Loving Our Guns with Common Sense

The murder of 27 people, in Newtown, Conn. is an event so horrible that it can’t be ignored. And hopefully we will not revert back into the roles previously assigned in the debate over guns.

So far the politics has been sadly reactive, one-sided and simplistic. Anti-gun activists waving the bloody shirts of Newtown are as shameless as the chicken hawks who waved the bloody shirts of September 11. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker called gun rights advocates "the child killing lobby.” Does he realize he’s calling about 80 million people child killers? Probably not.

Both the left and the right in this country are more than willing to trample the Bill of Rights when it’s politically feasible. This latest horror has proven to be no exception. We don’t have to look far back in our history to see how the politics of horror lead to decades of error, suffering and the loss of freedom.

Owning guns is a right guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. It’s the Second Amendment, top of the list, second only to the right to free speech and the freedom of religion. That was not a mistake. We didn’t shutter the gun stores on Dec. 15 for the same reason we didn’t shutter the mosques on Sept. 12. We’re a better country than that.

Pro and anti-gun forces agree: way too many of the wrong people have easy access to guns, and something must be done about that.

And many of us on the side of gun rights have been our own worst enemy when faced with this fact. For years we’ve only said no to proposed gun restrictions without proposing ideas that would work in keeping guns out of the hands of those that shouldn’t have them. And the idea of arming teachers as a way to prevent school massacres is a sign that our side is out of real ideas.

What’s going to solve the problem is dealing with the people who own the guns and how they keep them, not on what kinds of guns the law abiding can keep. The guns used in the Newtown massacre were all legally owned by the mother of the murderer who was herself victim. I want know how they were kept. Were they in a locked gun locker like they should have been? Why did a non-owner have access to them? How did he get that access? And most importantly: what warning signs about the shooter were ignored?

Regulating access to guns by people with mental illnesses would have been a more reliable way to prevent many of the recent gun massacres in the U.S. It means tackling issues of medical privacy and the sad state of the country’s mental health system, but if we ignore the issue of mental illness, we will have missed the point, and have massive school stabbings at best.

The N.R.A. and other gun rights groups should work to develop a system that allows the government to stop dangerous people from getting guns. This means that owners have to keep their guns safely and dealers have to know who not to sell guns to. Many of the guns used in these attacks were used by people already known to be dangerous but who went without any government sanction on their access to firearms. The shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre had been found by a court to be a danger to himself and others, but there was no effective system in place to keep him from obtaining guns.

If you think regulating what kind of magazines are legal or how many of what gun you can have will make a difference, think again. That’s been tried before. Many high capacity magazines are already illegal in many places. Gun manufacturers will stay ahead of the game to make guns that blur the lines between hunting rifle and assault weapon. (Historical note: some of the large loopholes in the 1994 assault weapons ban were placed there by Democratic representatives from Connecticut, home to the Colt firearms company. The assault weapons ban expired in 2004).

What has been working is the waiting period for handguns. That allows for gun dealers to make sure that the potential buyer did not have a criminal record. We need to make sure that the dangerously mentally ill are kept away from all guns in the same way.

Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the insane is what everyone agrees on. Trying to outlaw guns outright or place excessive constraints on gun owners tramples very real and important freedoms and fuels a culture war that has no winners. 

Meteors

There is a great meteor shower happening right now outside.

Meteors are pointed sparks of poet’s fire. Pure spirits spitting rain to remind us, in a good way, that we are small but destined to take in the whole universe and know every bit of it. They are wild fire fleeting like lift itself, burning brightly with a thrill to light the entire sky, but in an instant gone, a brief but brilliant memory burned into our being. While they do not last long, their inspiration can last decades.

The Perseid meteor shower in the summer of 1993 was amazing, and after a night of watching and being inspired by the meteors I went back inside my apartment and wrote a poem that was to be the first of many. That meteor shower started my life as a writer, and sparked my turn to art from politics, which was a good thing.

May you witness the night sky and marvel at the meteors. May they inspire you to burn memories fantastically in the lives of others and leave traces of your existence, however fleeting.

Sneaking Into the New York Stock Exchange

The glorious life of a writer consists largely of working jobs that will let you keep a roof over your head without driving you to suicide. For the past 12 years, minus a year of unemployment after being laid off, I have worked as a financial journalist.

It was in this capacity that I had the chance to visit the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to witness the ceremonial opening bell. I’m not normally ever in a position to go to the stock exchange—I don’t write about stocks and the publication I write for is small and obscure for anyone not involved in the junk bond or leveraged loan markets.

Journalists often have the attitude that they comprise such a special estate of American life that they are entitle to access and privileges that other people aren’t, and really that’s a lot of bullshit. The journalists doing the most important work are NOT the ones you see with fancy credentials dangling from their necks. The best journalists are the ones out on the street or ferreted away in a filing room digging through old or obscure documents for the cold hard unfashionable facts. If you’re a journalist and government officials and captains of industry consider you a friend, you’re doing it wrong.

Nonetheless, I jumped at the chance to visit the stock exchange floor on the flimsy pretext that presented itself. It’s a beautiful piece of architecture and a place off-limits to most people. The New York Stock Exchange used to allow tourists to visit and see the trading floor from a glassed in balcony (glassed in after Abbie Hoffman and a group of hippies threw dollar bills from the visitor’s gallery). All tourist visits ended after the Sept. 11 attacks.

I wish I could tell you I went on a Hunter S. Thompson-esque journey through smoky backrooms where cocky stockbrokers snorted giant lines of cocaine and made billion-dollar deals while I warded off angry pimps with a .357 Magnum, but it was nothing like that.   

After waiting at a security checkpoint, two young NYU students/public relations interns escorted me to another security checkpoint where I went through a metal detector and got a visitor’s pass. Some very friendly security guards held the pocket knife that I forgot to leave at the office and gave it back to me when I left.

The interns escorted me to the floor of the stock exchange and over to where the opening bell is rung. The balcony where the guests of honor ring the opening bell is smaller and lower to the ground that you expect after seeing it on television for years. It’s an interesting place where modern technology has been shoe-horned into a beautiful marble hall that was built for simpler, more elegant times.

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange does not erupt into a frenzied bedlam at the start of opening bell. Very little exchanging actually takes place on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange anymore. Most trading is done electronically. The NYSE’s rival NASDAQ stock exchange is completely electronic and their official exchange location is a TV studio in Times Square where they have their opening and closing bell ceremonies along with the ubiquitous big flashy screens.

I forgot to turn in my visitor’s pass when I left, so at least I have a souvenir.

The Other Side of the “Demographic Dilemma”

The going conventional wisdom regarding voter turnout in the latest presidential election is that the changing racial demographics of the U.S. mean that certain policies are now completely off limits and that the Republican Party faces certain doom unless it mends its evil ways.

There’s no doubt the Republican Party needs to do some work. With hooting ignoramuses that made insane quips about rape, abortion and evolution, I’d hate to see the candidates they turned away.

But the demographic argument is the one that is the most one-sided and simplistic and fails to look at the entire picture of racial politics.

Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are growing in number and since they all are voting predominantly Democratic now, the Republicans need to adopt policies that will appeal to these groups on nakedly racial lines if they want to cobble together electoral victory, so the theory goes.

It quickly became a tired mantra: The Republican Party needs to expel all those mean old racist white men who don’t believe in open borders or affirmative action or else the GOP is going to lose every national election.

What this account leaves out is the opposite side of this equation: If non-white ethnic groups are on the increase and are voting in large blocks, then whites are expected to vote as a block as well. The same forces of racial demography that apply to nonwhites apply to whites. 

Mitt Romney got a higher percentage of the white vote than John McCain, so whites are already voting more along racial lines. Why should they not? It’s somehow the cool thing to do in our “post-racial” America. A ham-handed candidate, Mitt Romney got a sizeable majority of the nation’s largest ethnic voting block without taking any really substantial stand on controversial issues like immigration. That should scare the bejesus out of liberal Democrats thinking in the long-term.

The left has successfully demonized any criticism of illegal immigration or affirmative action as inherently “racist.” Never mind that illegal immigration disproportionately harms blacks and Hispanics, as even respected liberal economists have pointed out. And affirmative action and other racial preference policies have the effect of excluding Asians and Jews at higher rates than whites. Asian and Jewish voters still vote predominantly Democratic, for now.

The dream among Democrats today is that this new multiethnic America will see blacks and Hispanics unite with the enlightened whites to defeat the evil cabal of Caucasian Scrooges and usher in the progressive American utopia that was meant to be.

But as machinery meant to realize this dream of a harmonious multiracial society keeps humming along, more and more whites and Asians will come to the realization that it’s them on the losing side of the multicultural math. Again, it’s not going to be due to anything but a shift in numbers. The greater number of nonwhites in the population, the greater number of whites pushed aside by government policies meant to do just that. More whites will start voting Republican (or whatever party replaces the GOP as the new “white” party). And now that the genie of racial demarcation is out of bottle, white voters are going to begin to vote more in a block than before.

Another giant misperception of the “demographic dilemma” perspective is that the nonwhite coalition forged by the Obama campaign is going to hold in the long-term. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians don’t all give each other giant hugs and sing “Kumbaya” in the celebration of not being white. They are as different and distrustful of one another as any other ethnic coalition that’s stapled together. Asians gain the least out of this bargain, being disproportionately injured by affirmative action. And blacks and Hispanics will need better reasons to remain in the same voting block other than not voting for a white candidate.

The Republican argument that blacks and Hispanics are forever lashed to the Democratic Party by entitlement programs, even if 100% true, is an argument with a short shelf life. The U.S. government is broker than broke, and it’s only a matter of time before the ax comes down, even on the sacred cows of Social Security and Medicare.

Just as our systems of cash-and-carry corporate government and rampant speculative financial cronyism fell apart under their own weight, so too will the multiple constructs meant to create a more racially balanced society. There’s no way to create a multiethnic mosaic in every institution without going to more ridiculous and obvious lengths. Even the most reckless gambler will eventually walk away from a stacked deck.

What this has meant so far has put whites on the losing side of several issues. Unchecked illegal immigration puts pressure on the public services of various municipalities all over the country. The U.S. government brings lawsuits against states that try to regulate this on their own. And President Obama’s second term promises more of the same disparate impact-based civil rights pursuits that has produced a de-facto racial spoils system.

The racial stratification of the American electorate cuts deep, but it cuts both ways.  

Happy Thanksgiving, Pass the Guilt…

Today is Thanksgiving, a secular American holiday that allows everyone to be thankful for what we have.

And some of my good friends have already alighted to the Internet to denounce Thanksgiving as a celebration of genocide, saying that we should feel shame for our place in the world given that our part of civilization is based on the ruins of another.

If you’re in a comfortable enough place that you can cast aspersions on your own history and doubt the validity of your own place in the world, be thankful. Questioning your own past is a luxury afforded to the very few.

Chances are, the people most vocal about denouncing the colonization of the Western Hemisphere by Europeans are European Americans who live with the benefits of this colonization every day. The overwhelming majority of people in this hemisphere of the world should be very thankful for the colonial policies of 1600s Europe; we wouldn’t be alive without them. Few to none of us would exist without European settlement in the New World.

Unless you’re signing over all of your property to a needy Native American and heading back to mother Europe, your reminders about the suffering of indigenous Americans ring very hollow.

So eat up, enjoy, and be thankful you are alive in a land of plenty that affords you the opportunity to denounce the people who did the dirty work on your behalf.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A Crazy Bitch Named Sandy

            Despite hopes that Hurricane Sandy would be a dud to New York like last year’s Hurricane Irene, New York was struck hard by the hurricane. Many parts of the city experienced intense flooding unlike the city has ever seen in its history.

           

            The wife and I are among the extremely lucky ones to have undisturbed power, cable and Internet throughout the hurricane. The most stress we faced was when we had to pause a streaming Netflix movie to tape up our windows during a very windy time. It’s been shocking to see images online of areas one is familiar with sitting under several feet of water. It is a luxury to have power and an Internet connection right now. I am very lucky to have a job where I can work at home. I am very lucky to even have a job at all right now.

            Eight people dying in a storm is terrible. But considering wide swaths of the city were flooded, hundreds of homes destroyed and hospitals evacuated, it’s damn impressive the body count is so low.

The weather kicked our city’s ass, but we don’t sit around feeling sorry for ourselves; we get back to work. People are already making plans and trying to figure out how to get things done without subways, which is no easy task. The MTA, never one for punctuality and particularly bad at dealing with the weather, will take a few days to get back up and running.

In New York, it is only a matter of time before things are back to business as usual. The city is too busy to be too sentimental for too long. New York runs on a constant buzz and bustle, and it takes major disasters or terrorist attacks to knock it off kilter, and then never for very long. 

Franken-Prepared

New York is in the midst of a mild “Frankenstorm” fever. Approaching storm fronts may dump  multitudes of rain and/or snow on our metropolis in a day or two, and New Yorkers are waiting to see what gets canceled when and what the latest forecast might reveal.

The panic that gripped New York prior to hurricane Irene last year has yet to grip us in the specter of the Frankenstorm. The supermarkets were not running out of bread and bottled water, though governors of New York and New Jersey have already declared states of emergency. While the disaster preparations by the government are the same, this has not seized on the consciousness of the citizenry in the same way, at least not yet, despite having the cool cache of the “Frankenstorm” moniker.

There’s a resignation to these kinds of disruptions in New York, though we are not normally subjected to the disasters that they have in hurricane alley or on the more volatile Gulf of Mexico shoreline. New York is geologically very lucky.

So now we run through a multitude of “what if…” scenarios in our minds. What if the subways are shut down Monday? What if they only close off the area where I work? What if power is knocked out? I’m hoping that no closures or suspension of mass transit is necessary, because I don’t want to have to work from home. It’s too much of a pain in the ass to try to reconfigure my home computer setup for my work needs. I can do it if I have too, though, and working from home during a storm beats being unemployed during a storm.

One interesting phenomenon that many might be unprepared for: During times of emergencies, cell phones may not be working. Too many calls overload the cell phone towers and most cell phones become useless. We saw this in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and a few years later during the East Coast blackout of August 2003. Many people are now without home phone lines because they use their cell phones more often than home phone lines. That’s something to keep in mind and an interesting phenomenon during a time of great technological transition: that some with superior means of technology will be worse off because of it in this rare instance.

I have enough weapons and Diet Pepsi to survive a Frankenstorm and a half. See you when it’s over.  

Misplaced Guilt Problems

            Perusing the vastness of social media, a phrase has caught my eye a few times and has been repeated enough to call it a trend. The phrase is “Middle Class Problems.”

            Except that isn’t the real phrase. It’s a glossed-over sanitized version of a more apt, accurate and original term that caught on first.

            The expression is “First World Problems,” not “Middle Class Problems.” To be really hip, write it without spaces and with a hash tag (#) to replicate the preferred style of the Twitter social media site. #Firstworldproblems. “There is too much guacamole on my omelet,” is a good example of such a "problem."

I’m old enough to have gone to grammar school when the schools were still teaching students real subjects. Sure we had our share of lame love-in student assemblies from time to time, but there were some facts that they didn’t hide from us. One of those facts is that we, being Americans, lived in the First World. That meant that we lived in a country where widespread famine and disease were eradicated, political decisions were made nonviolently and the basic necessities of life were easily obtained by almost all of the population. Those countries that suffered from widespread poverty, famine and disease were Third World countries. Those were the countries we were thankful not to live. It was a testament to how lucky we were to live in the First World. We weren’t taught to be ashamed of that, but to be grateful for what we had, because there were many people in the world who did not have that.

            The Second World, we were told, consisted of countries like the Soviet Block, that were developed but still lacking in many things. Once the cold war ended we saw just how second-rate the Second World was, and while our government had lied to us about a lot of things, the horrors of Communism turned out to be every bit as bad as we were told.

            Nonetheless, there was no moral judgment or implied superiority in this division of the world. It seemed to make perfect sense and was instructive to us. There is nothing about “First World Problems” that ought to offend anyone unless you’ve actually been caught complaining about how the sound of your maid cleaning your house woke you up.  Living in the First World is a good thing. No one asks to be born where they were. There are millions of people who would love to live in the First World rather than where they’re living. Why would it be wrong to say so?

            There’s no reason to feel guilty about living in The First World or declaring it so. Developed Western Civilization gets to give the nomenclature to its own standard of living, and we have our shit together better than anywhere else; that’s fact. Trying to shame us into ignoring that or saying otherwise doesn’t bring indoor plumbing to the people of the Serengeti. It’s more misplaced guilt that has no place among a sane, self-confident people.

            And in fact, the phrase “First World Problems” is not a boast of wealth, racial superiority or some other politically incorrect geographic prejudice, but an acknowledgement of our society’s own fixation with the trivial. It at once exposes and parodies the shallowness and self-regard that comes with great material success and the corruption of societal excesses. It’s the snarky, electronic media equivalent of your mother reminding you not to be such a shallow jerk; there are starving kids in Africa, you ungrateful snot.   

            The refusal to use the term when that’s what you mean is the worst kind of moral cowardice. First of all, though they are surely related, economic class and the different spheres of the developing world are not the same thing. Being middle class in the U.S.A. is nothing at all like being middle class in Ethiopia. But living in the First World means living in the first world not matter what you’re class. In their effort to not offend, these phrase murderers are substituting a subset for a set, and it doesn’t follow.

In fact, using the phrase “Middle Class Problems” as a substitute puts the user in the worst of all categories: enjoying the benefits of living in the First World and most likely not doing anything of consequence to improve things for those people starving in other parts of the world, somehow needs to alert others to their superior sense of moral rectitude. Thanks for the implied moral lesson, now go send all your co-op groceries to Somalia. Don’t have the international postage coupon to send your artisanal cheese to Africa? First World Problems. 

The Brooklyn Nets Deserve to Fail

The Barclays Center has officially opened, and this upcoming N.B.A. season will be the inaugural season of the Brooklyn Nets. If ever a team deserves to fail, it is the Brooklyn Nets. Their very presence in Brooklyn is a monument to the worst elements of power in our contemporary New York. It is a case study in abuse of eminent domain, with the government forcing people from their homes so that property could be handed over to a private developer for private profit.

            Wherever your previous sports loyalties lie or whatever your political persuasion, there are enough reasons for everyone to want to watch the Nets drown in sorrow and mediocrity. Hating the Nets could be as proud of a New York tradition as having your heart broken by the Knicks.

The Barclays Center looks like a giant rusted George Foreman Grill that’s been fitted with a toilet seat. It is covered in large poop-brown tiles and screams BARCLAYS CENTER at passers-by with large light blue lettering. It looks like it was designed by Frank Gehry’s retarded cousin (Gehry was initially tapped to design it, which is bad enough). The designers couldn’t have put together a more fitting eyesore for the occasion.

Uglier than the building itself is how it came to be there. Never was there a more perfect illustration of government corruption, crony capitalism, racial pandering and ugly architecture in these five boroughs. 

            The stadium is the centerpiece of the “Atlantic Yards” project, a scheme hatched by developer Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner at the height of the housing boom in the early 2000s. The scheme was to get public backing for a sports stadium to bring professional sports back to Brooklyn and then use that to build lots of upscale condominiums and turn a big profit.

Ratner managed to get some people to sell to him legitimately. Work crews would install scaffolding around recently purchased businesses in order to get the area declared “blighted,” which would allow further land grabs for the purposes of rebuilding an area the very same developer helped destroy. Getting your politician friends to force homeowners to sell their land isn’t capitalism.

The government didn’t invoke eminent domain in order to build a hospital, a bridge, a highway or even a public pool. Instead it forced people to sell their homes to a private developer so he could build for private gain. Will Brooklyn see more money from the area now that there’s a stadium there? Sure, but so what? Should I be forced to sell my favorite guitar to Eric Clapton because he’ll play it better and make more money with it? 

            The stadium will be open to the public that can shell out money for tickets, of course, but the profits all go to the owners. It is not owned by the people of New York or Brooklyn. It will be a financial windfall for the owners, but it’s not going to give much back to Brooklyn. It’s not a victory for capitalism either. Capitalism is buying the land honestly from willing sellers to build your stadium.

            Local landowners and residents fought in court for years to stop the Atlantic Yards project from taking their homes, but to no avail. No court stopped the project, even though its backers were shown to have lied numerous times about the environmental impact of the development. And Forest City Ratner has yet to deliver on key promises it made to solidify political and public support.  

            With a few notable exceptions, New York City’s political leadership supported the project. Remember when conservative activists secretly recorded an ACORN official giving advice to a would-be pimp exploiting underage girls? That ACORN is a corrupt recipient of public graft surprised no one who had followed the Atlantic Yards debacle closely. The activist organization was bought and paid for by the developers and dutifully parroted the mantra about jobs.

            Most of the holdout homeowners were middle and working class whites, and

the buying of ACORN also helped draw a racial dividing line in the issue. That made it easier for liberal politicians like City Council speaker Christine Quinn to back the project. Black activists and politicians like Rev. Al Sharpton touted the project as something that would bring jobs to poor blacks.

            Ratner bought the help of Brooklyn-born rapper Jay-Z, who owns less than 1% of the Nets but is one of the most public faces of the project.  He is opening the new stadium with a series of concerts. An overrated rapper who owns high-end night clubs and the like, Jay-Z made a more honest living when he sold crack.

There’s not much mention of any of this in the coverage of the arena now, except the brief asides that the stadium is “controversial.” The New York Times, whose headquarters was built by the same developer, had a feature story on the different cultural foods available at the new stadium. At least the presence of turkey meatballs is news fit to print.

            Many fair-weather Knicks fans have already jumped ship and are sporting the obnoxious black and white logos of the Brooklyn Nets. I have friends who should be smart enough to know better bragging about scoring Jay-Z tickets.

If he has not been cremated, late Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch would be rolling over in his grave at the sight of Brooklyn Nets t-shirts emblazoned with “No Sleep Till,” a reference to the Beastie Boys’ song ‘No Sleep ‘Till Brooklyn.”

It’s like being in the land of the pod people, where slack-jawed consumers take what you give them and hand over their money like trained animals. Am I delusional to think that New Yorkers were once made of stronger, smarter, more skeptical stuff? It would be forgivable to steal from such plump suckers if the Nets didn’t trample over people’s rights and build a shit-stain of a stadium to really blight once-proud Brooklyn. 

Bring on the Autumn

You can feel and taste the encroaching fall, and I’m ready for it. I can’t stand the summer heat, especially in the city. There are too many people and buildings and busses around to make summer pleasant in the city. Everyone does what they can to take a break and leave the city in the summer. You need to, just for your own sanity. This week has been nice and not too hot, almost spring-like in its temperature. Tomorrow it is supposed to be back in the 90s, the city summer we all know and dislike.

                I make a point to try to go for a short walk every afternoon on my lunch break. I take too long to walk through the parks, gawk behind my sunglasses at the scantily-clad tourist women babbling in their European languages, enjoy the view of the harbor, or just walk through the park for the satisfaction of walking through the park when I’m supposed to be behind a desk. Too often I take the same path though. It becomes too routine when you take the same path every day. I need to switch things up, maybe go by the water more and look out at the harbor and enjoy the breeze.

            Sunsets are better this time of year. There’s a brilliant blue-maroon hue to the twilight that doesn’t appear the same in the other seasons. It is those transitional times that are the most brilliant, the most poetic. The blue night that gives way to the dawn and the pre-sun dawn are the most beautiful times to be awake, even if you’re bleary-eyed and tired.

            Once we get through tomorrow, I’m hoping we can say goodbye to 90-degree weather for the rest of the year. There’s usually at least one bad Indian summer (or is that Native American Summer, is that also racist too?) in September, one last lash of the cruel sun before the comfort of a cool autumn. 

A Glitch in Time

At my job as a financial writer, our company decided to upgrade our email system, and they started a shit storm that saw some people, including high-ranking editors who supervise multiple publications, go days without any email access whatsoever.

Only a few days later, Knight Capital sunk themselves when a software malfunction caused them to buy shitloads of stocks they didn’t mean to. Their CEO asked the SEC for a “do-over” as if they were playing a game of tag. His request was promptly denied. They managed to survive only by agreeing to sell themselves only a few days later.

Knight Capital went hat in hand to beg for its life because of a software glitch. Although it is not as large as the major banks and lacks the same widespread name recognition, Knight was not some rinky-dink firm. It is a major trader and underwriter and if they can have a software glitch put them in jeopardy of losing their entire business, how much at risk are the rest of us? How quickly could we lose the money in our bank accounts as a result of such a glitch?

The Facebook IPO, the most highly anticipated IPO in years, fell victim to software glitches that will end up costing NASDAQ millions of dollars. This after repeated tests and run-throughs that were supposed to guarantee trading go smoothly.

In this advanced age of computers, the technology proficient sometimes can’t get any more specific than “glitch.” We are dependent on the world of Internet Technology to help us survive in the modern world. But in the IT field; even the experts don’t know what’s going on.

Also, cyber warfare is going to heat up soon. As exposed by the New York Times, the U.S., and Israel launched a cyber attack on Iranian computers using the Stuxnet virus. In a kick-ass, classy touch, the virus has apparently caused Iranian government computers to play the AC-DC song “Thunderstruck” (I would have gone for “Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap,” but that’s a personal bias). The Chinese and the Russians have hacked away at many of our systems and every once in a while a virus comes through that knackers scores of computers.

As we become more enamored with technology and dependent on it for our daily lives, we become diminished in capacities we used to take for granted. I used to be able to remember a woman’s phone number quite easily and dial it with lightning speed from any phone. Now I’ve been in a relationship with a woman for two years and I can’t remember her phone number to save my life (she can’t remember mine either).

It’s almost enough to make you become a Luddite and start making plans to retreat into the woods and learn to live off the land like the people who built this country, the pioneers who had only their own scrappy wits to survive. Teddy Roosevelt never had to languish in phone queue hell only to be told by a disembodied voice from India that he had to delete his cookies. Doc Holiday never had to download an app to do his work, he just started blasting.

The pioneers who conquered the West had many things to fear, and there were many things they couldn’t control. They didn’t have any say over the weather or how hostile the Indian tribes would be. But those were more tangible things you could light a fire or take up a musket against. Many us today depend on technology and if things go wrong our salvation won’t be our own tools or the sweat of our own brow but the whims and competence of a technical support agent on the other side of the globe. Technology is a wonderful thing, but it has helped neuter us as a people.

Technology is one of several things turning us into mush, but we can’t retreat from it. That would be the cowards’ way out. Luddites who purposely refuse technology are not to be applauded; they are stubborn people who think they are too important to make themselves useful and expect the world to conform to their whims. That’s weak.

And technology makes many more adventures and conquests possible. At the same time the Knight debacle was unfolding, another space probe landed on Mars. The probe’s photos were not very exciting to look at and seemed to only confirm that indeed Mars is a desolate place that has deserts even more boring than ours on Earth. But, every mission to Mars is an achievement in exploration in itself and we can pat technology on the back for that.

We need to embrace technology, but as the Knight episode demonstrates, we're a long way from using it well. So let’s please get a handle on it before it manhandles us. 

All Hail Dashing Warriors

This past Saturday I participated in a Warrior Dash, a competitive obstacle course race held in various places throughout the country. ‘Raced’ or ‘Competed’ wouldn’t be the right word, since I had little chance of winning and couldn’t care less what my time was.

The steep uphill climb had lots of warriors but very little dashing. Much of the little level ground was taken up by either obstacles or large muddy puddles where the water went up to one’s waist. Obstacles included scaling walls, crawling under barbed wire and jumping over fire. Most of us just trudged along in the mud, trying not to fall down. I fell down more times than I can count. But, I made it over, under and across every single obstacle, which was my goal.

There are a number of these events of varying difficulty that are gaining in popularity. The Warrior Dash is perhaps the easiest of them all, designed more for people who would rather drink beer in the sun than prepare for any warfare. They encourage people to run the course in costumes and give out soft imitation Viking helmets to all participants. A man dressed as Richard Simmons won for best costume; I didn’t see who won for best beard as I was too busy trying in vain to wash mud from my clothing in the Warrior Wash sprinkler-like shower.

The Tough Mudder is increasingly popular, it has teams of competitors run a longer race and compete in more difficult obstacles and physical challenges. Toughest of them all may be the Spartan Race.

I believe the reason these events are becoming more popular is that people are thirsting for adventure and challenge, and because we want desperately to prove to ourselves that we're not one of the neutered marshmallows we see all around us.

Many of us spend our days behind a desk or counter, hoping to get just a little taste of the life of a warrior, conscious of the fact that the life of a real warrior means sleeping in a ditch and praying you don’t get killed.

We’ll take our little taste of the warrior’s life, though I suspect that some of us are doing this because we want to toughen up for potentially tough and violent days ahead. That people are paying for the privilege of being put to the test is a sign of hope that some of us are trying to claw our way out of the hole we've found ourselves in as a people.

One of the signs posted along the Warrior Dash course was: ‘To Make Up For The Other 364 Days.’ See you there next year. 

(Photo taken without permission from Tru Stories from the 222nd Floor)

Strange Coin for Bums

A few months ago I found a strange object in downtown Manhattan and I have been puzzled by it and would like to learn its origins.

           

            I spotted it as I walked past Delmonico’s restaurant. I noticed what appeared to be an odd coin sitting on the edge of the landing.

            The coin is roughly the size of a quarter and appears to be plaster. It resembles a quarter that has been plastered over and it might be. On one side reads “Give Money,” and the other side reads, “To Bums.”

            So far I have not heeded the strange coin’s advice. Giving money to bums is a bad idea. Most of them will spend the money on drugs and alcohol and giving money to bums will only encourage them to stay bums. There are plenty of legitimate homeless charities you can give to if you want to help bums.

Underneath that is the cryptic “bw 12.”  Should I take that to mean that this was created by an artist with the initials B.W. this year?

Is this perhaps a coin created by a mysterious artist? Some anonymous artist has been handing out coins with the insistence that recipients leave one in a public place. Have I found such a coin?

If you have any clue as to the origins of this coin, please let me know.

I promise to keep the coin as an interesting work of art, and, using a broad definition of the term, assume that I’m close enough to being a bum to keep the coin in good conscience. 

Explosions in The American Sky

It is a few days after July Fourth but we’re celebrating and I’m lighting fireworks with clown makeup on. A fellow partygoer asks me to hold two sparklers while he takes my photo. I oblige him.

            “Sorry, but this photo is too creepy to pass up,” he says, apologizing for interrupting my important task of setting off fireworks.

            My clown makeup is creepy; it is that of Pogo the Clown, which is the clown character that serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Wearing face paint at these events is a two-year tradition for me (last year I was painted as Gene Simmons of KISS) at my friend’s Fourth of July Party, which is a tradition going back much farther.

            Steve Quilliam is the party host. He turned his one bedroom house into a three bedroom house, built the patio that now serves as a central party area, and showed me the ins and outs of hunting. He’s an intelligent man who can work with his hands, thinks things through logically and doesn’t need church. He’s the kind of man America needs more of but is killing off as quickly as it can. I won’t miss his Fourth of July party.

            More recently, a few of us have formed Premature Strangulation, a cover band with punk and heavy metal aspirations. If only we could stop some of the members from wanting to play Bon Jovi covers, we could make progress.

            Fireworks have been a party tradition since we were all in high school, drunkenly lighting them off in Steve’s mother’s back yard. Another friend, who lives farther south than the rest of us, has access to REAL fireworks, the stuff not legal in these parts. He and a few others are getting ready to set those off, but first it’s my display of the local, legal stuff that is still interesting.

            Every year I try to make a trip to Uncle Guido’s Fireworks and stock up on legal fireworks that I think will explode nicely. This year is no exception and a few other partygoers have brought some store-bought legal stuff that they pile in with mine.

            A few people join me so that we can set off multiple fireworks at once. People oooh and aaah when the fireworks are pretty and heckle us when they don’t live up to expectations. We soldier on. I take mental notes of what fireworks are the best and will try to remember that next year.

Some of us were meant to be that creepy clown setting off explosives in front of children. I embrace that role whole-heartedly. 

A New American Revolution

It’s Independence Day and the next American Revolution is slowing happening around us.

Today we take time to honor those Americans brave enough to stand up for their country against their government and create an independent republic from a smattering of colonies. Thomas Jefferson’s advice that governments need to be brought down through revolution from time to time rings as true today as it did more than 200 years ago.

Today Americans are asserting their independence and saving their country from their government once again, but not in the way we did in the 1700s. I don’t think there are any realistic plans being made to overthrow the U.S. government. But Americans more and more are doing things without their government, not because they want to make a political point, but because it’s a better way to live their lives.

The U.S. government today operates under a system of legalized bribery. Our political officeholders answer first to the wealthy interests that financed their political campaigns. Our administrative services are often corrupted by those same forces, with a revolving door between industries and the government offices meant to regulate those same industries.

The branches of government are in an almost constant state of stalemate. Very little actual legislating get done. More and more conflicts end in courtrooms or in recall elections.

For example, we can’t trust the government to keep our food supply safe or to require truthful labels on our food, so more and more of us are acting on our own to set up local food co-ops.

Our public education system is mired in political and cultural conflicts, saddled with ridiculous regulations that get in the way of actually educating kids, and are often required to house violent juveniles. More and more parents are demanding charter schools. More parents are home schooling kids or looking for affordable private schools. If it’s not happening already, educational co-ops will start to spring up. Some parents are even setting up illegal daycare centers for their children because the waiting lists for government-approved preschools are too long.

The federal government and its corporate masters and allied ethnic lobbies want illegal immigration to lower wages and divide the working classes through cultural conflict. More and more states begin passing their own immigration laws.

These are all nonviolent revolutionary acts in their own ways. Like the original American revolutionaries, most people who take part are only trying to save the America they know.

Not Supporting Gay Marriage is Gay

I went to a wedding the other day and it was a very gay time. It was gay as in happy and it was gay as in homosexual. 

The couple consisted of my uncle Tim and his longtime partner Andrew. The two were legally registered as domestic partners in New York City when that became legal in the 1990s, but an official marriage sanctioned by New York State gives them more protections and they wanted to make it official.

True to form, their wedding was a class-act through and through and it took all the hype and bluster surrounding the gay marriage issue and flushed it down the proverbial toilet. It contained more dignity and heartfelt honesty in the few minutes it lasted than most of the church services I have had the misfortune to sit through. And by my count there were way more Christians and heterosexuals at this than Atheists or gays.

It was not that long ago that the term ‘gay marriage’ was an oxymoron—Of course gay people don’t get married; they’re gay, duh. One can support gay marriage without switching away from the default definition of marriage being a heterosexual institution; it’s how most of us came to identify the concept. You’re not a homophobe if announcing someone “husband and husband” sounds bad. You can support the rights of gays and still love the English language more. Gays aren’t asking for your approval; they’re asking to be left alone.

The debate over gay marriage in the U.S. consists of people of different political camps overlooking the same essential issue. The issue is: does the government have the right to regulate or the moral authority to approve the personal relationships between consenting adults? I think most of us agree it does not.

The reason gay marriage should be recognized is not because the government needs to be on a crusade to make us all love the gays. Society is changing its views of gays on its own. Gay marriage should be nationwide for reasons that Americans of all political stripes ought to believe: that free men and women have the right to determine their own next of kin and form relationships with whomever they choose. Put that to a vote and America will say yes.  

Legalize Prostitution Already

A German language professor from the University of Georgia was arrested in the Atlanta area last week for prostitution and running a prostitution ring. He was not accused of robbing or cheating anyone, threatening anyone or withholding cash from his working girls.

In fact his harem of working girls may not extend farther than himself. He was arrested dressed as a woman after arranging a meeting and exchange of “services” with an undercover cop.

It’s a sad sight to see a tenured professor from one’s alma mater caught selling their own wrinkled, transvestite ass for cash. But what’s sadder is that we as a society have not come to our senses enough to legalize prostitution already.

Like laws outlawing the use of drugs, laws against prostitution are not only an infringement on personal liberty, but are a bizarre relic of puritanical times that stands against human nature and individual freedom.

The places in the western world were prostitution are legal—Nevada and Amsterdam—manage it quite well and are fully functioning municipalities within democratic societies that have not collapsed into anarchy.

So why is prostitution still illegal in most of the U.S.? Isn’t this the land of the free? Aren’t we supposed to be champions of capitalism? How are contemporary sexual mores improved by prostitution being illegal?

It’s your pussy to sell, ladies. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially if you like eating pussy. It’s common wisdom that everyone pays for it one way or another. Why not just pay for it outright? Wouldn’t that make for more honest relationships between men and women? What’s the difference plunking down beaucoup dollars on drinks, dinner and other things we spend money on when we’re trying to get laid and simply paying a prostitute for the same services but none of the bullshit?

I know that many people who call for the legalization of prostitution have an idealized view of the industry. The sassy hooker with the heart of gold is a myth, and most prostitutes are not go-getting entrepreneurs boldly taking a stand against society’s conventions, but rather desperate people usually exploited by men for their earnings, often living in fear of violence or deportation or are addicted to drugs.

Legalizing prostitution, like legalizing drugs, will allow society to purge the criminal element. The worst gangsters in the country used to sell alcohol; and alcohol kills more people every year than all the illegal drugs combined, but no one in their right mind calls for it to be banned. And grocery store owners are not gunning each other down for the right to sell you beer.

When alcohol was outlawed, people still found ways to drink and criminals became rich. So it is today with drugs and prostitution. Gambling is becoming legal in more and more places as states and municipalities seize on the opportunity to improve their local economy and grab tax revenues that would otherwise go to other states. Why should a law-abiding American have to travel to Nevada to get a legal, paid-for lay? Let brothels thrive next to marijuana cafes. Every city can have its own red light district and regulate prostitution according to its own needs. Want to find the nearest hooker that’s certified disease-free and fits your budget? There will be an app for that.

Every city already has a thriving sex trade, and state and local governments could probably fill the holes in their budgets by taxing the holes getting filled by johns every day. We as a people could literally screw our way back to fiscal solvency. 

Male prostitution would be legal also, of course. I’m sure there are lots of straight guys who dream of being some kind of high class gigolo for rich hot supermodels, but like it is today, legal male prostitutes would be mostly patronized by men. Women just don’t need to pay for it and can get sex from men just about whenever they want and spend zero dollars. Even the infamous penis cutter Lorena Bobbitt found a man to have sex with her for free.

Like the legalization of marijuana, prostitution will become legal in our lifetime, and there is no shortage of real crimes for police to investigate. Let’s do right by our communities, countries and cocks and get the balls rolling on legalizing prostitution.

Five Good Ideas Championed by Hippies

It is good and right to hate hippies. Hippie culture is a celebration of weakness and degradation. It’s given us a slice of the population that is equal parts useless and obnoxious and helped home-birth the self-congratulating, smug and cloying “progressive” culture that clogs the brains of many otherwise intelligent people. Hippies often smell funny and they have terrible clothes.

Hippies were the first cultural group in modern history that aligned political causes to a counterculture to such an extent that many legitimate causes became wholly unpalatable to mainstream Americans. I’m convinced that many of the people in Nixon’s silent majority were there not because they really supported U.S. policies in Vietnam, but because they detested the hippies that embodied the vocal opposition more than they distrusted Nixon.

One could almost propose that hippies are some brilliantly successful psych-ops invention meant to quell popular opposition to interventionist military policies. How can we make opposition to undeclared foreign war abroad culturally abhorrent in a democratic society? Gentlemen, I present to you: the Hippy. 

But however much it pains us, we must give credit where credit is due, and hippies have actually embraced some good ideas over the years. They may not have invented anything useful, but their knee-jerk embrace of anything countercultural has actually put a few good items in their erratically-cast hemp nets.

Legalizing marijuana: This is such a widely embraced idea now that it has almost completely escaped the cultural ghetto of the hippie. But without hippies marijuana would not have entered popular culture to the extent it has. Smoking marijuana may turn lazy people into completely useless people and dumb people into outright retards, but throwing people in jail for smoking it makes as much sense as prohibition. It will be legal in our lifetime, and future generations will look at the laws against marijuana the way we look at the outlawing of alcohol. Even elderly people in Florida are toking up before hitting the all-you-can-eat buffet.

Organic food: I once thought that organic food was a wonton excess of effete snobs and tree-hugging imbeciles. But the more information that is available today about the practices of many large agricultural corporations and the effects of many of the additives used regularly in food, the more organic food looks more unavoidably sane. With the increasing popularity of community supported agriculture, it’s possible to eat organic food without entering the orbit of the vegetarian or vegan planets.

Bicycles: Hippies embraced bicycles and helped turn a favorite childhood toy into its own obnoxious subculture. The cyclists who flout the law by breezing through red lights and riding the wrong way down one-way streets and then demand the same rights to the roads as cars share the same sense of entitlement as the hippies. But bicycles are beneficial in and of themselves and for city dwellers they are faster than most public transportation for getting around. (Full hypocrisy disclosure: I own a pickup truck but not a bicycle).

Co-ops: They are voluntary exchanges that organizers can invite or exclude whomever they want. When people think of co-ops in New York, they usually think of apartment buildings controlled by old curmudgeons or supermarkets run by bickering lefties, but who says you can’t start your own for whatever purposes you want? They are good ways to avoid the middleman and save money on things. Illegal day care co-ops are popping up as well; as parents do an end-run around long lists for local kindergarten classes and prohibitively expensive licensed daycare centers.

Preserving National Parks and Forests: Why do we leave it to the hippies to rant and rave about the loss or pollution of public land? It’s not anti-capitalist to want to have a national park. Does the name Theodore Roosevelt mean anything to you? If you like hunting, you like lots of unspoiled nature.

Don’t stop hating hippies; they are a malodorous race of useless clowns. But don’t neglect good ideas just because it may have been embraced by hippies.

How to Buy a Used Car

My woman and I set out several months ago and saw two deals fall through before finally finding success. I am sad to report that bait and switch is alive and well and the truth finds no purchase in the vocabulary of a used car dealer. The people you find employed as used car salesmen are those whose ethical lapses got them kicked out of pickpocket school.

It was hard work to not get ripped off, and we’ve only had our new vehicle for a few weeks so cross your fingers and stay tuned. But it has been a learning experience. Buying a used car will be easier if you follow these rules:

1.      Never accept bullshit prices. When you see a price listed and then see some small print about the price being the “Internet price” or the “financing price,” walk away. Do not do business with any car dealer that wants to tack on as much as 20% simply because you’re not willing to go into more debt and earn them a bigger commission because they’ve signed you up for financing.

2.      Take your vehicle to your own mechanic. If you don’t already have one, look one up on the Internet and call ahead of time and make an appointment to get whatever car you’re interested in checked out. Don’t trust any dealer that won’t let you take a vehicle to your own mechanic.

3.      Utility uber alles! Pick the vehicle that will give you the most use. Pay no attention to what it looks like or what your friends are driving and pick what makes the most sense to what your needs or and how you live your life. Unless you plan on invading a desert country or being a douchebag in an ugly vehicle, you will have no use for a Humvee. Likewise, you can’t fit a dead deer in the trunk of Prius. Think about how you live your life and what you do every day or every time you drive? I know people who didn’t buy a car because it didn’t have any cup holders. It was sleek and sporty, but sleek and sporty does you little good if you’re spilling hot coffee on your genitals every day.

4.      Research everything. There is no excuse not to be super informed on your car purchase. You can find out detailed information online on any vehicle worth buying and read lots of customer reviews. One truck I almost bought had two active recalls on it. Since the recalls would be serviced for free, it was even more inexcusable that the dealer hadn’t done that before putting the vehicle up for sale. Know this kind of thing. Spend the money on Carfax, and don’t trust the dealers to provide you with that. It is nice for dealers to do that, but at least one dealership I considered buying from had been accused of providing false Carfax reports.

5.      Go with your gut. Does the car dealer give you the creeps? Is there something that just doesn’t seem right about everything? If the sales people or their manager (they love the tactic of getting a pushy manager involved and playing good dealer/bad dealer with you) act as if they’re trying to rush the sale, something is wrong and you should probably walk away from it.

6.      Resist the bait and switch. The first dealership we visited pulled a blatant bait and switch. When the salesmen realized that we were interested in cheap vehicles and were planning to pay in cash, they sent us to random, far-away corners of the lot looking for a van they advertised at an inexpensive price. The story we got was that the vehicle was probably not there anymore. “We sell hundreds of cars every week.” They continued to play ignorance as to the location of the van listed for $4,995 until one of the salesman walked by it as we were walking with him and quoted us the wrong price on it. “This is a Toyota Sienna but it’s $8,000,” he said. We noticed that it was the very van they had advertised on the Internet for $4,995! We pointed that out for him and began looking over the van. He walked away. We put a deposit down on the van. It ended up being a piece of shit that we didn’t buy (see #2), but we made them make good on their ad.

7.      Test drive everything, three times if you need to. Don’t buy from any person or place that won’t let you do test drives. Those are either scam places or auction houses selling to dealerships. A test drive is a no-brainer. The only thing a dealership should want from you before you do a test drive is to see your driver’s license. One dealership said that we could only test drive vehicles if we put a deposit on it first. No dice. This was the same dealership that listed a truck on the Internet for $2,000 less than they did on their lot. The dealer said that once we gave them a deposit on it, “Then we know we can do business.” We walked away after saying a pleasant goodbye.

8.      Pay cash. Don’t get bogged down in financing unless you have to. There are many car dealerships that really don’t want to deal with people paying cash. I watched many a hopeful salesman deflate on the spot and write me off in their minds when I mentioned we were paying cash. Salesman will try to sell you something above your price range and they’ll say how easy financing will be and how glorious your life will be with an expensive car with the magical power of financing. Fuck ‘em. You don’t want to get involved with the dealerships that are relying too much on commissions from financing. The more they want to focus on financing, the less effort they put into giving a shit about cars.

9.       Ignore time pressure. One of the sleazy dealerships had signs several places telling customers to remember that, “The car you looked at today is one that someone may have put a deposit on yesterday…” and the tactics of the manager and salesman were in the same vein. Ignore those time pressures and understand it’s a bad sign that should make you think twice about buying from the dealer. The person trying to rush a sale is the person who doesn’t want you to get a good look at the vehicle or the terms of sale. 

10.  Join AAA. I seemed to break down a lot more when I was too poor to spend the money on an annual AAA membership. Even if you never use it ever, it’s worth it just to avoid the jinx of not having it.

At the end of the day, we drove away with a used 2003 Ford F150. It is big and it is hard to park, but it’s what suits us and we love it.