Working Man

Consulting work is fun. I'm going into my 9th straight day of work, but guess what? I'm fucking done Sunday at 6:00 p.m. Will have my rent paid and then some, can dick around for a few days before I start my next project. Only problem is, I am working 12 hour days, and have been experiencing some pretty serious cluster headaches lately. But whatchagonnado?

So, stuff is probably happening in the world somewhere. Someone else can bother blawging about it for right now. PowerPoint, onward!

Never Mind the Poltroons, Here's Arthur Silber

Help Arthur Silber. Please donate to him here, he desperately needs whatever assistance you can offer. I "unretired" from blogging in large part to write this post.

Arthur is simply one of the most generous and beautiful people I've ever had the pleasure to converse with on this here internets, and I hope to hell that he is doing alright. No one writes with his power or clarity, and on a myriad* of subjects to boot. No one.

I'm just gonna cut and paste Chris Floyd's post from last week in its entirety:

Arthur Silber has been silent for quite some time, and his last post spoke of horrific problems with his health -- which has been declining for a long time, and now seems to have taken a deep plunge.

I don't know his precise situation at the moment, but it is likely to be dire. I imagine too that in addition to the health problems, he is facing the usual crush of bills at the end of the month. He is one of our strongest and most thought-provoking voices, yet is forced to live at the margins of society, while witless poltroons and egregious time-servers swim in gravy.

I am not authorized to speak for him, and am not speaking for him -- but just on my own volition, I would urge you to go to his site and, if you have anything to give, give what you can to support Silber in this difficult time. We need his insight, we need his wit, we need the disturbing, productive fire in the mind that he can light.

And while you're there, avail yourself of some of the "Major Essays" listed on the side; this is powerful stuff, and you won't see anything like it anywhere else.

Please donate. Even if it is just a few dollars.

Thank you.

*Hey Smilingdork, if you're reading:

usage Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.

PS - Arthur, I promise to write soon. And guess what, it's mom's birthday today!

I Honked for Gaza this Weekend

Yeah, that's just about the only level of activism I can handle right now.

I went to Gainesville, FL last week (UF is my alma mater) to try to feel a little bit of the juice that was gonna happen when the Gators won the national championship. I was hoping to see some fires and cop cars flipped over, but no dice there. It was an extremely orderly and boooring celebration. There were 100 riot police on the street, they greased all of the light polls, had choppers flying overhead, and had the fire department patrolling the crowd and bars. It must have been a lot more fun celebrating (let alone protesting) before we became a total police state.

So, Luddite Robot put up an interesting post at UsefulActivism. Read it, comment on it, etc. What do you guys think?

I've been trying to think about something to post about lately, but it just really feels kinda useless. I can't seem to get it up for any significant bloggery. I mean, come on. What do I write about? Gaza? Obama's inauguration? Fucking Sanjay Gupta? (by the way, fuckhead over there wrote that article in response to the campaign [yeah, that's me suing the entire Nevada political and law enforcement communty. That's just how I roll, bitches. Well, used to roll that is, before I quit my job.] I worked on in 2006 in NV. Gupta has a long history of sticking his fucking beak into health policy debates, doing the establishment's dirty work as a supposed neutral healthcare professional). The fact that the "bailout" last year turns out to have been a total bullshit looting of the treasury for the banks to simply be able to buy other banks? I mean seriously, no one could have seen that one coming, right? Ferchrissakes. I'd just be adding noise. Spouting off into the void.

Oh, and TGGP? I'm not domain-name squatting. I've been the sole proprietor of this here piece of the internet since approximately March of 2004, once the Dean campaign was over, and I found myself unemployed and wondering "what the fuck just happened here?" I mean, I was supposed to have been working in the White House as of inauguration time back in 2005.

Unfortunately, for my ability to gain a readership anyways, there have been several lengthy hiatuses. But they were definitely a good thing overall. I mean, in 2004, I was a very vocal member of this crew. You know, e-mailing back and forth with la Digz and collectively scratching our heads, "I just don't understand why John Kerry is running such a bad campaign. He just needs to say X,Y, and Z in order to win. It just doesn't make any sense." Luckily, I took two years off from blogging, worked some more campaigns, worked towards getting a masters degree in political science, and became a fuckload more cynical and angry at the political process. I started writing again in summer 2007, that first week in August, when the Dems totally "capitulated" (that's what I used to call it back then) on FISA.

I tried to be helpful. I suggested supporting Cindy Sheehan over Nancy Pelosi in the election, as a tactic that your average Dem supporter who was angry at the Dems could do. I also suggested trying to impeach Pelosi and Reid. I also suggested writing out an actual list of things that, if done by the Democrats, would cause you to stop actively supporting them. I tried to point out the stupidity of the "More and Better Democrats" argument. Fuck it. HOPE AND CHANGE FOREVER, motherfuckers!

Then, last spring, I was asked by my former employer to remove my name from this blog. I completely see where they were coming from, and hold them no ill will on this matter. I mean, I was writing lengthy blog posts urging people not to vote at all, when I was being paid to try to get people to vote on medical marijuana initiatives (yeah, we won, bitches. It was supposed to have been a big deal. One of the final cracks in the wall of ending marijuana prohibition. Well, at least medical marijuana prohibition. All it was going to take is winning a few more states, and Obama being elected, plus larger majorities for the Dems in both houses of congress. Motherfucking slam-dunk. So, how'd that work out?). I'm kind of an obstinant, hardheaded fucker, and I refuse to be pseudonymous. Pseudonyms are for pussies. (Yeah, that's right. I just called out 97% of the blogosphere. Pussies.) So instead, I tore down my blog, deleted my archives, and did everything I could to scour any traces I that I had left on google.

Well, now that I'm unemployed, I can write whatever I want, right? Woo-hoo! If only I could think of anything to write about. Ah well, fuck it. Where else can you write a couple of hundred words about how you have nothing to write about?

Blaaaaaawg!

PS - ha, yeah, I know how that goes. Infuriating. Ah well.