Monday April 21, 2003

Chat threads seem to be working again. Let me say I’m extremely aggravated that the essays I posted early on Sunday had no comment threads on them all day, and now they’re archived, and no one will ever comment on them, and I liked those goddam essays. But I’m not paying Squawkbox anything, so I should just shut up about it and be grateful they’re working now… if, in fact, they are.

ALL IN A DAY’S SLACKING

I become unemployed, and amazingly, have no time. Or something.

I don't know what it is. I have certain leisure time activities I want to do... watch some DVDs and a videotape I bought over a month ago and still haven't thrown in the VCR. Finish a bunch of library books I took out several weeks ago.

Which reminds me, I need to call the library today or tomorrow and see if I can renew them over the phone.

“Today or tomorrow”, in Slackerese, means “Tomorrow or the next day, maybe”.

Then there's what I consider the 'productive' work I want to get done, although it's not, really (i.e., I’m not going to get paid for it, or not much)... writing projects. My seventh novel badly needs one more polish on its last half. My eighth novel isn't finished yet. I still haven't finished this goddam Heinlein article I've been diddling with for weeks now. I need to occasionally kick out some adult material for an X-rated website that very occasionally pays me a pittance for such... I'm in the middle of about four different stories there. I vaguely wanted to start working on samples of a comic strip called "Rain of Toads", but I've only done one so far. (And it's not funny, dammit. Or adequately drawn.)

And then there's De Blog, of course, and email.

And beyond that, I should be doing a full time job search. I did print out a slightly updated resume today and take it to my temp service. See, that's the thing about me. I do one minor thing like that and that satiates my conscience. Then I can go back to slacking off. Yet even my slack time activities are piling up.

And there's the emotional/psychological shit I’m lugging around with me. I'm working hard at not worrying about anything until NEXT week, but it takes a lot of emotional energy. I deserve a week off, even though I know it's childish to procrastinate. And today I got a real whack across the nose, in the form of next month’s phone bill… which is no big deal… except for the jarring realization that I don’t know, at this moment, how I’m going to pay it. If I’m still not working by the time it’s due, I should have an Unemployment check by then… but it won’t be for much… and you can’t count on Unemployment, there are a lot of bureaucratic snags your claim can run into.

This ‘don’t worry, be happy’ crap is startlingly hard work when you don’t drink or do drugs.

I also have minor health issues, mostly centering around my feet, which nobody really wants to hear about, but they're annoying and they trouble me too… until recently in my life, I always had the kind of perfect health you never think about. I need to lose a great deal of weight and I'm never, ever going to.

And, as always, I have no friends, and especially, no lover, which you'd think you'd get used to, and, really, after a while, you do kind of get used to it, but you never get all the way there. (But I know I get somewhat accustomed to it, because I can remember how horrible it is right after I've broken up with the few girlfriends I've had, and how welcome it's been when I finally got somewhat numb again.)

Of course, I’m also aware that ‘getting all the way there’, in terms of becoming fully adjusted to having no real intimate social contacts at all, and being content or even happy that way, can be summed up with one interesting word: ‘sociopathic’. So it’s good that it bugs me to be by myself, and to be living a life where I could die in the next second and no one would notice, or bother to even tentatively inquire, for weeks.

Of course, if I died around the first of the month, the poor girl who manages the apartment complex would probably have the unpleasant duty of breaking in once the rent was overdue by about a week… or maybe the deputy sheriffs would do that. But that would probably take a couple of weeks to work its way through the courts, too…

Morbid thoughts, but please, put down the phone books. I’m much, much too cowardly to kill myself, and anyway, life ain’t all that bad. I’m sleeping late, I still have food in the fridge, and the minute that first Unemployment invoice rolls into my agency, they’re going to find me work. Plus, I do indeed have books to read… good stuff, by “Martha Wells” (who absolutely is Barbara Hambly writing under a pseudonym, regardless of how she denies it) and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (three St. Germain novels I found at the library that I haven’t read yet). Life is always worth living when you’ve got good books to read.

And my computer monitor keeps flashing from its normal brightness to a dim greyish blue, and back again, for no reason. Plus the CPU is making demonic humming noises I really don't like. And that’s what I need right now: my PC to break. That would just make my life complete.

Sorry. Didn't mean to put that all down, I just got started and it all came out.

In less depressing news, but hardly more interesting to anyone but me, my long time email buddy Hartmut Schumacher tells me he’s started reading my unfinished eighth novel, a horror story I got about 2/3s of the way through with and then gave up on in disgust. I think it’s just awful, but Hartmut says he’s enjoying it more than the other two books (by actual professional authors) he’s reading concurrently. I first became aware of Hartmut when he sent me a nice note out of the blue complimenting me on my novels (posted on my Doc Nebula website , see individual links to the right), which he has read all of, without having any connection to or relationship with me at all. (The only other person in the world who has read all my novels is Nate Clarke, who is a man among men, but who read them because he’s my buddy.) Hartmut likes my novels, and I have no explanation for it, because he’s a smart, sharp guy who reads a lot of other authors I enjoy myself. And now he’s apparently liking this godawful horror novel thing. I don’t know. Maybe I’m a good writer? But if I’m a good writer, why is it I can only get paid for my porn?

What I find interesting to contemplate about those novels and short stories sitting there, at the other end of those links to the right of this text, is the way supply and demand works. Right now they’re free. Anyone who wants to read some or all of them, in whole or in part, can. They’ve been available, some of them, for years now. And I can’t tell you how many people have read them, because obviously I have no idea, but only one person (Hartmut) has ever written me to tell me he’s read them, and what he thought.

Now, if I ever sell any of those novels to a publisher, I imagine that publisher is going to make me take them down off my website… after all, at that point, the publisher will own the rights to them.

If that ever happens, I anticipate getting at least a few emails from people wanting to read whichever novels I’ve pulled down… while any that remain up will still be ignored, for the most part.

Ah, human nature. We only want what we can’t have anymore.

Like it? Hate it? Sound off!

THE COLOR OF THE SKY ON THEIR PLANET

I have to continue to thank to my email pal Emily Jones, for her kind plug of this blog on her, deservedly very popular, blog, and for introducing me to some really fascinating viewpoints over on her end of the political spectrum. Emily is a genuine class act; an intelligent, articulate, conservative pro-War blogger who, nonetheless, has denounced the various hatemongers on the right to me like Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Coulter more than once, and who has told me she thinks the recent anti-French hysteria is ‘silly’. She listens to what people say to her even when she disagrees, and I listen to what she says to me, even under similar circumstances.

Thanks to Emily, I’ve come into contact with some very nice people over there on the right (no, they’re not all trolls; Limbaugh, Coulter and O’Reilly just give them a really really bad image) and some truly astonishing viewpoints. I myself thought I fairly clearly remembered that Dubya had not, actually, legitimately won the 2000 Presidential election. I thought that, in fact, the results of the 2000 Presidential election were ultimately inconclusive and doubtful, filled with unanswered questions and grotesque irregularities, and that Dubya had taken power due to a ruling of the United State Supreme Court that nearly everyone admits, from both sides of the spectrum, was biased, and almost certainly illegal (but who are you going to appeal the Supreme Court to?).

I was of the opinion that this questionable ‘victory’, at best, was something we’d all just more or less agreed to deal with, since the obvious and, really, only alternative was armed insurrection in the streets, and nobody wants that, least of all me, I’m a big target and a lousy shot. Yet I thought it was still generally felt… in fact, I thought it was historically documented… that this particular election was anything but irrefutably legitimate in its outcome. I thought there had been stuff in the paper… minor, trivial, carping stuff, I admit… about how Al Gore had gotten more votes than Dubya. And about how it had been admitted, much after the fact, that Dubya’s brother Jeb, and Jeb’s Secretary of State (and current Congresswoman) Katherine Harris, had initiated a project that had ‘mistakenly’ disenfranchised thousands of voters who were actually entitled to vote, and, by sheer coincidence, who would have voted to a man and to a woman for anyone but Dubya. I thought I myself had gone to vote for the first time since moving to Florida and been absolutely appalled by the butterfly ballot, and had noted, rather dryly, to the nice woman at the polling place, that this ballot was absolutely brilliantly designed; not only could I not tell, once the ballot was removed from its frame, if I had voted correctly, but in fact, I couldn’t actually tell if I had when the ballot was still in its frame… which was why, when thousands of elderly Jewish voters later complained bitterly that they had not voted for Buchanan, as their ballots seem to indicate, I easily understood how such a mistake could be made, and did not join in with millions of non-Floridians in jeering at them and calling them morons. To those who have never experienced a butterfly ballot, I tell you this in truth: line up a ballot as much as a quarter of an inch off, and put a misleading candidates’ listing on the cover sheet, and, well… that was gonna happen.

I even thought I read something about Dubya and Dick paying Republican operatives to come to Florida and stage violent demonstrations in front of polling places, to shut down manual recounts, in defiance of, you know, what’s that weird thing, what do we call it… oh yeah… the law.

So I was under the impression that the Republicans stole the election, fair and square… that Dubya, you know, probably shouldn’t be President of the largest democracy in the world, since he didn’t get as many votes as his opponent, and also, since he used paid thugs, and family connections, and one of the most deliberately corrupted election systems in the world to somehow manage to swipe Florida’s electoral votes, I thought he really hadn’t even ‘won’ with electoral votes.

But, silly effing me. Since I’ve bobbed and weaved around a bit on the right of the blogosphere, I’ve come across true illumination, in the form of blog posts such as this one, by Robert Prather:

George Bush Won The 2000 Election

September 23, 2002
A few facts:
1. Al Gore didn't actually win the popular vote when you factor in the obvious margin of error in the system. One-hundred and six million votes were cast and Gore "lead" by 500,000, less than one-half of one percent. That is well within the margin of error of the current system and it would be be more fairly characterized as a tie. The popular vote doesn't actually matter, but this is one area where Democrats have attacked President Bush as being illegitimate and they're wrong on even that.

2. The Florida State Supreme Court violated the U.S. Constitution by moving the certification date. They knew that all plenary power with regard to federal elections lies with the state legislature and moved the date anyway.
3. The case is sent to SCOTUS and they overturn the Florida Supreme Court in an unsigned opinion. That's a mistake I'll return to later.
4. In the mean time an "equal protection" case is making its way through the federal system challenging the manual counting procedures in Florida. Filed by the Bush team.
5. The Florida Supreme Court, against the vocal dissent of the Chief Justice who seems to have been chastened by the SCOTUS ruling, issues another ruling that conflicts with the Florida Legislature's election law and jeopardizes Florida's safe-harbor date, which the legislature obviously intended to meet. SIDENOTE: The safe harbor date means that if you have all legal matters solved by a certain date set in federal law and submitted to the Congress, the quality of the electors won't be questioned.
6. During all of this the Florida Legislature, heavily Republican and in an ongoing war with the liberal state Supreme Court, begins preparations to send it's own set of electoral college delegates, infuriated that their authority has been trampled again by their Supreme Court.
7. The equal protection case makes it to SCOTUS and the next appeal of the Florida Supreme Court arrives and they're combined to become Bush v. Gore.
8. SCOTUS, on a 5-4 vote, finds that there is an equal protection problem with Florida's standard for manually counting ballots AND finds that the Florida Supreme Court has once again violated the U.S. Constitution by tampering with election law and also might have violated federal law regarding the safe harbor date. I can't remember.
9. SCOTUS issues their 5-4 opinion saying what I said above and provides a method, I believe, that can be used that one time to manually count votes that will pass an equal protection challenge. They issue it at around 11:00pm on the safe harbor date leaving one hour to do the recount.
10. Ideally SCOTUS wouldn't have sent back an unsigned opinion and would have provided a remedy, particularly on that equal protection issue. However, I believe a court can only answer a question that is before it and the equal protection case was still winding its way through the federal system. If they had issued their final Bush v. Gore opinion at the time the unsigned opinion came out there would have been time for a manual statewide recount using a standard SCOTUS provided. This, in theory, would make everybody happy, but I doubt it. The other side would have ended up bitter because the election was so close.
11. Shoot forward a few months and several independent media outlets have examined the ballots and find that George Bush wins Florida under every scenario in which the votes are counted legally.

12. One final point: it was a tie. After that it was a matter of who could manage the legal machinery better. Bush won.
Now, I want to acknowledge here and now that I’ve read much of Robert’s blogging and he’s a sharp, intelligent, thoughtful guy. He’s also been very kind to someone he doesn’t know, giving me excellent tips on how to improve my blog’s exposure and gain more attention for my work. He’s always been civil to me; and the above post is an excellent example of how lucid and cogent Robert is. (I don’t mean that as a nasty, subtle smear, either. I think the post is very lucid and cogent.)

I do want to say a few things in response to it, however.

First, Robert starts out with “George Bush won the election”. His first point is the interesting one (and one I haven’t seen anywhere other than this particular article, so Robert gets an A+ for original thinking) that half a million Americans’ votes in the Presidential election simply don’t matter, because they are within what Robert calls ‘the obvious margin of error of the system’. (He also points out that the popular vote simply didn’t matter, and that’s interesting too, since Dubya was undeniably getting ready to argue, on morally principled grounds, that the popular vote was all that mattered in a democracy like America, when he thought he would win the popular vote and lose in the Electoral College. To my mind, anyone who is prepared to argue one side of a case on morally principled grounds, and then drops those arguments like radioactive isotopes when he comes up on the other side of them, is simply not ‘Presidential’… and while that’s just my opinion, I believe it was the right wing who was making vehement issue of ‘Presidential character’ just a little while ago.)

Leave all that aside, though, because obviously, it’s not persuasive: right wingers simply believe what they want to believe from one news cycle to the next, and Presidential character is only an issue when they’re accusing a Democratic President of not having any. (For the record: I voted for Clinton once. He broke his promise to me about getting me a health care system, and it became very clear to me that he was not anything I would call a liberal. I am not a fan of his, although I do admire his wife, which I know, in the eyes of most conservatives, is even worse. However, I am not defending Clinton’s undeniable lapses of character. I’m simply saying, ‘lapse of character’ has a broader definition than ‘a Democratic President taking sexual advantage of one of his employees’… an employee who, in my opinion, badly needed emotional help, and probably still does. I personally feel that (a) you don’t sleep with the help and (b) you don’t sleep with those who need emotional help, and Clinton’s character certainly lapsed there. But I also strongly feel that Dubya’s character is simply nonexistent, and more than that, I think most right wingers know it… and now, all of them are screaming at the top of their lungs that ‘you respect the office, not the person holding it… this is the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, you anti-American liberal scumbag, and YOU SHOW HIM SOME RESPECT!’. In recent historical context, that’s contemptibly hypocritical. And now we’re moving on.)

And leaving all that aside, I simply want to say this: if 500,000 votes are meaningless because they are within the margin of error of the system, then 500 votes are also meaningless. By Robert’s reasoning, Bush did not win Florida. (My reasoning is a little different, and includes other factors Robert doesn’t list, but it reaches the same conclusion.)

Robert’s final point makes fisking his article at length unnecessary, though. Robert, after lucidly compiling a list of both subjective and objective reasons why he believes Dubya undeniably won the election, finally states that the election was actually a tie, and “After that it was a matter of who could manage the legal machinery better. Bush won.”

Now, I reason a bit differently from Robert, but, still, accepting his thesis as valid, I do want to add: when ‘managing the legal machinery better’ includes having your brother toss thousands of voters off the election rolls because you know they aren’t going to vote for you, and involves paying thugs to stage violent demonstrations in order to shut down court ordered manual recounts, I believe there is another phrase that sums up ‘managing the legal machinery’ even more cogently:

‘Cheating’.

Or, (although it’s somewhat longer and clumsier) ‘trampling the very fundamental ideals of democracy in the gutter and then pissing all over them’ works too.

I do not believe Dubya won the election. However, even if I did, I simply do not believe that anyone who resorted to the methods he used to win the election, should be our President.

But I admit, Robert certainly writes very well.

Like it? Hate it? Sound off!

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally acceptable social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly… even when I’m talking in ‘public’, to an unknown audience, nearly any of whom may be almost as crazy as that whackjob female blogger I mentioned running afoul of previously.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude that most bloggers who know their opinions are going to offend people tend to take… namely, if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read them or it.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. Oh, I firmly believe that if you really don’t like something, well, you must have hit a link or typed in my URL voluntarily to get here, and you have a back button on your browser… you certainly don’t need to flame me just because something I’ve written here has gotten your shorts all in a bunch.

Nonetheless, this is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out. Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough style and panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded if you write me, okay?

ABEHM