We all need to put our hands together in supplication and thank The Donald.

I mean really, genuinely thank that guy for what he has done for our country.

Right now.

Seriously.  His present supercharged flameout is an obvious effort to create a phoenix narrative from which he will emerge from the ashes of his presidential bid reborn as the media demagogue that he never could have been on his show “The Apprentice”.

He is the new Breitbart. He will galvanize both sides of the shadowed, unspoken debate about power, class, race, gender and privilege that exists in patriarchy. He already has mobilized the ‘alt-right’ and brought their quasi-fascist ideologies into mainstream.  The conversation about feminism and sexual assault he has unwittingly initiated will open the door to a more mature discourse on the pervasive effects of violence and entitlement across power spectra (read: class, race, gender, sexual orientation) that will force people to take sides.  This is what we want. We need this schism in order to fully dissect the nature of our society and the evils perpetrated in the course of simply ‘doing business’ as a patriarchal superpower.  Women are routinely sexually assaulted here for the same reason that black men are routinely shot by police, for the same reason that everyone bitches about illegal immigration while forgetting that NAFTA compounded by the ‘tough on crime’ drug laws of the 1990’s fomented the creation of the Mexican drug cartels that now essentially rule our southern border.

This violent entitlement is integral to the worldview of many Americans, and yet not even recognized by its worst offenders.

So thank you, Mr. Trump, for playing the role of Entitled White Man so absolutely, so ostentatiously that you have roiled up those who admire and wish to emulate these repugnant traits in our nation.

Now we know who the bad apples are.

Keep it up.

The Magic Has A Name: Trump

Trump might just be the Ultimate Salesman insomuch as he cloud of bullshit he peddles is so amazingly popular and yet so entirely inaccurate. I can't even say entirely what he is selling, I don't understand him in the least. Whenever I try to unpack what it is about Trump that people so adore I get basically the same answer over and over, that he speaks his mind- then I point out that much of his talking points and random comments and tweets are falsehoods, that he doesn't just say what is on his mind but rather that he says whatever he wants with no regard for its validity. I think that is a terribly dangerous habit for a man who would be president. The blue collar guys I work with love it. In some respect I think the subtext in this admiration is that all politicians are fucking liars, so if their personal favorite says things that are wildly untrue simply because he is saying whatever makes sense to him then they accept it all the more because his intuitive and warped sense of the world mirrors theirs- I try to point out that many of these intuitive non sequitur moments are carefully crafted to perk their redneck ears.
They don't care, because, again, all politicians, all campaigns are exercises in bullshitting.
I hate to say it, but they have a point.

That said-
Fuck that guy.

Five Words All Construction Workers Should Say Out Loud

All right. All of you blue collar wage earning manly men out there who currently think Donald Trump is the horse to bet in the coming election I have five words to say to you. Five words you should say out loud.

PRESIDENT SANDERS LOVES DAVIS BACON

Know that Bernie Sanders is in love with a plan to tax the hell out of the rich and spend one trillion dollars resurrecting our infrastructure.

That means boatloads of Davis Bacon jobs.

And everybody who has ever been paid Davis Bacon wages knows just how sweet they are.
I made 20 and 7 resurfacing a bridge.
Before overtime.

Say it out loud, think about it before you head to the polls.

Prognostication Ain't Easy... (But It's Necessary)

Well, it's been nearly a year since I last posted, which is a grim reminder of just how busy things are these days. That said, I've got to bend the page a bit here and let a few cynical predictions out.

1.  The Donald vs. The Sandman

Yes this is what it will come down to.
Good luck America.

2. The failure of Too Big To Fail.

There are two versions of this inevitability:
        2.1 Sanders wins, the banks freak out, congress seizes up completely and we get hit with a 2008 level of recession with no way out because congress will only approve another TARP style bailout, and Sanders will veto anything that smells like corporate welfare. This happens weeks to months after the election in response to Sanders' win. Out of the fear that there will be no bailout, the banks curl up like sensitive plants in a drought and credit stops moving in every sector of the economy.
Nothing gets done.

        2.2 Trump wins, his buddies in finance go looney tunes with deregulatory lobbying, the market surges like a drunken walrus masterbating in a vat of lard. For eighteen months the economy spirals upward with the frat house intensity of the very coke fueled benders driving it forward.

Then it all fails. Uproariously. The global economy vomits unceasingly in a toxic overdose of debt and investor terror.

Trump goes into a spin management cycle that keeps him within a bulletproof whirlwind of bluster and media whoring.
He becomes the president we all hoped Jesse Ventura might have been.
Nothing gets done.

3. Warheads go missing in Pakistan.

Yup. This happens.

The world shits a collective Brick.
Sideways.

ISIS claims responsibility and goes into overtime on the propaganda front while we all wait to see which middle class neighborhood goes up in a thermonuclear fireball.  Will it be Mumbai, L.A., Paris? We will never know, the damn things fail to surface and everybody forgets about the threat by the end of 2018.

4: Apocalyptic Drought

By 2020 the water supply throughout the Middle East is so depleted that ISIS pretty much rules a caliphate of bleached bones and parched waste. Oil prices continue downwards as Iran opens up the tap and the US subsidizes oil production to spur job growth. Also, global warming becomes an inescapable reality forcing even the saltiest of rednecks to finally admit they have been had by the very companies their tax dollars are subsidizing while they line up to compete for horrendous, low paying jobs in the oil fields.

5. Irony Becomes Completely Passé

Hipsters vanish from the earth with the only pockets of their kind living in grey haired enclaves in Olympia and Williamsburg.  Irony is considered too painful to be interesting except to a few noble game theory mathematicians who recognize that irony has an actual place in stochastics. Their research fuels a new form of ironically based investment derivative that causes the rebound of the markets in 2021.

A Few Words About White Privilege

Yeah... That old kick dog topic - white privilege, I'd like to say a few things about what it entails.

Obviously there is a certain privilege that comes with being white and middle class- it could be argued that much of that is really class privilege- but I don't have the patience nor the academic chops to try to untangle class and race in terms of who gets screwed more in which society. Suffice to say that gender, race and religion are all used as gradients of power whenever numbers or capital are distributed unevenly in a society.  (Read: All the time.)  There are plenty of statistically sound examples of how this gradient difference exists in our society. Examples include a study that demonstrated that white sounding names will consistently get more call backs than black sounding names when placed on the top of identical resumes.

Ok- enough disclaimer.

What I want to talk about is the wonderful baggage that comes with white privilege.
What do I mean?
Well, for example, as a white man working in a blue collar trade I have quite a few advantages, the utilities sector in particular is an old boys club if there ever was one. It is extraordinarily white.
Redneck white.

Oh I know- that's a slur. However I have worked in several trades and the utilities field is by far the most rife with racism, misogyny and homophobia.

So I get to enjoy an easier entry into this field because of my skin color- however, if I react 'inappropriately' to any racist remarks or classically macho misogyist bullshit then I run the risk of being ostracized and pushed out.
There is no real HR in this field. They ask you your age up front. If your boss threatens to kill you or smacks you in the field- deal with it. That's life.
In the blue collar world life is tough, and there is no room for liberal weakness...
Or so the ethos seems to me here in the tradesmans' world.

In closing, my point is that while I enjoy white privilege, I often find myself facing a lay off or looking for work elsewhere because I don't play along.
I lose some of my privilege because I am not racist.
How awesome is that.

Dear Seattle,
You smell like weed.
Everywhere.
Every ten minutes.
It seems like no matter where you are, indoors or out, you run the risk of getting a contact high. I no longer partake, in fact it has been so long for me that I can remember when pot still had those acrid little seeds hiding inside the buds. Nevertheless, the constant whiff of competing strains of herb lifts me up every few minutes with waves of nostalgia that originate in a steamy haystack of memories piled blearily in my youth.
As a resident of a less green and more red land far from the shores of your fair and aromatic city I wanted to say-
Thank you.

Total Information Awareness Day! or 'Orwell's Priapism'

After watching the Guardian Interview with Snowden (the name of the first character killed in Joeseph Heller's 'Catch 22') I knew that I'd have to finally speak up and let everyone know that we need a national holiday in honor of this monumental breach of national security.

Let's make 6-9-13 the first annual Total Information Awareness Day!

I'd like to point out that the interview was a fairly benign indictment of the supervision being applied to the technology of information surveillance. When the tools are out there, somebody is going to use them. Period. Who uses those tools and what constitutes legal use of them is what we need to deal with. 

It isn't just the monitoring that had Snowden's hackles up. It was the record. If the NSA stores and records EVERYTHING that passes back and forth then your entire electronic footprint is potential evidence in a trial or as grounds for a warrant. Just like you can get pulled over for a wide right turn or a loud muffler as a means to initiate a search, almost anything one has done/said/has been recorded doing can be used to justify further search and/or arrest. What I don't understand is precisely how Snowden's actions are a danger to the US. People are decrying him as a traitor, and while, yes, he is technically, I fail to see how this blown whistle aids terrorists. Are terrorists going to start communicating and organizing offline? Will we see a return to dead drops, microfilm and shadowy hand signals? Will the Jihad not be televised? Will pigeons be strapped with 140 character messages written in invisible ink?

Don't forget that this NSA nonsense started well before Obama was in office. I was working in silicon valley during the last administration. Rice and Cheney were regulars on the Google campus, this madness has been in the works for a while. A program the size of this doesn't pop up in four years. Don't get me wrong, the whistle has been blown on his watch, he has to man up and make the right next move. He IS accountable, I'm just saying that it sure didn't start with him.

So, mark it on your calendar, 6.9.13 - Total Information Awareness Day- because if this story fades into the noise with the rest of the 24 hour news cycle and the necessary debate never materializes in congress or in the White House, then at least you can point to the day that apathy won out over liberty.