Obama Endorses Gay Rights

Today President Obama signed a non-binding resolution on universal rights for gay people. It calls for "decriminilization of homosexuality."

This resolution has been around for awhile, having been put forward on December 19 of last year. This means that the former administration actually resisted getting on board with a statement that it should not be a CRIME to be homosexual. What the hell century is this? Are we North Korea or something?

Somebody out there please try to defend not signing this thing because I really want to know what justification there could be.

Some hatin', true.

I'm working on another blog post right now, but I thought I would compile some recent Bush-related articles posted on The Onion*:

Bush Dies Peacefully in His Sleep
Spider Eggs Hatch in Bush's Brain
Single-Engine Cessna Crashes into Bush
Bush's Eyelid Accidentally Nailed to Wall
Bush Dragged Behind Presidential Motorcade For 26 Blocks
Bush Passes Three-Pound Kidney Stone
Crocodile Bites Off Bush's Arm
Bush Tumbles Wildly Down Washington Monument Staircase

I forget sometimes that the ills that have been visited upon our country for the past eight years were foreseen by many. Check out this classic Onion article entitled "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over". This was posted January 17, 2001, just three days before Bush took office. A few quotes:

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

Turning to the subject of the environment, Bush said he will do whatever it takes to undo the tremendous damage not done by the Clinton Administration to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He assured citizens that he will follow through on his campaign promise to open the 1.5 million acre refuge's coastal plain to oil drilling. As a sign of his commitment to bringing about a change in the environment, he pointed to his choice of Gale Norton for Secretary of the Interior. Norton, Bush noted, has "extensive experience" fighting environmental causes, working as a lobbyist for lead-paint manufacturers and as an attorney for loggers and miners, in addition to suing the EPA to overturn clean-air standards.

Continued Bush: "John Ashcroft will be invaluable in healing the terrible wedge President Clinton drove between church and state."

An overwhelming 49.9 percent of Americans responded enthusiastically to the Bush speech.

"After eight years of relatively sane fiscal policy under the Democrats, we have reached a point where, just a few weeks ago, President Clinton said that the national debt could be paid off by as early as 2012," Rahway, NJ, machinist and father of three Bud Crandall said. "That's not the kind of world I want my children to grow up in."

"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

*I in no way wish pain upon Mr. Bush, although I whole-heartedly endorse him going through a war crimes trial.

You haven't lived...

...until you've heard Arnold Schwarzenegger say "Ponzi Schemes." Also, should any governor ever say this?:

Conan's sword could not have cleaved our political system in two as cleanly as our own political parties have done.

The answer is: this should never be a thing that an elected official says. Thankfully, from the audio feed I was receiving it seems that nobody in the room laughed (this was delivered as part of the State of the State Address).

Some life instructions

Picture this. You're driving down a highway and you see a car with a flat tire. Or you come across a car with a dead battery in a parking lot. The owner of the car is Jim Lehrer. You should stop and help him. It's like your prerogative. This is why.

Today our VP Dick was on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. If you've never watched this show, it's a wonderful news program that I don't catch often enough because I don't watch a lot of TV. Strangely enough, KQED plays the Newshour over the radio every afternoon, which is kind of disconcerting since it isn't set up as a radio show and therefore you lose gestures and graphics and such, but that's neither here nor there. Jim Lehrer is an incredibly fair, patient man, and an extremely well-respected newsman.

Lehrer and Cheney discussed a number of things, and ranged into talking about the economy. The following exchange took place (italics are mine duh):

MR. LEHRER in a fair, patient tone of voice: What about - going back to the original question - about seeing this coming? Isn't that part of the stewardship of the president, of the vice president and of his administration - to see these things coming and try to prevent them from coming, rather than to act after they've happened?

VICE PRES. CHENEY in an asshole tone of voice: Did you see it coming, Jim? You're an expert.

MR. LEHRER winning: I'm not the president or the vice president of the United States.

MR. LEHRER: FTW!

Seriously? Does anybody buy this?

I am in the process of writing another post, but I just saw this bit of news. An interview with our VP Dick. He asserts that nobody at the CIA did anything illegal in interrogations. You can argue, from a certain point of view (which I and other, expert, people would not) that torture is the way to get information. You could argue that it's justified to protect the national security or what have you, although I think the ethical questions overrule any kind of other benefit. But to argue that it's LEGAL? Come now, VP, I know that you think we're stupid, but really. The lying has to stop some day.

What I've been reading

I just finished a book, which is getting annoyingly rare these days. I walk an hour plus every day now (I stopped taking the terrible neighborhood bus because it's terrible) plus 20 minutes on the subway per day. Which seems like a lot of time to spend reading except that it's not the easiest thing in the world to walk and read at the same time. Alison made it a little easier since she bought me a nifty reading light for a pre-Christmas gift. It still takes me about a month to read a book unfortunately. This book I just read is The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Alison had heard of these folks before but of course I'm ignorant and had not.

The book started out very slow...the whole beginning of the book was a lesson on the mechanics of evolution (why we evolved, and stuff). It was a strange way to write this book, with a lot of very technical scientific writing mixed in with language pandering to the completely non-scientific. It felt a little trite to the scientist in me, but also a little muddling to the non-geneticist in me.

It got way more interesting toward the end, with a lot of stats about the human ruination of the environment. I think that everybody should at least read the last half of this book to get a better understanding of our impacts, in case you don't already know. It's leading me to greatly reduce my meat intake (not because of my health, or the high price of good meat, or the cow farts, or the fertilizer in the waterway, or even my lovely wife's aversion to it, but rather simply because it turns out to be an incredibly inefficient way to get our food energy, and would make much more sense in terms of sustainability to eat vegetables instead).

My main conclusion drawn from this book is that there is basically no hope for the human race. I have felt this way for awhile to a certain degree, but the way we're headed in this book seals the deal. People, we are screwed.

Next I'm going to read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. I hope this book cheers me up by thinking about what will happen to the world once we've destroyed ourselves. Alison already read this book, and wrote a blog post about it.

It's unfortunate that we as a species have decided that it's our right to do whatever we want to to make us happy at the cost of everything else on this planet, but there it is. It's also unfortunate that when we go down we're going to take with us an unprecedented number of species away from this world. The generalists will survive, cockroaches and rats and such. In a world devoid of lots of the species that usually fill the ecological niches present in this world, at least there should be a species explosion to fill them in rapid (geologically) order, yay!

A late goodbye, hello

Some of you know, and some of you do not, that I recently left the Land of Enchantment for the Golden State. This means a lot of things, major shifts in my life. This means that I quit school (probably). I've never really quit anything before, and I don't feel too good about it, but I think it was the right decision. It also means that, for the first time in my life, I have no plans to be going back to school. Think about that. I've never not been either in school or preparing to go to school. There's a finality in that that I've never experienced, and I'm not sure how to take it. For now, I mostly just don't think about it.

This also meant moving again. We had some troubles with the landpeople, but luckily my wife is awesome. It meant I had to tear out my garden, which was a little sad because the yellow squashes were finally starting to bear fruit; the zucchini, beans, and corn were pretty much played out, with little result from the non-pop-corn (I should take a picture of my bean and popcorn harvests some time; I dried them and brought them with me...shhh! don't tell California). I had already finished up with the community garden, since my pepper plants succumbed to frost. The zucchini plant also proved to be pretty well infested with aphids, so it was probably time for it to go. It was taking up at least half of the garden when I killed it. I haven't yet gotten around to planting anything here, a month later. And we had to give up all our houseplants (including my grape vine that was doing quite nicely) before the move. Hopefully some of those plants still exist?

Another thing the move meant was that I got to realize what great friends I have. I am a complete douche when it comes to keeping in touch with people and such, as pretty much all of you know. I only talk to one of my friends on a regular basis, and that's because he's a bulldog about calling me regularly. So I had notified two of my friends about the upcoming move so they could come help me fill the truck. I texted (texted!) BT the day of to see if he wanted to come down the street to help out, and he passed the word to SB, who passed the word to KGS and PS...all of these people showed up at my front door on no notice, with SB, KGS, and PS having to drive all the way down from Santa Fe for this. They stayed for hours and hours, helping me move boxes and pack boxes and wipe down surfaces and such. I really don't know how to thank these people. And AKW wouldn't even let me pay him for the beer that he brought over, so I basically did nothing for anybody, with no notice, and all of these people still gave of their time and energy just to see me off. I am truly luckly to have such people in my life. I hope that they still want to know me after my little escapade, although I would not blame them if they did not. They are all welcome to come stay with us in the big city any time, of course.

The next thing the move meant was a very long drive by myself (Alison already having moved out here the previous month). I hope not to have to drive a rental van that far again, maybe ever. The trip took 16 hours, with all of it taken up by road either terribly boring, pitch black, or that I've already seen before. Or all of the above in some cases. The only new towns I got to experience were Barstow and Bakersfield, and I tell you I could go my whole life without experiencing them again and be perfectly happy. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but they're just more Kingmans and Yumas. Nothing for me there. The move took me all of a day and a half, and I did it on a pretty amazingly low budget (less than $1K for the van, meals, gas, and lodging) which netted me a good signing bonus. The nicest part was seeing Alison again, even if we had to stay in a not-so-nice place for a couple nights.

The move also meant finding an apartment. I'll be first to say that Alison put in a heroic effort looking for a place in this city. The rental market here is apparently even worse than in Albuquerque, where you have to basically commit to taking a place as soon as you see it. In SF, you have to commit, and you have to have credit reports, references, and all kinds of other documentation ready at a moment's notice. This was kind of a shock to me, and led to quite a bit of running around for her, and a little bit for me. When I got to town, we looked at a total of two places and I encouraged her to agree with me that we should take the first one we saw. Now we live in a huge (by SF standards - 700 square feet for a 1 bedroom 1 bathroom) apartment on Twin Peaks, from which you can see the entire city, the Bay, the ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge, and everything else (on a clear day). Look at the pictures of the city in that article (incidentally, you can see our apartment complex on the aerial photo, just east of the parking area to the north of the two peaks). It's quiet here too, the quietest place I've been in the city yet. The roads are all very steep, and so nobody ever drives through our neighborhood.

It means that my carbon footprint has nosedived. It takes me about 40 minutes to get to work in the morning on the bus and the subway, and about 50 minutes or so on the subway and on foot (up the mountain!) to get home. I have a bus pass now, so I ride all of the buses for free. I have been in the car 5 times since we finished moving into this apartment, which is a bit over a month. I've commuted on public transit, I came home from the airport on transit, and we go into the city to do our shopping, socializing, and eating on transit. I've never, ever lived anywhere so easily accessible as this place. What a wonderful thing.

It means that I am having all kinds of new experiences. I have never lived sniffing distance from the ocean before. In fact, the closest I ever lived before here was Phoenix, which is a far cry yet, climatologically if not proximally. I've never lived somewhere so liberal before (although the passing of Proposition 8 was a pretty crushing blow, and kind of a shock in such a progressive state). Every day I embark on the subway in the morning (and disembark in the evening) in the Castro, beneath a huge gay pride flag. This place is easily the most diverse, most accepting place I've ever lived in, and I'm very appreciative of that.

I hope that this will be a return to regular blogging for me, although I only have a limited number of hours to spend with the wife between work and bed. I had such a long hiatus because my life was in flux, and I hate having to tell everybody that my life is in flux; I'd obviously just rather not deal with it and tell people after the fact.

Finally, it has come to my attention that my mother has located my blog, so everybody cut out the penis jokes and all the childish bullshit, for her sake if not for mine.