Obama Documents - The Facts You Need To Know
Monday, August 10, 2009 8:42 PM



I must say, I LOVE Human Events!  To the political commentator and satirist, they are the gift that just won't stop giving.  Like a batting cage pitching machine that just won't stop lobbing a ball right down the middle of the plate at a leisurely 40mph, they keep emailing little tracts and advertisements that are just too good not to knock out of the park.  In fact, it's their political and commercial advertisements that most keep me convinced of the fallaciousness of their more serious columnist positions.  Any political group that feels the need to talk in such shuckstery, sophomoric terms to their own unwavering base has some serious issues with honesty....but I'm prattling on about things I've already addressed elsewhere.  Let's move on to today's little piece of exquisite rhetorical bullshit.

Today's email comes to us from the United States Justice Foundation, your "Conservative Voice in the Courts", and from the desk of Gary G. Kreep (I am not making that up!).  The purpose of the email?  Mr. Kreep needs our help to,

 "...FORCE BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA TO PRODUCE
HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE AND OTHER DOCUMENTS!" 

And so, here we go again...

"In recent weeks, the liberal media, especially Chris Matthews of Hard Ball and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, have gone to great lengths to attack and ridicule those who question whether Barack Obama is eligible to serve as President of the United States.

Recently, a liberal columnist raised the interesting question of why are these "attack dogs" so viciously going after any of those who would raise such a question. "

Ignoring for the moment the fact that this "liberal columnist" and his column go unlisted and unlinked-a rather unpardonable crime in the age of hypertext-there is a very simple answer for why all "birthers" have been the subject of ridicule: they are completely full of shit.  The mainstream media is ridiculing these folks because they are the right wing equivalent of the worst 9/11 truthers-and in fact, some of them, such as Phillip Berg are the same people-they will not accept any degree of evidence as answer to their claims and feels as if anyone who would produce (Hawaii’s republican Governor and McCain supporter, Linda Lingle has certified the available birth certificate but to no avail) this evidence is part of a conspiracy, a conspiracy whose goals are anything but nebulous (to install someone born in Kenya, but raised as an American into the presidency in order to...what?  Destroy America? I thought the very much American born Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi were doing just fine at that!). Not even Ann Coulter wants to touch this one.
    Of course, Mr. Kreep has a different explanation,
,

"In my opinion, the simple reason is that the question as to whether Mr. Obama is eligible to serve as President of the United States has become a national issue--as a result of efforts by the United States Justice Foundation and by WorldNetDaily.com. According to recent polls, over half of the public in the United States are aware of this issue, and over forty percent want the matter resolved."

Well yes, group's like Mr. Kreep have made an issue out of a non-issue; of course 40% of Americans are aware of the issue.  It's been all over the media-sphere.  I wish Kreep had cited the polls he's discussing here as I would love to know exactly what is meant by people wanting this issue "resolved."  I certainly want to see it resolved, but I don't think it's resolution depends in any way on Barack Obama releasing any documentation.  But I digress.  Mr. Kreep has more to say,

"Case in point: the recent attacks on Lou Dobbs. Lou Dobbs has stated that he does NOT believe the claims that Mr. Obama is not eligible to serve as President of the United States. However, he HAS questioned why Mr. Obama has not made public his actual birth certificate. He has also had guests on his show who question the eligibility of Mr. Obama to serve as President. However, the "attack dogs" in the media, and radical groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, will not tolerate ANY free speech on this issue."

It's an interesting strategy people like Mr. Kreep are employing here, attempting to cast this as a freedom of speech issue.  The reason pressure has been brought on people like Lou Dobb's is because these allegations about President Obama are demonstratably false.  In almost any similar situation involving a private citizen, many of these birthers could be sued for libel.  It's hard to imagine a claim that more seriously harms a President's reputation than falsely claiming he is not eligible for office, especially so after this has been proven to be patently false (in fact that’s essentially the definition of libel if printed and slander if spoken). 

In this light, Lou Dobb's behavior seems particularly bizarre; if he really does not believe Obama ineligible for office, why is he helping to promote those that assert this as fact.  After all, birthers are not claiming that we do not yet know if Obama is eligible for office, they are claiming that he is not eligible for office.  This is a substantially different claim, for if the question can be fully resolved by an original birth certificate, then the truth would be that we really don't know whether Obama is a natural born citizen, but that doesn't imply that he is not a natural born citizen. The only “evidence” against Obama’s citizenship is that he is black and has a foreign sounding name.  Unfortunately I suspect that at some level, not necessarily a conscious one, that this is what is driving the rabid and credulous acceptance of birther claims.

The real problem with all this birther nonsense is that there really is no answer that would satisfy them.  They are committed to a conclusion before they even see the evidence they claim is necessary to prove their claim!  Worse yet, even if Obama and the state of Hawaii agreed to "release" his original birth certificate, what would that entail?  It's hard to believe that birthers who already reject the scanned image of an official copy of Obama's birth certificate (something that fully satisfies the State Departments requirements for obtaining a U.S. Passport) would accept a scan of the original as being real.  Given that birthers have already denounced the republican governor of Hawaii as part of the conspiracy, who could handle the original and then report to the world it's authenticity without being implicated in the cover up?  Should we place the certificate in a secure chamber in D.C. and let all who are suspicious file through and handle the certificate under the watchful eye of the secret service?  Would even that ridiculous spectacle satisfy these rabid conspiracy nutjobs?  For that matter, would any birther-and this ..woman in particular-agree to allowing even one perfect stranger handle that very personal and important piece of documentation?  Mr. Kreep asks,

"WHAT is Barack Obama trying to hide? WHAT is he afraid of? WHY doesn't he just release these documents to prove that he is a natural-born citizen and, therefore, qualified to serve as President -- especially his actual birth certificate?"

I answer, simply: because he has produced what is necessary under the law and demanding anything more than that is an invasion is his privacy.  Surely our conservative voice on the courts can understand that.

Everyone's favorite full-crazed bitch political commentator (as opposed to half-crazed, a far to generous description), Ann Coulter, was back on Human Events with a newcolumn on August 5th.  This one entitled, "Obama Birth Certificate Spotted In Bogus Moon Landing Footage."  Yes, that's right, Coulter is actually denouncing the birthers!  Well, sort of.  She begins thusly,

"Tardy though they are, we welcome MSNBC to finally joining every major conservative news outlet -- including Fox News, The American Spectator, Human Events, National Review and Sweetness & Light -- in discrediting the idea that President Obama wasn't born in this country and, therefore, is ineligible to be president.

"Now the big question: Was Joe Biden born on this planet?"


One might ask with equal incredulity whether or not Coulter is even living in this dimension.  It's rather difficult to exonerate any news source in this "birther" nonsense because even rather centrists outlet's, such as CNN, have their Lou Dobbs's stoking the fires of idiot sophistry.  What can be said with near absolute certainty is that Fox News and Human Events have not exactly gone out of their way to correct the whack job disinformation they have helped spread.  They have both, despite Coulter's statements, issued reams of statements supporting the birther movement.  In fact, Human Events apparently failed to get Coutler's August 5th memo in their own rag since I received an email from them just today, August the 6th, containing a birther plea from the so called "Western Center For Journalism*."

    "Use the button below and help the Western Center for Journalism flood the fax machines of Barack Hussein Obama and the editors of the top newspapers in the United States (USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post, and Long Island Newsday) - and the producers at ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX News, MSNBC and CNN.

"Tell them that fabrications, distortions and lies are not going to fool the American people. Article 2, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States specifically states that the President of the United States must be a natural-born citizen and Barack Obama has moved heaven and earth to block the release of his actual birth certificate - the one document that could prove his eligibility under the Constitution to occupy the office.

"Admonish them for distorting, instead of reporting. Admonish them for their biased and disgusting efforts to assist Barack Hussein Obama in obscuring the truth from the American people."

In truth, I'm not surprised that Coutler is not hopping on the birther bandwagon.  I've always maintained that she is more of a dark comedian than a serious commentator.  Coulter is in show business and her particular niche is spouting things that shock the mainstream while engaging and inflaming her base, the extreme right.  She strike's me as an extremely insincere person who is not in anyway fully committed to any of the rhetoric she espouses.  If this is the case, we should hardly wonder that she has made the correct tactical choice in distancing herself from what is obviously a movement of desperate and often racist cretins.  Besides, she has plenty of other crazy bullshit to shout from her megaphone...

...Such as spending the rest of the article trying to prove that Democrats are more irrational and harbor more conspiracy theorists than do Republicans (at least she's not trying to claim there are not whack-job right wingers).  She does bring up some important points, like the fact that far too many otherwise intelligent people bought into Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" as a piece of serious, investigative journalism.  Most of the others however are either actual facts that she happens to disagree with (Like the fact the Diebold voting machines have been proven to be statistically faulty in recording votes correctly; that's not a conspiracy to "steal" votes, it's just a factual statement about a shitty piece of machinery), or the beliefs of only the most whack-job leftist fringe.  In the latter case, for every liberal nut who believes that, "Sarah Palin's infant child, Trig, was actually the child of her daughter" or that "Justice Antonin Scalia threw the 2000 election to Bush so that his son could get a legal job with the Labor Department", there's a conservative now convinced that Obama wants to kill their grandparents, raise the taxes on their $16,500 annual income and convert the nation to Islam. 

In truth, there's no shortage of irrational lunatics on either side of the political divide; 
irrationality, credulity and stupidity are, unfortunately, the most bipartisan of political realities. It's really too bad Coulter is more interested in making money than doing real journalism, more interested in covering her ass than taking the intellectually insipid mouth breather's she has used to make her rich to task for sinking to such depths of credulity.  She might have instead used her pull with the unhinged right fringe to help effect some change towards a more reasonable approach to things...

Or not. As is always the case with Human Events columns read online, it's the commentary where things get really interesting.  The following comment from Macos in Texas (IF that's his/her real name) sums the situation in the conservative base pretty damn perfectly:

"Coulter does not get it --- she thinks she and Drudge control the grassroots. Hey Ann your just another rich elitists .... we will believe what we want!

WHERE IS THE ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE ??? !!!"

Sometimes the monster awakes and evades even the most conniving of mad scientists....





*Their logo on the email is subtitled "Training the Next Generation of Communicators."  Given the content of the following email as content, one cannot resist dismissing this as a rather transparent euphemism for training "talking point" spouting talking heads.

http://forms.ehow.com/contribute.aspx?P=10&id=5265...

How to Store an Opened Bottle of Wine

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So, Pearl Jam are re-releasing their seminal album, "Ten."  My response? So what?  I've always felt them to be a bit overrated.  All the songs sound the same and Vedder sounds like he's singing while chewing sand at the bottom of a tidal pool.  Worse, just as Robert Plant inspired a decade of multi-octave vocal range knock-offs of his sound ("Rainbow"!, ugh!), so Vedder seemingly inspired numerous insipid vocalists through the 90's and early 2000's (3 doors down, ugh!).  

I must say, I did like the song and video for "Do the Evolution" but I think that's the only thing Pearl Jam I have ever really enjoyed.  Interestingly, it seems like it's one of the things Jam fans typically do not enjoy.  I guess I just don't understand Eddie's pain...

I have heard (or rather, read) various murmurs in the blogosphere coming from conservative commentators, arguing that limiting executive pay is socialist and un-American.  This is, at the least, mildly entertaining considering these are often the same folks who are opposed to any sort of bailout (even when we were still under Bush's watch) on grounds that it was turning the United States socialist; now they want failed executives to keep the pay they would not have had were it not for the 'socialistic bailout.'  

Is it really so hard to see that arguments for unlimited earning potential in a free, capitalistic society must also be subject to the constraints of a market?  Sure, you can be paid whatever you are worth on the open market, no problem there.  The current problem is that Wall Street Executives are entirely overvalued in this economy.  

I have also heard the argument that such pay, especially “bonus” pay, is built into the structure of wall street; that to deny a bonus is really like cutting someon’s salary and that a firm that does so would lose their top executive talent to someone else.  This of course brings up the question: where exactly would these butt-hurt executives go?  You could cut their pay in half in half and they wouldn't leave; there’s just no one else out there to work for.  This is just another bubble; the executive compensation bubble and it will have to burst if many of these firms are to live on to fight another day...

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So the Pope is taking heat for bringing some wildly conservative clergy back into the mainstream of Catholicism.  These are Bishops and others who share Mel Gibson's belief that Jews should be held accountable for deicide, that is, for the murder of Christ.  Yes, even two plus millennia later.

Now, this may be by protestant upbringing betraying my ignorance of Catholic doctrine, but isn't the whole notion of deicide in relation to Christ's death a little silly?  Jesus, we are told, was sent to earth so that mankind could be redeemed of its sin and thusly could once again be worthy of the presence of the Lord.  We are also told that the "wages of sin are death"; that the only way to purge the sin of the world was to kill a God as the sacrificial animal.  Perfect blood spilt to make sinless all and for ever.  

So Jesus had to die in order for Christendom to exist.  Why then are the Jewish people vilified by these splinter Catholics (and for that matter, ALL Catholics prior to Vatican II)?  Seriously, I don't know the answer and any of you out there with a Catholic background should feel free to fill me in.  I mean, is it that murdering Christ is still murder even if it was part of the 'plan' from the beginning?  Just as God must have foreseen the Fall and so it too must have been planned, but man was to be cursed for it anyway?   If that's the case, then shouldn't the Jews be sanctified for their actions?  I mean, if Jesus did something good by taking the sins of the world upon him, then by extension, didn't the Jews do something good by taking the sin of murdering Jesus upon them so that the world could be saved?  Would Jesus have taken a bottle of aspirin with a skin of wine had no one else appeared to wield the knife that 'saved' the world?


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Why, would anyone want to identify with the label "conservative"?  Historically speaking, it's the group that ALWAYS loses, almost by definition.   The conservatives of today are fond of referring to the American Revolution and the so called 'Founding Fathers' as a source for their conservative views, yet the American revolutionaries were progressives for their times; the conservatives were the Anglican-Monarchists supporting King George.  

The "conservative" label has been previously applied to the French monarchy, the slave trade and religious authorities that refused to look through Galileo’s telescope because they just knew that the sun revolved around the earth.  Why would you choose to be on the team that's defined as the team that loses (indeed, why are there Cubs fans?)?

One answer I might put forward lies in notions of truth.  Conservative movements always stand for what they feel are truths that are immutable and timeless.  The feeling is always that the new fangled ways are sapping the vitality and morality of the new generation and that the world is headed for disaster unless traditional values (which again, are always different rather than immutable) are rescued from passing away in time.  This is a particularly religious sort of sentiment (at least, in terms of revealed religions) and it is notable that since the enlightenment at least, many of the most conservative social elements have been the more religious, depending upon supposedly revealed and immutable truths. Truths that supposedly, were adhered to in “the good ole’ days.”  Progressives, meanwhile, have at generally been less dogmatically religious and often subscribed to the scientific method (i.e. Belief in the existence of things only upon sufficient evidence).  At the least, a recognition that the past has generally been desirable than the future, and understanding that understanding increases over time while ignorance decreases often pervades progressive thinking.  

So it might also be noted that it is not the normal historical progression that the liberals of one era become the conservatives of the next.  Rather, the conservatives of the new era have been modified by the progressives of the previous generation.  The center having been shifted to the left, the new conservatives retrench behind ramparts declared to be the new “traditional values” after being swept from their previous battlements by a progressive tide.  Thusly, conservatives today no longer argue for a return to rule by the British monarchy.


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Why do even very progressive columnists who argue against abstinence based (or at least, abstinence only) sex education for children feel the need to add caveats such as "of course, everyone knows teenagers should not be having sex."?  Putting religious dogma aside for the moment and treating this as a public health issue, what is it about sexually mature teens that makes their having consensual sex always wrong?  Sex can certainly be more hazardous to them than to older adults; teens are more prone to be emotionally hurt, less responsible in protecting against pregnancy and STD's, etc.  But many of these same hazards exist for adults having sex; date rape, herpes and broken hearts are not the purview of only seventeen year olds.

I say this not because I think teens necessarily should be having sex and I certainly don't think they should be encouraged to have sex (there's no need for that, nature will take it's course in due time ;).  However, the basic reality is that teens are driven to mate by millions of years worth of evolution in mammalian sexuality.  This does not mean that all sexual encounters between teens are a good thing, but it does mean that simply writing off the sex drives of teens as a pathological abnormality is not only counterproductive, it's a mindset that in itself might be pathological.  After all, American society is obsessed with teenage sexuality. It permeates our media and fashion...perhaps we are only so protective of teens because of our own unconscious desire for them (I am speaking of our nation's collective psyche here)?  

At this point, I refer the interested reader to the excellent essay by Mark Grief, "Afternoon of the Sex Children."  And of course, there is always Lolita.


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It was recently reported that former attorney General Alberto Gonzales claimed he was a "victim of the war on terror."  It truly boggles the mind to attempt to conceive of the hubris and social isolation that could produce such a statement.  How anyone who lived the comfortable lifestyle of a Washington political elite could ever compare themselves to an innocent teen held and perhaps water boarded at Gitmo, or an office worker burned alive in the twin towers is surely revealing of the dark depths to which man can descend through blind egotism.  

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So, how about those pills that make your dick grow?  I was watching the daily show the other night and sitting through the typical barrage of "Girls Gone Wild" and penis enlarging pill ads when the thought occurred to me that if these guys really wanted to sell you snake oil to rub on your Johnson like it was a magic lamp, they ought to have some "before and after" pictures on the internet.  Proud that I had picked an obvious and provable flaw in their marketing, I checked the Internet just to be sure.  

Low and behold, I was wrong. Hideously wrong. They have pictures.  Yes, pictures of cocks.  And yes, it is both disturbing and hilarious at the same time.   You know those pictures in muscle and fitness magazines?  The ones were a scrawny little dude poses looking all pale and timid, then they spray some tan on and have him flex to show how "ripped" and confident he supposedly got from whatever product is being hawked to the socially insecure and sexually deprived?  Well, these pics are pretty much the same. View at your own risk but should you choose submit yourself to such unhealthy media, the last picture on the page is the funniest: it appears that they took a 'before' picture from about 4 feet away, then an 'after' picture from about a foot away.... I have an idea, instead of paying $$ for these douchebag’s pills, just ask the lady you're taking home to wear a pair of binoculars...tell her that getting too close to the trouser snake may "spook him" and cause him to go into hiding in your choad....


http://www.extenzework.com/extenze-before-and-after.html

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I wonder if, given California’s current $40 billion budget shortfall, if Governor Schwarzenegger has considered full decriminalization and taxation of the dope trade?  A billion dollar a year industry in California alone, it's another wine industry waiting to happen...


    


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    The first time I heard M.I.A (her hit, “Paper Planes” of course) I was actually put off.  I happen to like the Clash a lot and the sample from “Straight to Hell” (as well as the fact that many people are sure not to recognize it) seemed like a cheap way to score a single.  Then I found out a bit more about her, how her father was a Sri Lankan Rebel; it seemed an international story that Joe Strummer would have approved of.  And then the video!  The video for Paper Planes is a return to a more playful style (even slightly cheezeball) that was prevalent in early hip-hop, but that seemed to disappear in the early nineties. 

    So I have now come to appreciate her music and especially her voice.  Yes, I think that’s it!  She has a voice like sweet and sour soup; sweet, sultry and almost syrupy but cut with a racy acidity and a punky tartness that keeps her on the tip of your tongue.
 

I recently received an email from Humanevents.com that was hawking a book called "Meltdown" by Thomas E. Woods Jr.  This book is another attempt to portray the fiscal policy of reaganism as the solution to our ills rather than part of the problem.   Amongst the things it claims to show is:

"The cold truth that capitalism isn't the culprit—the government is."

I think it's time to dispel a major fallacy in economic thinking.    I will agree that the decisions of government regulators (appointed by a conservative republican president) are a major part of the cause behind this current fiscal crises.   But this really misses the point.  At issue is not "pure capitalism vs. the government" because there is no such thing as "pure capitalism."  Even in a Randian, Objectivist Utopia (or dystopia depending on your point of view and hours logged playing Bioshock) with an anarcho-capitalist social structure, there will be SOME body of standards, rules and agreements under which commerce will take place.  There will be some mechanism for making known the current interest rates for loans, the value of one currency against another and some system of arbitration should a deal go awry.  There would be, in effect, a government of some sort because a government is part and parcel of a marketplace.

 Markets are systems and in order for a system to be at all meaningful, there must be some sort system of constraints placed upon it.  Not only this, but there is nothing in the whole of nature that tells us that a system can exist in permanent homeostasis; this just doesn't happen.  It is ludicrous to think that a particular system of market capitalism will be able to maintain itself indefinitely.  Far more likely is that economies will naturally swing from one type to another on their own; the laissez-faire of one era yields to socialism in another and a more constricted mercantilism in yet another.  reaganism is no more discredited than socialism, and vice versa. because reality may in fact be too complex a thing to encapsulate in one socio-economic system.

Conservatives wish to set up a false dichotomy between one ideal and another while ignoring the real systems that these ideas supposedly represent.  Let’s take refuge in the evidence that over time, society has moved towards policies that are based on empirical evidence.  Let’s us hope that this trend, reaching back to the enlightenment (and prior to that, even if it be a thinner and harder to follow trail), is not blunted in the age of information overload….

I don't usually blog about my everyday events, the "journal" in livejournal sort of thing...I think that's because I never really wrote about those sorts of things in my private, paper journal either.  I'm going to break that habit today to tell about the peculiar occurences of the past few days.  The sort of thing that, on lifetime or the Oxygen network, would turn into a saccharine sweet story of family, love, and quasi-religious drivel about the "true meaning of Christmas" that  somehow never mentions the word "Christ" on it's own.  

But to get to the story...

Let me start with context.  The past several weeks have been simply insane.  I was forced by scheduling beyond my control, to take on far more than is humanly possible to handle this semester.  Seventeen credits, eight of them in two classes that really should have been taken  by themselves due to difficulty, running experiments in a psychophysics laboratory, and fighting with financial aid folks almost until November to determine whether or not I was officially enrolled or not...all in all, it was the perfect storm of financial and academic stressors (and the perfect opportunity, as Tobias pointed out,for gratuitous use of the catchphrase, "a perfect storm"). I've already gotten back the final grade for one of those tough classes, and let me tell you, my performance was far less than stellar...not as in,
"whoops, you missed orbital velocity but you'll be weightless for fifteen minutes", but more like "oh shit, the rocket exploded and the space capsule is lodged in a landfill."  As I finished my finals, it was time to cut loose.  I needed to dissociate myself from my performance in classes that were now over, any further improvement in the grades being beyond my control...

...So Brook and I went to a party with some friends.  We drank a lot.  We talked.  We were too intoxicated to actually drive home at 2am and slept on the floor until 6:40am for the first time since high school.  We drove home through Oakland, heads pounding, our stomachs sending waves of nausea crashing against our esophagai like a mob on the door to the local mad scientist's castle as the sun slowly lit up the world.  Hung over and tired, but unnable to sleep, we watched "Walk Hard" and can now recommend it as the best "still up at 10am and hungover" movie.  Finally we slept, awakening to my alarm clock at 3pm (it is surrealto set one's alarm for 3pm) so that I could run into the lab and conduct an experiment.

That evening, this past Sunday evening, went as many a post-hangover evening go, with a bit more drinking followed by passing out early and hard.  We fell into a stupor, supported by our bed and thoughlessly secure in our home and it's seals, insulation and locking mechanisms designed to keep out the world.  We always
lock the doors and windows at night.  We didn't think about how we might not have on this particular evening...

At 7am or so on Monday morning, Brook woke up to go to the bathroom and noticed that the living room was filled with sunlight from around the corner.  It struck her as strange...did we leave the blinds open all night?  Could we have been so careless?  She turned the corner to find the sliding glass door to our patio, open.  Open to a ground floor patio with a little wooden gate that stood also ajar and open to the parking lot.  She woke me to tell me that someone must have been in the house.  MY hair stood up for a moment, but then I remembered: Our fridge had been acting up and the maintenance folks were supposed to come by and check onit that morning.  They must have come in and left through the backdoor in a sloppy fashion.  We resolved tocall the office and bitch them out later in the day, and promptly fell out again.


By ten in the  morning, I could no longer sleep and went to check my computer's calendar to see when I was next schedule to make an appearance at the lab.  The computer was not there.  I had left in unopened on my desk the night before, but it was there no longer.  Nothing else seemed disturbed or missing.  Not my ipod nano, not the two very nice electric guitars sitting against the desk where I had been writing songs, nothing else disturbed in anyway.  The slick little bastard knew what was worth the most...and what hurt the most...

...I had been saving up for a portable hardrive so that I could backup a lot of my data.  My macbook was three years old and it's 60GB hard drive wasn't exactly capacious at the time of purchase.  It was downright conjested now.  It contained thousands of photos, essentially the last three years of Brook and mine's relationship in the visual medium.  It had all of my painstakenly accumulated notes from three years at Berkeley and almost everything I had written since I was fifteen years old...almost all of it existed as just one digital copy on that computer.  It's a funny kind of theft, having a computer stolen.  So much of our public AND
private personas are now bound up in these digital realms...back in the day, someone might have broken in and stolen my guitar, and expensive instrument with great sentimental value but a piece of hardware in the end. It's not B.B. King's Lucille or anything like that.   Or they might have stolen my T.V., an expensive piece of hardware I would shed nary a tear to see vanished like a fart in a windstorm.  But this..this was like someone coming into your home, taking a cool grand from your wallet and then proceeding to grab your photo albums, your family pictures off the wall, your journals and hell, even your grocery lists...and yet with all that personal and personally valuable information in hand, they only really came for the money.  The personal items are atomized into random bits, the computer converted into it's dozen components and resold on ebay, it's personal value to me liquidated and it's monetary value converted to a hit of crack.

It was strange indeed to be giving a police report.  The officer that responded was extremeley pleasant to work with and helpful...I don't know if that perception was a result of not being on the receiving end of the long arm of the law for once or if cops in the SF Bay area are just a little less philistine than the standard redneck fare one finds in Carroll County Maryand.  In any case, she took some prints, gave me the standard speech about how they'll do they best but can't promise anything, etc, etc.  But it was OK, really.  At that point I was already planning my next step; with luck from the financial aid department of UC Berkeley, a new macbook (this time with computer "lojack" installed!) is in my future.

The problem of course is that with all this nonsense going on, I forget to call the repair people who did not in fact show up in order to have left through the back door.  Oh no, they did not show up and now, today, the day before Xmas
eve, they are not on duty when Brook calls me at the lab to tell me that all our food is spoiling in a 65 degree fridge only 48  hours before Xmas.  Bloody wonderful.  I decided I needed a drink, left the lab and stopped to get ice so
we could salvage what we could of the $120 grocery trip we had went on just the night previous (after the theft, we consoled ourselve with a big dinner) in a cooler.  As I pull into the safeway parking lot, my car starts making a sound that now gasoline powered mercedes bewnz should ever make.  It sounded like a diesel engine making love to a clock tower with a cat stuck between the two of them.  Not exactly what I was hoping for that evening, another car problem that is.  
Just the week prior, while driving home in the rain from a company lunch in Napa (at the Wine Spectator Greystone restaurant which was sphincter imploding good...that's right, it was so good I had to use a description usually reserved for talking about gastrointesintal distress..fuck yeah), my right rear tire blew out. I've flattend tires before, but this thiung fucking blew like a pumpkin filled with C4 and pasta...at least that what it looked like melting into the road beneath the
decieving weight of my rather svelte profilled vehicle. Brook and I had both forgotten that a year ago, after getting hit by a bus and changing that wheel as a precautionary measure against it being bent, we had never changed off of the
spare tire.  The thing could have blown at any point, never having been designed to be drive for a year, often at high speeds on winding mountain roads.  We tend to do this, narrowly avoid death by bizarre auto malfunction (I'm pounding
hard one some wood right now).  But back to the safeway parking lot (with an apology for that digression), I check the oil to find that we forget something else too; the oil dipstick was dryer than a homeless Moscow alcoholic's rubbing alcohol martini.  We were do for an oil change a month ago.  The sound I had heard was just the sound of a seven cylinder engine about to tear itself to pieces.  Ouch.  So I bought oil, filled it and drove home.  The terribel noise abated so that I could here the normal sound our car makes; a high pitched squeel during breaking because our front break rotors are shot to hell and we can't afford to fix them.

We can't afford much of anything actually, even the stuff we buy.  I must somehow come up with four thousand dollars before January 17th in order to get the rest of my financial aide for the spring, finish school and graduate.  I don't know how you folks that go to college in states other than California do it; this is university on the CHEAP and it's still
breaking my bank...

..but I never meant this little blog entry to be some sob story, though maybe I needed to get a lot of that out so I thank you dear readers for your patience as I subject you to my problems (how does it feel to be an unpaid shrink?).  The main
reason I wanted to write all this down is that despite a large portion of my life and the means of my livelihood being stolen, a fridge full of rotten food at the eve of the holidays, impending car repairs and a seemingly implacable block
on my college registration due to delinquent rent, I feel bloodyfuckingcalifraglisitic GREAT! I've either gone insanse, am getting dividends from meditation in years past (I certainly haven't been sitting regularly lately) or am finally just that relaxed from finishing the semester and sleeping.  It could also be that I was thinking about even the personal things on my laptop...and realizing that they too are just things.  The Buddhists believe in six senses, the sixth being the mind but not necessarily in any hokey, telepathic sense; they just hold that the brain is the sense organ for percieving mental objects just as the eyes perceive visual objects.  Mental things are still things...still subject to the same laws as all other things....still bound by their impermanence and their unsatisfactoriness...something usually translated (and
poorly so) as "suffering."  

I don't know...but in any case, here it is, your heart warming, gut churning moment of hallmark fucking goodness!:

Despite being robbed, broke and out of food, Brook and I are happy to be alive, together in a world with friends.  

"Dear Oxygen network, I would LOVE to whore myself out for you to write a valentine's day special....."

Stay tuned next time for a more standard Jon Kelvey blog entry about how he realized the universality of the dharma and how Ray Kurzweil is both correct in his prediction of human immortality AND how it will lead us all to universal suicide AND how that's not really all that bad...
that's next time on the Kelvey media network, bringing you confusing rants since 1999...

Interviewer: Do you consider yourself a moral relativist?

Him: Well, that's an interesting question, I think in the way it is normally used, which is almost always a pejorative, I would say 'no', but let me ask you this: what exactly do you mean by that?

Interviewer: I mean do you feel morality is an absolute or is it person/culturally relative?

Him: Well here's the thing. We live in the bottom of the ocean on the abyssal plain. There is no light above us, nothing casting illumination. The world is dark, cold and without light, without meaning. The only thing that produces light here is us; we're bioluminescent fishes, casting rays of meaning wherever we swim, only having eyes because we ourselves make eyes useful...
So, is morality absolute? Yes but only relative to meaning, which is entirely human. There are absolute evils, but only relative to the human organism which makes evil acts and the perception of evil possible. So morality is an absolute relative to humanity.

The legacy of the Reagan revolution as filtered through the neocons is a world where the whole of civic duty has been reduced to buying unnecessary goods and serving in the military.

The key to Marxist revolution in the 21st century is not political and capital reorganization, but technological innovation. With the right vision, technological progress will put the means of production into everyone's hands, individually-the individualist libertarian as the proletarian comrade. The computer is a good example of what is possible...just wait 'till design, fabrication and power can all fit into your loft apartment....