Author: Mark Alexander

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Seeing an Anus Form Words No Longer Surprises Me

From marmel.com:

Joe Wurzelbacher, more commonly known as Joe the Plumber, wants Americans to “admit” they “want a white Republican president again.”

“Wanting a white Republican president doesn’t make you racist, it just makes you American,” Wurzelbacher wrote on his website Oct. 10.

First, let’s get this out of the way: If you’re criteria for the next president be that he be white, it makes you a bigot. That’s the definition of bigot. There’s no wiggle room there. Own that.

But on to the rest…what public figure—and I use this term loosely referring to this clown—would say this?

I get that the skinheaded bigoted “sorta-plumber” who got famous for being sassy to the black guy has dialed his “black-smack” to eleven. It’s loud out in the media, with a lot of bigots saying a lot of horrible things about the President from subtle dog whistles about “takers” to George Will comparing Obamacare to “The Fugitive Slave Act.”

It’s a tough time to be a minor player hate-monger when the league is filled with established home run hitters. And for all of his “fame”—again, loosely put—Joe is really just a freak-show anomaly now. He’s a car crash you can’t take your eyes off of, like Michele Bachmann or Louie Gohmert. He’s Snooki, really.

But here’s the thing. We should be grateful for morons like Joe.

Unsubtle, blunt, dimwitted throwbacks that aren’t savvy enough to mask their hate, he’s like people at town halls that scream about Obama being a secret Muslim. Or part of Al Qaeda. Or that he’s actually Osama Bin Laden (see “Truckers Ride For The Constitution”).

You know bigotry still exists because he’s not smart enough to hide it in code-words.

And in being that, he reveals that he is a big chunk of that unmoving GOP’s 30%. You know that number that never changes? That always disapproves of everything the President and his wife does, even if it’s as simple as “drink water?” or “eat healthy?”  Or cheered Zimmerman?

He’s those guys in a ball cap. The only thing he’s missing is the white robe.  And if he had that white robe, he’d be dumb enough to wear it to work.

The election in 2008 made it so the days of smiling racism over. The black President drove that 30% nuts.

After all… Fox News promised Obama would lose. Twice. The right wing media promised they could hurt him by repealing Obamacare with lie after lie after lie. They were told this man would be put in his place. And now, that 30% is so mad, it’s like turrets syndrome or Mel Gibson getting pulled over drunk—the bigotry just explodes out in ways they can’t control.

And it’s part of what’s destroying the GOP.  See, the shutdown sucks and is hurting a lot of people, and the polls are showing most people blame the Republicans in general and the Tea Party specifically.

The more people like “Joe the Plumber,” or Mark Kessler, or Glenn Beck or the next loon pops up, the more people realize exactly what is fueling this five year “let’s not work with Obama” that’s been going on that has brought us to this shut down.

Not wanting to work with the black guy. Hanging an imaginary “Whites Only” sign on the office of the President or any seat of power in Washington, D.C.

So in a way, I’m grateful for this moron. He’s defining the problem in a way that would make anybody with a brain, or a heart, or a single friend of diversity go “this is not what I want out of a mainstream political party.”

It’s hurtful, I’m sure, for many people of color to hear.

But It’s also hurtful to people who wish they could pretend they weren’t bigots, but by toleration of people like Joe show that they are.  With their facebook feeds, and N-word tweets, and racist memes.

And as ugly as it is to look at, it’s good that we can see it.

Maybe some of those people can be shamed into the 21st century.  But at the very least, we know who they are and they can now be discounted as the cavemen (and women) they’ve always been.

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God Angrily Clarifies Do Not Kill Rule

NEW YORK—Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.

“Look, I don’t know, maybe I haven’t made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again,” said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. “Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don’t. And to be honest, I’m really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand.”

Worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, God said His name has been invoked countless times over the centuries as a reason to kill in what He called “an unending cycle of violence.”

“I don’t care how holy somebody claims to be,” God said. “If a person tells you it’s My will that they kill someone, they’re wrong. Got it? I don’t care what religion you are, or who you think your enemy is, here it is one more time: No killing, in My name or anyone else’s, ever again.”

The press conference came as a surprise to humankind, as God rarely intervenes in earthly affairs. As a matter of longstanding policy, He has traditionally left the task of interpreting His message and divine will to clerics, rabbis, priests, imams, and Biblical scholars. Theologians and laymen alike have been given the task of pondering His ineffable mysteries, deciding for themselves what to do as a matter of faith. His decision to manifest on the material plane was motivated by the deep sense of shock, outrage, and sorrow He felt over the Sept. 11 violence carried out in His name, and over its dire potential ramifications around the globe.

“I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so you’d get it straight, because I thought it was pretty important,” said God, called Yahweh and Allah respectively in the Judaic and Muslim traditions. “I guess I figured I’d left no real room for confusion after putting it in a four-word sentence with one-syllable words, on the tablets I gave to Moses. How much more clear can I get?”
“But somehow, it all gets twisted around and, next thing you know, somebody’s spouting off some nonsense about, ‘God says I have to kill this guy, God wants me to kill that guy, it’s God’s will,'” God continued. “It’s not God’s will, all right? News flash: ‘God’s will’ equals ‘Don’t murder people.'”

Worse yet, many of the worst violators claim that their actions are justified by passages in the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an.

“To be honest, there’s some contradictory stuff in there, okay?” God said. “So I can see how it could be pretty misleading. I admit it—My bad. I did My best to inspire them, but a lot of imperfect human agents have misinterpreted My message over the millennia. Frankly, much of the material that got in there is dogmatic, doctrinal bullshit. I turn My head for a second and, suddenly, all this stuff about homosexuality gets into Leviticus, and everybody thinks it’s God’s will to kill gays. It absolutely drives Me up the wall.” God praised the overwhelming majority of His Muslim followers as “wonderful, pious people,” calling the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks rare exceptions.

“This whole medieval concept of the jihad, or holy war, had all but vanished from the Muslim world in, like, the 10th century, and with good reason,” God said. “There’s no such thing as a holy war, only unholy ones. The vast majority of Muslims in this world reject the murderous actions of these radical extremists, just like the vast majority of Christians in America are pissed off over those two bigots on The 700 Club.”

Continued God, “Read the book: ‘Allah is kind, Allah is beautiful, Allah is merciful.’ It goes on and on that way, page after page. But, no, some assholes have to come along and revive this stupid holy-war crap just to further their own hateful agenda. So now, everybody thinks Muslims are all murderous barbarians. Thanks, Taliban: 1,000 years of pan-Islamic cultural progress down the drain.”

God stressed that His remarks were not directed exclusively at Islamic extremists, but rather at anyone whose ideological zealotry overrides his or her ability to comprehend the core message of all world religions.

“I don’t care what faith you are, everybody’s been making this same mistake since the dawn of time,” God said. “The Muslims massacre the Hindus, the Hindus massacre the Muslims. The Buddhists, everybody massacres the Buddhists. The Jews, don’t even get me started on the hard-line, right-wing, Meir Kahane-loving Israeli nationalists, man. And the Christians? You people believe in a Messiah who says, ‘Turn the other cheek,’ but you’ve been killing everybody you can get your hands on since the Crusades.”

Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: “Can’t you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism… every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you’re supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It’s not that hard a concept to grasp.”

“Why would you think I’d want anything else? Humans don’t need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other—you’ve been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!” God said. “The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get? I’m talking to all of you, here!” continued God, His voice rising to a shout. “Do you hear Me? I don’t want you to kill anybody. I’m against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don’t kill each other anymore—ever! I’m fucking serious!”

Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God’s shoulders began to shake, and He wept.

(Source)

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I’m Getting Tired of Following the Apple Anon Community on Twitter

At first it was interesting, like you were getting a peek behind the curtain into the super-secret inner sanctum of Apple retail. Being in a pseudo “customer service” role myself, I could easily relate to a lot of the frustrations that were being voiced. But more and more it’s simply turned into a bitch fest of seemingly continually drunk or high self-important Gen-Yers who are just now very reluctantly discovering—and refusing to accept—that in fact the world does not revolve around them.

You’re in retail, honey. You may work for one of the most profitable and forward-thinking companies in the world, but your job is still to deal with the public. If you don’t like it, do something else.

Because of this never ending parade of anon customer-bashing—not to mention the fact that the chances of me ever being called in for an actual interview are next to nil—only out of sheer desperation last week I submitted my own application to Apple. There was a time not all that long ago that I would’ve jumped at the opportunity to work for the company, but no longer. And it’s not because of the anons’ tales of  customer stupidity and assumed privilege—hell, I’ve been dealing with the same sort of thing in the corporate world for the last fifteen years—but rather it’s the toxic attitude of some of the assholes wearing those blue shirts that has turned me off.

That being said, I’ll probably get a call from them on Monday to come in…

We all gripe about work. I get that. Lord knows I’ve done it myself often enough on this blog, but I worry that diving into Apple retail would be very much like an extremely short-lived contract job I took at a certain hospital downtown shortly after Ben and I moved to Denver. It took me less than an hour to realize the attitudes of the other technicians on the job were beyond toxic and made working there impossible. I left after lunch that first day and never returned.

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Every Day I Wake Up, Look Over…

…and silently thank the gods that I have Ben in my life.

Five years ago the absolute last thing I expected in my life was a relationship—even though just prior to meeting Ben I had told the universe (or whoever/whatever was listening) that after a lifetime of less-than-successful attempts at coupling and a dozen or so years of being very, very single, I was ready to love again. I had run that line through my head many times before, but this time it was different; this time I felt it in the very fiber of my being. Even with that being said, in my wildest fantasies, I could not have even imagined the awesomeness that was about to enter my life—much less that I would be legally married five years later.

Sure, this past year has been difficult on us for a variety of reasons, but it’s never strained our bond and through it all we’ve always been there for each other. As I lay there this morning watching Ben sleep, I was once again struck at how—and I hate to use the word because of its religious connotations, but nothing else springs to mind to describe it—blessed I am that we’re together.

 

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Well That Was Interesting

I had a video interview today. But it wasn’t a live interview; it involved recording video responses to a canned set of interview questions.

And of course I royally screwed up the first attempt. For each question you’re given three opportunities to get it the way you want it before submitting. I wasn’t happy with my response to the first question, so I set about re-recording it, only to have the second attempt be marred by my phone ringing. I said “Aw, fuck!” (while still on camera) and stopped recording to get up and silence the phone, only to return and discover the “Aw, fuck!” take had been auto-submitted.

FUCK. ME.

I went ahead and completed the remaining questions and sent it off. I immediately called the recruiter and told him not to submit me and explained what had happend. “Would you like a do-over?”

Praise the baby Jeebus.

The second time went better—especially since I knew what all the questions were beforehand and could tweak my answers accordingly.

This whole job hunt is just getting weirder and weirder with each passing day. I hope that wherever I end up landing it’s some place conducive to remaining until I retire (or at least until we leave this wretched city), so I don’t have to go through this again any time soon.

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All This Has Happened Before and Will Happen Again

A relative of Boston Dynamics’ Cheetah robot, which last year managed to outpace the world’s fastest man Usain Bolt on a treadmill, is now able to run outdoors untethered. Named the WildCat, the outdoor runner is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is being developed for military use.

Of course it’s being developed for military use.

Do today’s engineers only read halfway through the warning stories of science fiction? I mean, it seems like they get to the “gee whiz that’s cool!” part of the book and then walk away to create this shit without reading the part where gee whiz technology obliterates mankind.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ~ Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune

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And Teh St00pid Continues

From Asshole of the Day:

The whining by Republicans about things that were closed during the shutdown has reached ridiculous levels. How hard is it to understand that making Obama shutdown the government would mean closing things? As I said before, YOU shut it down, Republicans, so all the closings are YOURS, not Obama’s or anyone else’s.

Well, especially not Obama’s since no bill ever reached his desk to fund the government. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from phony grievances, such as Eric Cantor having all the doctors in the House show up in lab coats to discuss how Obama is refusing to let up to 300 kids with cancer into the NIH trials. This, while they shut the government down to stop Obamacare which would give MILLIONS OF KIDS access to healthcare, some of whom certainly have cancer. Yes, this really happened.

And then of course there was Rep. Randy Neugebauern arguing with an park ranger as though he didn’t vote for the shutdown, which he did. And the best part is that Neugebauer gets paid during the shutdown, but the park ranger does not!

And then today in Arizona, state Rep. Brenda Barton posts on Facebook:

Someone is paying the National Park Service thugs overtime for their efforts to carry out the order of De Fuhrer… where are our Constitutional Sheriffs who can revoke the Park Service Rangers authority to arrest??? Do we have any Sheriffs with a pair?

Hitler! Thugs! Overtime! If you had NO KNOWLEDGE of what’s going on, that would sound bad. Of course the government is shutdown, so how can you justify keeping open a park? How? And the rangers aren’t getting overtime— they aren’t even being paid! But don’t let facts get in the way of your smear campaign, asshole!

Full story: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/arizona-lawmaker-rages-against-de-fuhrer-obama-in-angry-facebook-post

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You Know You’re Getting Old When…

…you hear a certain song and find yourself thinking, “Gawd, life was so much simpler then.”

I have iTunes on shuffle today, and Meco’s Empire Strikes Back came on a little while ago. Yeah, you know Meco did the infamous disco Star Wars, but did you know he followed up three years later with Empire as well? No, of course you didn’t. It never got the kind of club or air play that Star Wars did. I’m fortunate in that Steve gave me copy for my birthday the year it came out.

It wasn’t one of Meco’s better works, although it stands up pretty well in more of a jazz-fusion sort of way than outright disco after all these years.

At the risk of running off the rail completely, did you know he also did The Wizard of Oz…released on yellow-brick-road colored vinyl?

Yeah, good times. Wizard  is probably his most straightforward interpretation of all the movie soundtrack stores he attempted to discofy. I actually count the entire album in my Top 100 dance tunes.

But I digress, again.

As I was listening to Empire today, I couldn’t help think back to that summer of 1980 when Steve and I were working as messengers for Lewis & Roca in downtown Phoenix. Back then, the worst thing I had to worry about was whether or not the air conditioning in my truck would blow up, leaving me stranded somewhere—and what I was going to wear out dancing on any given Saturday night. We (and most of the rest of the world) were blissfully unaware of the shit storm that was to descend upon the world in the form of AIDS, Ronald Regan, George Bush (Senior and Junior), and Dick Cheney. (The impotent right wing was braying that Jimmy Carter was surely the anti-christ.) MTV wasn’t even yet a glint in anyone’s eye, and computers still occupied entire rooms. The most high-tech thing I owned was an analog turntable that had digital speed and pitch readouts and was controlled by integrated circuits! CD players were still a couple years out, and having an in-dash cassette player in your car was considered hot stuff.

It kind of makes you pause and consider how much life has changed during the last 30 years.

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I…I Just Can’t.

I swear Teh St00pid is spreading like an unchecked cancer  across this country.

Last Friday I received an email from a recruiter:

The Desktop Support Analyst will be responsible for providing a high level of PC hardware/software support for our local and remote clients in a Windows/MAC environment and for assisting with major PC related projects (rollout of a new application, hardware/software upgrades, integrations, etc.)

We are the world’s largest supplier of services, products, and solutions to industrial and commercial users of electronic components and enterprise computing solutions and growing by leaps and bounds!

 What you’ll be doing:

▪   Providing PC hardware and software support for our local and remote clients.

▪   Diagnosis of PC problems via phone, remote control of desktops or desk-side visit.

▪   Provide support for Mobile Device Technology (Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, etc).

What you need:

▪   Extensive hands-on experience troubleshooting and installing PCs, peripherals and applications.

▪   Minimum of 3 years’ experience supporting users via phone, remote control and desk side visits in a large multi-location corporate environment.

▪   Strong knowledge and experience with Windows 7, Windows XP, MS Outlook/Exchange, MS Office 2007

▪   Experience using remote-control software, software distribution tools (e.g. Symantec Altiris) and anti-virus & spyware tools..

▪   Experience upgrading PCs (memory, hard drive, data transfer, etc.)

▪   Maintain and update users PC asset information and experience supporting mobile device technology

▪   24×7 On-call technical support on a rotation basis and local travel when required (less than 10%)

Nice to have:

▪   5+ years supporting PC users in a multi-location corporate WAN environment with 3,000+ users.

▪   Microsoft or other technical certification or training.

▪   Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or related discipline

▪   Experience with iOS and MacBooks

▪   Experience with encryption software such as McAfee Endpoint Encryption

What’s in it for you:

▪   Competitive salary and full benefits.
- Work with one of the top-ranked solutions companies in the country
- Unlimited opportunity for growth

If you feel like this would be a great fit for you, please apply today!  You’ll be glad you did!

Okay, this sounded exactly like what I’m looking for. The email had no direct link to “apply today!” so I sent the guy my latest resume.

This morning I received an email from him saying, “Please call immediately!”  Wow, I thought. This must be a hot job.

So I returned his call and it soon became apparent I was dealing with someone who wasn’t running on all cylinders. He asked how much I had been making at my last job and I told him. For the life of him, he could not understand how I could be a full-time, permanent W-2 employee with benefits who was paid hourly—all but calling me a liar for claiming so. Then he asked what I was making my job previous to that one (the one I’d worked at for seven years in Phoenix). Again, he COULD. NOT. BELIEVE. I was paid on an hourly basis.  “If you work 60 hours in a week, do you get paid for 60 hours?” YES, I said. I get paid 40 hours at my regular pay and then 20 hours of overtime at time and a half. So then I tried tossing out the terms Exempt and Non-Exempt. That didn’t register with him either.

This guy just didn’t get it, and from there the conversation went downhill. He asked why I wasn’t still working at my last position. I explained that because of the revolving door lack of leadership, too much was falling into my lap that I was unqualified for.

Because I got tired of dealing with idiots like you!

“So you were fired?”

“No, I quit.”

And his response, dripping with judgment, was, “Without something else lined up? Do you think that was a wise idea?”

I swear, this is not the kind of crap I needed first thing today. When I related this to my friend Michael, he said I should’ve responded to him with, “It was wiser than talking to you since you clearly don’t have a CLUE.”

Why don’t I think of this stuff while it’s happening?

Anyhow, he never asked about my experience or what I actually did at any of the places I worked. Totally fixated on the wage issue, he ended the conversation by saying asking what kind of money I was looking for, “Not hourly, but as an employee.”

I told him and he reluctantly said he would pass this information along to the hiring manager.

You do that, buddy. You do that.

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Word.

From Driftglass:

They really aren’t that complicated.

Because.  There. Is.  No.  Tea.  Party.

As we Liberals have said many, many, many times before—as we were saying immediately after they appeared on the national scene and were slobberingly embraced by the national media as a Totally New Awesome Shiny Object—the Tea Party is nothing more than the same, cranky, white pig-ignorant GOP base voters who have been flinging the United States off of one cliff after another for most of my adult lifetime.

The same, old (very old) coalition of bigots, fundies and assorted other proudly ignorant meatsticks (tarted up for the cameras with a drizzle of “intellectuals” and think-tank manikins and a sprinkle of a few self-loathing minorities) that have been the bedrock of the GOP since Nixon—a mob of lobotomized shouters who cheered for every treason and catastrophe of the Bush on at 120 decibels right up until he started to lose.

After which they started to become exponentially more publicly unhinged.

Then came the Black President, after which they lost their shit completely and forever.

But of course, Serious People in Polite Society are never supposed to recognize such things, so instead of doubling over in laughing when millions of Republican meatsticks put on tricorner hats and hied their fat asses down to the local Ramada Inn to rally in favor of everyone pretending they’d out for a short beer for the last 20 years or so…the Mainstream Media went right along with the scam.

As one reviled, loser wrote back in 2009, while Very Serious people like David Brooks were ooh-ing over all of these newly minted “independents” that were suddenly abroad in the land, the word “Independent” had lost any meaning at all

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in “Cat’s Cradle” as a “granfalloon”:

“…a proud and meaningless association of human beings”

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

As the same, reviled loser wrote back in 2009 as the protobaggers were figuring out where to order Gadsden Flags in bulk:

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that’s who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

Actually, I got that last bit wrong: turns out they fooled a whole lot of wealthy, influential people in the press because so many people in the press got to be and wealthy, influential by being just such colossal fools.

All of which is made geomentrically more depressing when I go back to my archives and note that, yep, I sure as shit predicted this exact phenomenon 2006 during the height of the Age of Boosh:

… In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade. 

It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.

As I said, Teabaggers really aren’t that complicated.  They only made to appear so by their collaborators in the national media who categorically refuse to call them out by their real name.

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