, superdrive, and an iPhone. Or, you can get something that’s really thin.

…

Nevertheless, the Apple fanbois eat this shit up. “It’s clearly for on-the-go businesspeople who don’t need cables!!1″ they say, nevermind that businesspeople who are on the go and stay at hotels which provide ethernet access but charge extra for wireless. Nevermind that they are still shackled to the wall since users cannot replace their own batteries, and so must charge up a single battery over and over again until someone from an Apple store replaces it for you — likely having to ship it to California first to do so.

The next most popular theory is that it is for use as a “second Mac” — clearly not as a primary machine! What, exactly, is the benefit of it as a second Mac when compared to a MacBook? The MacBook is nearly as small, faster, has firewire for direct-connecting to another Mac, video out, ethernet, an optical drive, etc. The only thing that the Air has going for it is that it is thin, and unless you routinely need to shove laptops into inter-office envelopes, that is a completely useless trait when compared to the perfectly acceptable thickness of the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines.

And now, I move on to OS X. Touting it as the “World’s Most Advanced Operating System” is abso-fucking-lutely retarded. All it is, is a lovely front-end for a *nix system and that is why I use it. There is one application which makes OS X worthwhile, and one only — Terminal. If Terminal were removed in a patch, OS X would become completely useless for anyone who desires to do something beyond reading their email and browsing websites in Safari. Terminal grants you access to all of the functionality which all UNIX/BSD-derivatives have but which the front-end in OS X refuses to let you even see. Perhaps OS X will be able to legitimately claim to be the “World’s Most Advanced Operating System” when they start enabling power-users to utilize the full functionality of the underlying operating system without having to rely on Terminal to do so. Instead, we get a fucking 3D dock with window contents reflecting off of it. Wow. Windows XP Pro is more “advanced” than OS X when it comes to features an average user has access to.

The other day, a boss of ours took John and I with to visit the Apple store over our lunch break, which is located in Southcenter mall in Tukwila, a suburb of Seattle. The store is pretty small, with computers on each side of the store and a small island in the middle with iPhones, iPods, etc. It was packed with people, at noon on a Thursday.

I figured, hey, other people are just coming here on their lunch breaks too. They grab a bite to eat at the food court and then walk around the mall a bit. Right? Only, Southcenter has no food court. There is a Johnny Rockets, a Rainforest Cafe (essentially Chuck-E-Cheese for tweens and their parents who can afford $18 per plate for lunch), and a few other restaurants with separate buildings beyond the parking lot — an Olive Garden, Cheesecake Factory, and something else I can’t recall the name of — all fairly pricey and certainly not a quick lunching. No World Wraps, Pita Pit, Pagliacci Pizza, nothing of the sort for just grabbing lunch and going elsewhere 15 minutes later. Do all of the people crowding the mall at noon on a Thursday have jobs with two-hour lunch breaks so they can hang around the Apple store for 30 mins, take an hour to eat at Olive Garden, and spent another 15-30 minutes stuck in parking-lot traffic while searching for the perfect spot? An alternative, I suppose, is that they bring their lunches to work to eat at their desk, and then spend their lunch break at the mall.

After work, the three of us went to Fry’s to get some work-essentials. As we drove past Target I noted how useless the building was — nothing but blank empty walls — until you reached the entrance. In Seattle, a better example of use of space is Uwajimaya Village, which is essentially a mall with a grocery store (Uwajimaya) surrounded by small shops which are all connected to Uwajimaya. All of the surrounding stores have their own street-facing storefronts and can be accessed separately of Uwajimaya, or while you shop for groceries. Oh, there is a food court too (and questionable-quality apartments above it all) while remaining about as large (maybe smaller) as a suburban grocery store.

The above simply works, and without the need for massive parking lots adjacent of each other for two stores which try to sell everything. Instead, there is specialization of shops and a central point of collaboration between them to provide a diverse set of services and goods to each customer that walks into the complex.

Back to Fry’s. The store itself seemed like a cross between a K-mart and a Radio Shack. They had some neat components for sale, null-modem cables, external 1.44mb floppy drives, etc. but seemed really slack on brand-name goods, probably to keep prices low. Another effect of low-prices, I assume, is that their employees had little care in following through with a sale. When Bakha wanted to buy a laptop, he had to ask three different employees for information on their return policy — receiving only one bit from each, and piecing it together himself. This, after one employee responded that he didn’t work in that area and didn’t think to direct him to someone who did.

So, the customer is on their own in the über-mega-store and after being funneled through the single entrance to the checkout area and directed to a numbered register by someone-who-I-can’t-imagine-justifies-their-$8-per-hour, your bag and receipt are checked at the exit 30 feet away. When did this become commonplace? Why is the customer treated as an unwelcome guest, and then as a criminal after making purchases? More importantly, why do people tolerate it? I can see the appeal now of the Apple store, where employees are so obnoxiously helpful and friendly. I, for one, will now never purchase anything from Fry’s. Fuck that store, fuck their employees, and fuck their policy of treating their customers as mindless cattle who probably stole their cheap slave-labor goods.

Today I went out to see Sweeney Todd at the local suburban Minnesota theater — a Carmike Cinemas theater. The showing was at 4:05pm, so I arrived at 4:00 on the dot, moments before they began seating. I chose a seat, sat down, and waited. The fat cunts behind me talked obnoxiously-loudly about a friend of theirs getting suspended from school. They appeared to be at the movie with their illegitimate father, or perhaps the high school janitor that they exchange favors with for tickets to an R-rated movie on Christmas eve.

Anyhow, one of the trailers caught my attention. A band named “Three Doors Down” apparently shot a music video for a song of theirs, “Citizen Soldier” for the National Guard. It was three minutes of doom-and-gloom, with hilarious comparisons of National Guardsmen in Iraq with Minutemen fighting the British during the American Revolution. I am sorry, but being led into war with our President’s father’s old buddy is not the same as earning our nation’s independence from the British. How fucking tasteless and, frankly, pathetic. Is scouring high schools around the US for drop-outs no longer sufficient?

Thankfully, there was justice-poetic, as one of the next trailers was one for Stop Loss. I imagine that the rest of the theater, including the twitching jackasses behind me, didn’t appreciate the irony. Their loss.

So, 31 minutes later, at 4:36, the movie FINALLY started. I had lost count of how many trailers I’d seen — only the one for Stop Loss looked any good. Over all, it is a pretty gruesome flick. There is a lot of throat slitting, and it’s all very.. gushy. I’ve seen reviewers recommend that those who enjoy the SAW movies go see Sweeney Todd, but I disagree. I don’t think that they would be able to sit through the introductory song, much less all the ones that follow, and the plot would escape the average SAW-enthusiast. If you don’t mind a musical, like Johnny Depp, enjoy a good revenge movie and can stomach a bit of gore, I highly recommend that you go see it. I give Sweeney Todd 4.5 out of 5 buckets of mystery-meat.

Two posts in one day! I feel myself getting burned-out already.

I saw the movie Everything is Illuminated tonight, thanks to Netflix. I give it 3.5 out of 5 tired stares.

It started so well.. it was amusing, yet a little touching. You were drawn in fairly quickly by the various neurosis of the main characters. From “Alex”, the wig– uh, Ukranian Hip-Hop aficionado / translator and his physically abusive dysfunctional family to the obsessive-compulsive collector “Jonathan” played by the fabulously-gay hobbit Elijah Wood.

Half way through, however, it falls flat. Alex’s translations to and from Jonathan to various other characters no longer amuse and, in fact, hurt the movie. While sometimes he repeats verbatim what a character says — hearing lines twice is always a blast — often in the last quarter of the movie he completely fails to translate anything of meaning at all. Several paragraphs are reduced to three word sentence fragments. And yet, somehow, Jonathan intuits what is said. Magical.

And now, the part which will make people hate me.

I grow tired of the holocaust movies. I cannot name all of the ones I have seen, and though they all attempt to shamelessly tug at the sadness-strings to cheaply wring some tears out of you, every one of them evokes the same response from me. Anger. What the hell was ANYONE involved thinking? 1) Hey, herding people into train cars and making them drink urine sounds like fun. Oh wait, no, that NEVER sounds like fun. That sounds like twisted sadistic shit. 2) Hey, being herded into train cars and being forced to drink urine sounds like fun. Oh wait, no, there is no fucking way I should be forced to do this and perhaps I should fight back. 3) Hey, sitting back and watching people being herde– NO IT REALLY ISN’T FUN, DO SOMETHING TO STOP IT.

Passive resistance be damned — if you are herded into train cars and forced to drink urine you and the dozens, hundreds, thousands around you need to jump the nearest guard, take his weapon, and right the horrible wrongs occurring around you. Yes, the jews (and others) were victimized by the Nazis. Yes, that’s awful. No, it should never happen again. No, we should not herd every non-jew into a traincar of guilt and force them to drink their own pride. Pride is what we all need to avoid this ever happening again — not guilt or shame or sadness. I cannot fathom how much of ones own humanity the have to lose in order to allow themselves to be turned into sacrificial animals. I just don’t get it. How utterly oppressed by society, by government, by government, by government, even by friends and family must you be in order to lose that tiny part of you that whispers in your head.. “hey, being herded like an animal and forced to drink my own urine is wrong, I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore?” I guess that movie came out after WWII, but I imagine that at least some people still thought it. That level of oppression and mind-manipulation scares the hell out of me.

For once I want to see a holocaust-related movie where there is a hero, not just victims and escapees. I don’t know if that is possible while still remaining true to history.