Last summer, on a warm August morning, I walked my son over to his day camp at the community center down the street. I did this every weekday morning that I was in the country and we usually took a shortcut through the playing field.

On my way back I was listening to music on my headphones and I walked past a guy who was just hanging out. He was old, at least 65, on crutches and had a cast on his leg. As I walked past he started shouting the “hey baby” crap at me. I could hear him over my headphones but I ignored him. He started to chase after me ON CRUTCHES when I didn’t respond. He started yelling shit like “bitch you shouldn’t be shaking your ass if you don’t want attention” etc.

I turned around, pulled my headphones off and told him that if he didn’t shut up I was going to kick his ass, and I absolutely meant it. He said something about how I couldn’t kick his ass and how he could kill me. I laughed, pointed out that he was old and broken and walked off. I was a bit shaken up but proud that I had told him off. Today though I am really glad he didn’t have a car or a weapon after reading this.

A woman was in serious condition Wednesday morning after Orange County
deputies said a man deliberately ran her over.

The woman and her friend were apparently walking down the side of the road near Orange Blossom trail and Jordan Avenue late Tuesday night when the accident happened. Deputies said the man responsible wanted their attention and wasn’t taking no for an answer.

Just to make it simple- here’s an easy breakdown so you can understand the problem from a male privilege point of view

1) Women are created to be attractive so that men will pay attention to them

2) All women are attention whores so they all should appreciate any type of attention they receive from men

3) Women who don’t show the appropriate amount of respect when receiving attention from men (i/e dropping to their knees and offering a blow job or at least flashing their tits) are teases even if they weren’t trying to get any attention at all. If they didn’t want attention then they shouldn’t have left the house.

4) Teases and whores deserve what’s coming to them. They were asking for it.

Most guys don’t get how unnerving it is to be yelled at by some stranger. They think that like in publicity- all attention is good. But being yelled at by some stranger or even just having some random guy on the street tell you to smile are not the same thing as having a friend or acquaintance compliment you on your dress or hair or shoes. One action is part of enhancing or creating a social bond between equals, the other is one person turning another into an object for their own gratification and not for the benefit of the person being commented on.

Add the ever present threat of violence that women are warned about everyday from the time we are old enough to know we are different from boys, and this kind of harassment is enough to make me want to get a concealed weapons permit.

Today is my birthday. It is also the anniversary of this little adventure called The White Papers.

It is also the 4th year of the Iraq war. The paranoid conspiracy theorist in my head still thinks that part of the reason for starting the war on my birthday was so that the neocons could get one more giant dig into a progressive. But I’m not really that important.

So it’s four years into this pointless and badly planned war and no one seems to have any idea what to do about it. Surging is pointless, we don’t have and can’t commit enough troops to turn Iraq into the lock down, high security prison state that Bush dreams of. If we stay the course then the horrible bloodshed will either maintain its current intolerable level or, much more likely, get worse. And if we pull out, completely leave Iraq to its own devices, then there really will have been nothing gained and much lost after four years of horror and blood.

But pulling out is the only way for Iraq to find its footing and eventually some peace.

The current powers that be, namely Bush and Cheney and their foaming mouthed sycophants, still think we are a country capable of creating puppet “democracies” like we did in Latin America for most of the last century. But not this time. There was no real “Big Man” in Iraq like there was in Chile with Pinochet. Well, there was and we helped put him there, but recently the Iraqi people had their former leader executed.

The Iraqi people need the Americans out so that they can create their own government, be it a democracy or theocracy or flat out anarchy. It is not our place to force a government of any kind on Iraq. One of my favorite quotes is that “Democracy through tyranny is still tyranny”. By imposing ourselves and our politics on Iraq we are the worst kind of tyrants- ineffective. If we could justify our presence in the country by showing that the Iraqis are now safe from violence or ethnic divisions, that they are free from the starvation and shortages that they suffered under Saddam because of the embargo, that they could even walk out of their houses everyday to go to work or school, then maybe we could justify staying in the country to promote peace. But everyday life for Iraqis becomes harder and we are the cause.

So we must pull out. It will cause a power vacuum, it will increase violence in the short-term, and every death that follows our leaving will be just as much our fault as the deaths that are caused by our being there. But the Iraqis will then have to deal with each other without the excuse of the Americans as occupiers to continue the violence. Without us there, then the influence of Al Qaida (that only exists since we have invaded Iraq, not before as the foaming mouths will have you believe) will diminish.

Iraq needs a chance to organically develop a leader to take charge of their country and as long as we are there that WILL NOT HAPPEN. Anyone who works with the Americans will be suspect as being a puppet, anyone who works against the Americans will be fodder for our troops. The Iraqis must have a chance for a strong leader to develop the support and organization needed to drag a country out of civil war. It will be bloody, it will most likely be another dictator, and the Sunni minority will probably be the biggest losers. But it is up to the Iraqis to fight or accept that. All we can do at this point is throw money at the infrastructure of the country that we destroyed (and not put that money through government contracts where palettes of money disappear like political Latin Americans in the 70s).

We have failed the soldiers of our country by putting them in harms way for reasons based on lies. We have failed the people of Iraq by taking them from a dictatorship that they knew to a bloody civil war where no one is safe. Saddam was certainly not a saint, but I am pretty sure most Iraqis would prefer a false sense of security over perpetual war. We must admit our hubris and withdraw.

I have to say that its a bit strange being on this side of the globe. I think that we all get these romantic notions that things are better here or there because they’re there and not here and there are so many problems with here and none that you can really focus on there. That is, of course, until you’re there and then you also realize that they’ve got problems as well.

It all makes sense in the head, seriously it does.

Since this is my first real post from abroad, I figured it needed to be wordy and deep or just wordy. As someone once told me about opening bands, “if you can’t be good, be loud”. I plan on being plenty loud. How can I not? I’m in the UK and if they’re anything they’re about the subtle humor vs the American “pie in the face” kind. They suffer awful weather graciously. Wear monkey suits when they go to their day jobs and in general, are fairly pleasant even when they don’t need to be. Generally speaking though, humor wise, I prefer a mix, sarcasm and slap stick, yes, there is room in my comic universe for both Carrot Top and John Stewart.

I will say that the news here is about a thousand times better than what you get in the states, if for one simple reason, I can turn on my teevee and watch Al Jazeera and make my own opinion about it vs having that opinion made for me by cable marketing execs who fear the fallout of rightwing wacko conservatives who get their noise from the Big Dick’s secret bunker. And strangely enough, I like Al Jazeera. A little more mid-east focused than I’d really care about but you have to figure that’d be the case with a station that is based in Qatar. Otherwise, its clean (no waving flags or 18 different news banners going off at the same time or crazy graphics) and professional and unlike the Dick’s secret bunker, it is quite balanced.

It is certainly a different world here though. Yesterday there was a story concerning the controversial issue of bi-weekly garbage pickup. Basically, the news did an admirable job of attempting to tie the issue to global warming, which is now the justification for any poorly thought out policy. This is probably going to ruffle a few feathers but I don’t completely buy into the man made global warming story. Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no issues with using less carbon, recycling, etc and I can see their merits outside of a “global warming” prism but I suppose its the cynic in me. Something about this just seems too neat, it smells. But if it makes people wake up a bit and attempt to reduce their footprint on mother earth, then I’m fine with that, gospel truth or not. That having been said, a purely financial decision and an unpopular one at that was being tied to global warming so as to lower the amount of criticism for it. Cause if you just came out and said, we’re not going to pick up your garbage and recycling every week because we don’t want to pay people to do it, that might get a lot of people’s gander up. But if you tie it to global warming, then anyone that complains obviously doesn’t care about the environment and so on and so forth. Sort of like stuffing spinach farmer relief and other pork into defense authorization bills. If you veto that, well then you must hate our military.

The justification for the 2 week pickup was that most waste is food, food is carbon but “encouraging” people to not throw out as much food since having it piling up is a bad thing, then you’re lowering carbon and saving the earth. This all fails basic logic when you start thinking about things like, well, the carbon from your grapes that you didn’t eat would still be carbon some place else, in your rubbish bin or someone else’s. Basically the only thing you’ve done is move it around like a bad shell game. Not only that, but there are people who seriously need to have their trash picked up, like families with kids (imagine two weeks of dirty diapers). This doesn’t even begin to cover things like rats and other vermin that will more than likely thrive under such a regime, etc.

Recently, there was a new tax on flying here in the UK. It was brought in to help curb the effects of global warming or some such nonsense with respect to flying. Are the proceeds of the tax going to make the airlines more efficient? No. Are the proceeds going to making airports more efficient, either by adding new systems that would mean less taxi-ing or more direct routes to destination airports, expanding airports so that flights don’t endlessly circle when there is bad weather, limiting flights so that their aren’t more scheduled than safely take off or land at a particular time, etc? That’d also be a big fat no. Basically, they’ve just added a tax to discourage the average Joe person to not fly. But a 40 pound tax isn’t going stop Joe Holiday Maker from putting off his vacation plans. A 400 pound tax on the other hand, would. But you don’t see people screaming for that, do you. Why not? Because people really wouldn’t fly. This is less about global warming and more about putting money into the hands of the government and then painting anyone against it as someone who hates the earth.

Anyway, I just with people would think a bit more critically about this kind of stuff. I’m not against paying taxes or anything of that nature (goodness knows I was for the monorail and I owned a car in the city) I just want the revenues for such things to basically go for the justification that was given for levying it. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if the lottery revenue (I’m not sure about WA but the lottery was sold in NY for this purpose) actually went to schools? Or tolls from roads actually going to fixing the road? How about global warming taxes that actually went to reducing carbon emissions? Or encouraging people to use less of it or buy more efficient cars, lightbulbs, appliances, etc? Placing windwarms off shore or using wave energy?

Been around the world and I’m cynical. Its good to see that some things don’t change. Though I do have to say that the outlook on life certainly did.

Now I wonder what those boys are doing with that new fangled Globe Theatre thing…

Lacking Papers, Citizens Are Cut From Medicaid

WASHINGTON, March 11 — A new federal rule intended to keep illegal
immigrants from receiving Medicaid has instead shut out tens of thousands of
United States citizens who have had difficulty complying with requirements
to show birth certificates and other documents proving their citizenship,
state officials say.

Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Ohio and
Virginia have all reported declines in enrollment and traced them to the new
federal requirement, which comes just as state officials around the country are
striving to expand coverage through Medicaid and other means.

Fascism is coming to America and I am complicit.

Whether I like to see it or not, I am.

See, I’m a white, suburban, middle-class Christian.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone came out with a fab piece on the Bush 2008 budget and correlation between the elimination of the estate tax for the country’s wealthiest families and cuts to social programs.

I’m not going to rehash his entire article, but for reference, these are some of the disgusting examples he sites:

If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family — the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

the heirs to the Mars candy corporation — some of the world’s evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D’Ivoire — if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That’s more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while education would get $1.5 billion in cuts

Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630 million cut

Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut

In typical fashion, the libertarian and conservative yahoos posting comments on blogs that have written about this article are using the same old, tired, untrue arguments.

For Example:

Whahhhhh, you want to STEAL from dead people!

Whahhhh, rich people earned their money, they should get to keep it.

Whahhhhh, all the money the government gets from taxes just disappears and no good comes from it.

Whahhhhh, those poor people who want social services should pull themselves up by their bootstraps like the rich heirs to trust funds do.

Etc.

But those are all false. Government services are like food in a restaurant, sometimes you get surf ‘n turf with a really good wine, sometimes all you can afford is a hamburger and a coke. But you pay for what you get, or at least you are supposed to. Bushco has been trying to turn that around for years so that us hamburger eaters are paying surf ‘n turf prices while the mucky-mucks get their lobster free.

For example, I do not need a trade agreement with China or Mexico and the Doha trade talks won’t really do anything for me. But Wal-Mart needs Uncle Sam to go in and get China to whip up some Peking Duck on the cheap. It is not my container ships or trucking companies that need to make sure oil is free flowing so that my goods are too. And I don’t need some jacked-up war in Iraq or Iran or wherever we are fighting this week so that I can fatten my pocketbook with military contracts or pilfered oil resources. Those are expensive, steak and lobster level meals that the wealthiest in the country need and need to pay for.

I need healthcare, education, safe water and food, transportation and domestic security. So do you. Those are hamburger meals, nothing fancy. And we pay for them.

Whining that the estate tax is stealing from the dead is ridiculous. When do you pay your restaurant tab? The only time you pay it before you eat is at an all-you-can eat buffet (think socialism) where everybody gets to take what they need for the same price and nobody eats for free. (very simple analogy- but suck it if you’ve got a problem)

Nope, you pay your restaurant tab at the end of the meal when you know you’ve had your fill. Those who die with mountains of money generally have had a much better meal than the rest of us. Shouldn’t they pay for what they’ve eaten? What, you think they should be able to pass it onto their heirs instead of paying their government waitstaff? Whose gonna pay their tab then? Whose gonna pay for Doha talks and free trade agreements? What, all the rest of us who gain little to no benefit from such things? Why? Capitalism is supposed to mean you pay a fair price for the goods and services you get. You can’t very well go around screaming that capitalism is the best way if your not willing to pay your tab at the end of the night. No dine and dash for the wealthy, they need to pay for what they eat just like the rest of us.