My Suburban Destiny

What’s up with McCain supporters going around and smashing people’s windows and stealing their yard signs?

Just more evidence, that there isn’t a conservative party in the US, just creaping fascism.  The consequences of a two party system is you get to vote for people who have no respect for law and no respect for law and order.  Or you get to vote for a party that might disagree with you on your favorite issue.  Or you can stay home.

Without law and order, without the rule of law, abortion and who is more pro-gun is the least of our concerns.

Fantastic movie.  Everyone should see it ask themselves, which party, given that we only have two, is likely be backbone of the Norsefire party in the US?  Which party would create fear and war to remove our freedoms? Which party will use fear of the other to make obey what we would never obey if we were afraid? (In our own back yard of Virginia no less)  We have only one thing to fear, and it isn’t the fear– it is that we vote people who would manipulate the fear of everyone around us.

I’m not afraid, and besides, inspiring true fear takes a certain amount of competence.

Everyone planning to vote should watch this movie.

The Republican Party has always been one of tough love.  Tough love means not giving handouts, subsidies or services to the public.  Doing such detroys the incentive to achieve because handouts and entitlement reward failure the same as success.

This is why it is more important than ever that there should be 248 people to add to our mind boggling high 7% unemployment rate– all of them Republican hangovers from the biggest nation wrecking binge since the British burned down the White House.

Why should we reward these scum of the earth?  Like it or not we have a two party system and there is likely to be issues in each party with appeal and diagreeableness. Is it because they support guns rights more than the other side? (Both parties support guns more than any guncontrol advocate does!)  Should we relect bozos who are destroying the economy just so we can have fantasies of playing Rambo in our  home?  Is it because they oppose abortion?  Would the Catholics support Beelzebub himself if he were pro-life?  Is there no level of incompetence and malfeasance so great as to trump these popular single issue voting strategies?

The Republicans, like John McCain are the new welfare queens, who have so many houses that he can’t keep track of them.  John McCain is welfare queen of the worst sort whose wealth is derived from coporate welfare.    John McCains family fortune comes from the wholesale liquor business, who would not have such sky high profits if it were for prohibition era experiments with laws that turned out to be a massive consumer to supplier transfer of wealth, check out this Reason article for details.

This year, vote your conservative conscious and vote against all Republicans.  There is no conservative party in the United States.

Most foreign language text books will give you the words for husband, wife, child, son, daughter, etc, but don’t give you the correct words for ex-spouse, ex-wife, ex-husband, live in boyfriend, live in girlfriend, etc.  This is interesting because some of the ways one could say ex-spouse might imply they are dead.

As we head into a recession, will this be the Great Depression II or will this be the close call with the Great Depression II?

Let me tell you as a software developer with a master’s degree in Economics:  the johhny one notes of the Republican party will not save nor help me or the economy with a tax cut.  The “cut taxes” matra of the Republican party is not economic policy but unreasoned sloganeering turned into pseudo-public-policy.

It wasn’t high taxes that turned Wall Street into Vegas.  It won’t be tax cuts that get us out of this mess. Besides, when we are all unemployeed, bereft of our retirement funds and our houses, what taxes did McCain intend to cut?  We already don’t tax the penniless. 

Tax haters like to point to the day when you start working for your self, about one quarter to one third through the year.  Maybe people should start paying attention to the day that we will make up for the Bush tax that robbed us of our stock and real estate portfolios.  When will we get that back?  At least tax freedom day arrives sometime in the year.  The day our assets recover may be much more than a year and longer should we individually go bust before then.

McCain and the Republican party are scurrying to save the passengers on the luxury yachts that are watching us sink on the Titanic.

And they tried to charge $600 on it for some sports related thingy. Fortunately a watchful robot caught the transaction, denied it, called me and the whole card has now been canceled.

This just helps remind us how evil check cards are. If it was a check card, the bank would have let the transaction go through.

My experience also demonstrates how bills by email are somewhat of a mixed blessing. My email account over the years has become deluged with email. In the last few months I’ve been unsubcribing to everything. Still, after I logged on to check the rest of my credit card accounts, I noticed that I got hit with a late fee! It seems the email notification of my bill didn’t make it to my conscious mind.

Word to the computer savy– only do paperless billing if you are a convenience card user (i.e. pay your bill in full every month). Sign up for automatic payment. Check your bills periodically for fraud, and budget busting. Don’t rely on email for bill notifications. Close extra credit card accounts– not because they hurt your credit score, but because they require too much attention to monitor for fraud.

I think people are sick of hearing about my meetup adventures. So I blog about it instead.

It’s kind of like a part time job. The project got started when I figured I could use some leadership experience. It’s been a good way to be a leader with a little L.

Languages. Icelandic attracts intense, intelligent people on a mission. Swedish attracts everyone, but they’re too cool to be obsessive about learning it. Norwegian attracts people who have relatives in Norway, but are more into the food and ski-ing than the language. 100+ people and events with 2 to 9 people almost every other day.

Problem groups. The Mongolian group is going to take off…any day now, but it hasn’t yet. The constructed language group couldn’t get off the ground and I ended it. There is something wrong with the category “constructed language” as a special interest group. In retrospect I think it was a poorly chosen category– too narrow, no natural event formats that follow.

Up and coming I posted a literary Science Fiction book club on meetup and bam! In two days I’m up to about 9 people. I hope to fix some of the organizational issues that I saw in the past book club groups I’ve been to. Lemme list them:

1- It takes a long time to get the book. If the book is chosen a week before the event, I won’t be able to find the book.
2- It takes time to read the book. Odds of finishing = time / (boringness + pages + seriousness)
3- People who propose a book– sometimes don’t show at the book club
4- Books are chosen hastily
5- If you don’t like the choice, your recourse is to find another book club
6- People like to read a narrow sort of books. While it is nice to get kicked out of your normal genre occasionally, it gets tiresome to always be reading a book that was specifically written to appeal to someone else.

Solution
1- Pick the books far in advance
2- The book group should be based on a set of similar books, i.e. books are chosen from a particular pool, eg. historical fiction
3- Let readers pick one of two.
4- Set the a minimum pages read and set it at about 200 pages
5- Be geographically stable, i.e. always at the same metro stop, same house, same restaurant or bar
6- The organizer should make sure there is some discussion of the book, even if it only holds up for five minutes

My solution will work for a meetup book club because a meetup is all self selected people. I don’t think my proposed solutions would help an affinity book club, like say one based on church membership.