Category Archives: America

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who gets to decide what’s fake?

We got through most of this entire lunatic campaign season without nary a word about fake news sites. I find this amusing as for the most part I consider Fox, MSNBC, CNN, etc, etc, to all essentially be fake news sites. They don’t actually report news so much as they seek to shape public opinion to serve whatever interests they champion. There’s also the ever delicious The Onion which is usually a good place for a decent laugh, though even they have an obvious slant they push, but they’re obviously an admitted satire site.

But what folks are actually talking about are the sites that are totally off the deep end. They have no purpose except to play people for morons to move the election needle. Some of the examples I’ve heard over the last week were popular articles that said something along the lines (my paraphrase) of, but all of these were lies:

– The Pope had endorsed Trump

– Trump had commuted to Valhalla before the campaign ended

– Machines will not be our Masters

– Trump won the popular vote

– Going vegan makes you happy

– Trump was seen at Putin’s dacha alongside six former Olympic gymnasts (I too thought this one 99% accurate)

– The Walking Dead is a good television show

So now that the election is over a whole bunch of folks are stating that these fake news posts were in some way responsible for altering the course of the election. This point of view is mostly for those in the Hilary camp who ascribe some of the last minute push towards Trump as caused by said nakedly vicious pro-Trump fake news. Facebook, Google, and your local school newspaper are now thus under pressure to filter and delete said fake news stories from their feeds. The idea is that you the voter will no longer see this fake news so you can know the news you read online is legit.

First off, I feel sorry for Facebook and Google on this because no matter what they do everybody is going to hate them for it. One side will claim they’re not doing enough to police fake news or hate speech, the other side will claim censorship. Both sides will be simultaneously right and wrong. Facebook and Google will be caught in the middle of the broader cultural wars. Zuckerberg will become progressively more frustrated and insane, thus laying the groundwork for his impending slide into the oblivion of Bond villain darkness.

Because honestly who gets to decide what’s fake? As I understand what Facebook and Google are being asked to do, they have to hire somebody to edit their feeds. Then that person upon viewing some news they deem fake is supposed to delete it so folks can’t see it. Well, what’s fake?

– The Pope had endorsed Trump, fake, delete.

– Okay, what about The Onion? Well, that’s fake too, but that’s satire, so, do not delete? I guess. Well, what’s satire and what’s fake news? Who determines the difference?

– Okay, what about Salon or National Review? Well, they’re flamethrower sites for the acolytes, so it’s analysis and not technically news, so, do not delete? I guess. Who gets to determine the best way for remembering where you put your keys?

– What about that random Facebook post by normal average human that becomes popular but is chock full of lunacy, lies, and opinion? Well, but that’s not from a news site, so, we do not delete? But it’s still fake, so shouldn’t that person be made to shut up? Even if that person is just an average person they’re still shaping public opinion, aren’t they? Who decides who is made to shut up?

– But what if somebody reposted that person’s post as if it was news? Do we delete them too? What about somebody’s random blog post, is that news? Who decides what’s a blog post and what’s fake news? Who decides if Lady Gaga is hot or not?

– What about a 1930’s Looney Tunes cartoon clip with Speedy Gonzalez, is that hate speech worthy of deletion? Who determines what is hate speech, what is stupidity, what is fake news, and what’s just normal average painful human discourse to resolve our problems? Have you contemplated your future bleached skeleton status lately?

– What about a scene from Frozen which falsely gives the impression via fake news that Elsa would not have been put to death by the Catholic Church for witchcraft in real life? Shouldn’t we delete that too?

And on and on and on.

Where does this end? Where do you draw the line on what should be seen and deleted? What is fake and what’s not? The answer always will end up being the opinion of some screener, likely guided by policy that a bunch of folks from Facebook and Google got together and wrote. And thus, a bunch of random people you’ve never met get to determine what you’re allowed to say and read. This is not healthy in any aspect.

Facebook and Google are private companies and can essentially do whatever they want within the law. For example, if Google decided it hated cats and deleted all cat content from its site I’m pretty sure there’s nothing anybody could do to stop them. But Facebook and Google are also so ubiquitous to society you could make an argument they’re becoming an intrinsic part of our culture, infrastructure, lives. Do we really want two of the global Internets backbone sites to be in the censorship business? For any reason at all?

I come down to two points on this:

1) I am an open season kind of person on free speech and thus to all the Internets. Facebook, Google, Twitter should not be in the business of removing content whether it’s fake, hateful, whatever. This means you can post fake Trump news, evil ISIS propaganda, incorrect tips for how to properly cook an egg, Tweet how much you despise [insert anything here], and so on. Dealing with all this nonsense is a price worth paying rather than living in an online society where strangers get to police thought.

2) Humans as free individuals are responsible for what they do and do not read and how they process information they acquire online, in newspapers, from ads, from their neighbors, from their imaginary friend, from their own fears, from their own dreams. If somebody read fake news and believed it, that’s their own problem and responsibility. Living in a free society is hard work. It requires you to think for yourself, do your own research, and make your own decisions. It’s not the responsibility of society to do that job for the citizen. Indeed, if society did, then said citizen would never be truly free.

And I want us all to live free.

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we belligerently break down what the hell just happened

1) The outcome: people are pissed

This is a global phenomenon. There is an entire subset of humanity (half the population) in the democratic world who rightly or wrongly feel they’ve been left behind. They’ve got no skin in the game of a modern globalized, multicultural, interconnected world that the politicians, businessmen, and the media have built. Said politicians, etc, have tended to dismiss the concerns of these people as resistant to change on the kind end, and things like racist on the unkind end. Abject dismissal was always going to be a poor way to address the concerns of a substantial portion of society’s citizens. People who genuinely believe their children will have it worse off than they’ve had it don’t appreciate being called backward. The establishment (the other half of the population) have taken it for granted that the newfangled world they’ve built was always the right answer. And so it’s been a only natural that everybody should get aboard and reap the benefits. The problem is that the benefits haven’t trickled down to everybody. Not enough effort was expended to aid workers who lost their future to globalization. Too many elites spend more time worrying about corporate tax policy or transgender bathrooms than a opioid addiction that’s literally bleeding whole areas daily. These things matter. In any democracy, when half the electorate feels that both political parties are essentially ignoring their core interests, don’t be surprised when they get pissed and back fringe lunatics. This happened with Brexit, it happened with Trump, it might happen soon with Marine Le Pen. It will continue to happen until those that govern make it a point to work for all citizens, not just the narrowly defined slice of the country that happens to be inside the system.

2) Hillary was Donald’s Hillary

The prevailing wisdom of this campaign was that Trump was the perfect candidate for Clinton. She’d sail to victory because he was such a lunatic. I tend to think it was rather the other way around. Clinton was the perfect candidate for Trump to battle against. Where Trump was the anti-establishment guy, you could not have conjured a more inside the system player than Clinton. Where Donald could connect with voters in his own crazy way, Clinton probably couldn’t even properly connect with her own campaign staff. Everybody got aboard the fact that Clinton was going to make history as the first woman president. She even planned her coronation beneath a glass ceiling building. The problem with this line of thinking is that nobody bought it outside the bubble of politics. To the average voter, Clinton was always going to be there just because she was the other Clinton’s wife. The real glass ceiling of this election was that a lot of folks wanted somebody to break the glass on establishment dynasties, be it Bush or Clinton. In an election where well over half the country thinks things are going in the wrong direction, what people were definitely not looking for is more dynasty. They were not looking for a person who’s been in politics for forty years. Imagine if you will, how different this would have all played out had Sanders, Warren, or even poor Jim Webb been on the ticket. Any one of these people would have likely beat Trump. Anybody could have beat Trump. But not Clinton, she was the keen match he needed.

3) The division

After all of this, after all this mess, the answer is 60 million Americans pulled one lever, 60 million Americans pulled another lever, and 6 million Americans (like yours truly) threw their vote away. Statistically speaking, you could not imagine a more divided electorate. This is a rather troubling existence for the nation. The American system is built to produce divided government. But I wonder if it’s built to handle a consistently divided nation. Each side is talking past the other. Nobody wants to listen anymore. If 60 million folks think the other 60 million folks are not just wrong, but nefarious, we’re in for a death spiral. History tells us that tribal alliances can progressively break down and destroy a culture. And what we have here are truly tribal feelings. As an example, for the very, very limited amount of time I watched live election coverage I was troubled to observe:

a) An analyst on PBS who stated that the election was only playing out the way it was because of the “South” and it’s continuing capture of the broader political forces of America. In other words, if you lived in Ohio and voted for Trump, you didn’t do so because you’re protesting that the elites forgot about you. Instead, you were doing so because you were inherently racist. This is the idea that Trump won because a full 60 million Americans were too stupid to vote for anybody else or are just racist, or sexist, or whatever. Everybody surely remembers Hillary’s “deplorables” comment, right?

b) An analyst on Fox who stated that the election was only playing out the way it was because of “Conservatism” and it’s return to recapture America from the dark forces of liberalism. In other words, if you lived in New York and voted for Clinton, you didn’t do so because you were appalled by Trump or believed in the progressive ideas Clinton stated. Instead, you were do so because you wanted to destroy the old America to remake a new one. This is the idea that a full 60 million Americans wanted Clinton to win so they could detonate the country and remake it at the expense of the other 60 million. Or that 60 million Americans only want to milk the nation of the other 60 million. Everybody surely remembers Mitt’s “47 percent” comment, right?

I don’t know how you resolve the feelings of (a) and (b) without a lot of turmoil. I do worry, friends.

4) The reality

As stated, the American system is built to produce divided government. Whoever you voted for, either Clinton or Trump was going to run against the brick wall of this reality. The American President might be the least powerful Executive in the modern democratic world. It was designed to be this way from the beginning. People who think Trump’s going to rule as some unhinged dictator should not forget that the system is constructed specifically to prevent such a thing from happening. However badly you thought about Clinton or Trump, I assure you, American has previously survived far, far worse than these two idiots. I suspect, either way, that we’ll be sitting here four years from now with much the same situation on our hands. I could be wrong, but if you remember back in 2008, the Democrats were equally in control of all the arms of government power. What came of all that? You could say Obamacare, a few key Supreme Court decisions, etc. But largely, I don’t think most folks would say in the last eight years America has undergone earth shaking radical change. I loosely predict it’ll be the same result by 2020 or 2024.

Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, I just don’t see much changing for the average man or woman on the street. Trump voters are going to be rather disappointed to realize that their local mayor has far more power over their lives than Trump. They’ll be disappointed to see they can’t have problems that have taken decades to create wished away by a maniac who shouts loudly. Clinton voters are going to be rather relieved to see that even this guy can’t do the level of damage they feared. The needle will move, but for the most part people’s lives aren’t going to change. The system, the broader waves of our culture, are bigger than this election or Trump or Clinton. Where is our reality headed? As I’ve stated above, I’m worried, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this, in the broader path of where we are bound, this election is little more than a rounding error. I wish, I wish we’d take a step back and think about the bigger picture. Instead, I fear, we’ll soon be wrapped up talking about small fry nonsense like the intricate details of Executive Order Whatever or Senate Filibuster Verbiage. This is disappointing, but also, rather comforting. One way or the other. Life goes on.

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Sicario – the film that hits you repeatedly with a plastic bat

You hear a movie’s great. Then you see it and didn’t like it. What does that say? Well, a couple of options are in play:

1) Everybody else is right, the movie’s great

2) You’re too stupid to completely understand the movie

3) Aliens and/or alcohol drugged you so much you couldn’t follow the movie properly

4) Everybody else is wrong, the movie’s complete garbage

At any given point, all or one of the above apply to my movie viewing experiences. But for Sicario, I’m going with option (4).

Sicario.jpg

Blunt, Brolin, and del Toro view the film creator’s designs for the most pristine of plastic bats.

Everybody loves this movie. It’s some kind of award winning masterpiece. And I’ll admit, it has some top notch features. It’s well shot, has a beautifully dark score, contains mostly interesting scenes, and has swell acting. I think this is why folks think the movie is awesome. On the surface it’s well done. But when you peel back the onion everything underneath is just wrong. It’s like those onions that bring the fruit flies into your humble abode.

If I could name one key gripe with this flick, it’s the unjustified suspension of reality. Not all movies need to be knife edged real. Movies are all about escapism. They take you somewhere special, or they bend the truth to make a point, or explore possibilities that otherwise wouldn’t exist. But Sicario makes it clear almost immediately that it has a larger purpose. It’s a running commentary on the war of drugs, American policy, morals, etc, etc. About 1/3 of the way through the movie I said to mine doggies, “This flick is Syriana II”. And so it is. And Syriana sucks too.

In order for you to buy the film’s message that our reality is wrong, you’d think the movie would have to be grounded in some kind of its own reality, right? Otherwise the message would get clouded by lunacy? Nope.

Kindly observe this limited list so that you can understand why I think this movie hits you repeatedly with a plastic bat and asks you to not think. They just want you to admire the beauty of the film, swallow the message, and not think too much.

1) In the first five minutes we’re asked to accept that one can store 40 corpses in a suburban Arizona home if only you hide them behind drywall. There’s even three guys just hanging out in there like it’s nothing. Eh, I’m pretty sure drywall aside, that this home would smell like five blocks away. But it’s dramatic, so they put it in there.

2) Juarez is depicted as a vacation spot worse than Mosul. Blunt looks on from a nighttime El Paso roof to see the Juarez skyline alight with explosions and machine gun tracer fire. Eh, I looked at that skyline almost every night I was in El Paso for years. I never saw any of that nonsense. In the years I was out there, I never heard one gunshot. Contrast that with my fairly standard east coast suburban hovel where I’ve heard at least a dozen gunshots over the years. Granted, most of those shots are jackasses shooting trees in the small woods adjacent to my back yard, but the comparison remains valid.

3) Blunt, del Toro, and Brolin alongside a dozen stereotypical American commandos (scruffy beards included) erase eight cartel gunmen and one corrupt Mexican cop on the Bridge of the Americas in front of several hundred people. We the audience are then treated to a throwaway line via the team radio about how this incident is so common it won’t even be news in El Paso. Oh, how cynical! This movie is so darkly intriguing. Give those geniuses an award. Eh, I’m pretty sure if nine men die on the Bridge of the Americas that the whole planet would know in about four minutes.

bridge-of-the-americas

Gee, I wonder what occupation these bearded gentlemen must have?

4) We find that the CIA’s plan to assassinate a cartel boss apparently can only entail the use of a former Medellin killer who can infiltrate the bad guy’s compound to exact his revenge. Eh, this would come as comical news to the Mexican Marines who have killed or captured dozens of cartel bosses over the last decade in deadly raids. At great cost to themselves and their families.

Mexican Marines.jpg

Mexican Marines (not depicted in Sicario), escorting El Chapo to his second opportunity to die in prison.  No matter what you do in life, you will never be as awesome as these men.

5) Ultimately, Brolin admits to Blunt in a plot twist that’s quite humorous that the CIA’s grand strategy to defeat the Mexican cartels is to help the Medellin and/or Columbian cartels regain turf because they provided more stability. Truly! In order to swallow this completely bullshit notion, you will need have never heard of the following concepts:

a) The evisceration of the Medellin cartel and the overall recovery of Medellin as a decent city

b) The capture of the Columbian drug trade by the FARC and the Columbian war against said entity

c) The belief that the Columbian cartels of the 1980’s and 1990’s were somehow not the agents of chaos and destruction that they really were

d) The very idea that an American whole-of-government operation can conduct any such secret evil plan without it ending up on the front page of the Washington Post

e) That the CIA will threaten to and/or actually suicide people who state that they’ll tell folks about this evil government conspiracy

Hey I’ve got news for all you conspiracy lunatics: Everybody talks. America is not Soviet or Putin Russia. Everybody talks. As one of my references, I draw your attention to the ultra-secret CIA run black site program conducted after 2001. This was as deep a conspiracy as you can get. Yet here we are about a decade later and you can read online and determine just about every aspect of the operation, right down to the price the CIA paid for the freaking Polish buildings.

Again, I wouldn’t bring up this absence of reality, except that Sicario takes itself so damn seriously. You’re meant to feel their message. The plastic bat is at work. You will be made to agree with this nonsense. Well, I will not. This movie is only mildly entertaining, but is overall, just not very good. My Guests and I would not recommend.

del Toro.gif

Sorry, God’s too busy to meet your shitty movie.

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clowns have always been evil, why is this news?

When my age was still in the single digits I had the unfortunate experience of accidentally catching a television scene where a clown brutally stabs a fellow human in a manner that’d probably be considered horrific even by today’s degenerate tv standards.  It melted my little child brain.  I couldn’t sleep for days.  My parents were freaking out.  Can’t sleep.  Clown will eat me.  It was at one of my relative’s houses and I figure somebody accidentally left it on a channel not appropriate for the kiddies.

Suffice to say, from that day forward I’ve always hated clowns.  So now lunatics dressed as clowns are walking around scaring people all across the country.  People are freaking out.  Oh, clowns are now all of a sudden evil?  What took you all so long to realize this?  Remember those party clowns when you were a kid?  Evil.  Who actually thinks clowns are happy, funny creatures anyways?  I seriously have never gotten this.  Here, just look at these random clowns:

clown.jpg

Closet serial killer

french clowns.jpg

Cheese eating surrender monkeys

ronald.jpg

Evil robber baron

the joker.jpg

Upstanding ordinary average Gentleman

I always remember The Simpsons having it right.  This is what I thought clowns were like:

bart clown.png

Can’t sleep.  Clown will eat me.

Clowns or fools have been around since Caveman Overlord Steve turned his bitter rival Former Caveman Overlord Carl into his fire pit fool.  These jesters or whatever didn’t dress like creepy murderers though did they?  Where did this modern incarnation come from?  I’m guessing the circus.  Early in the 20th Century I’m sure all clowns looked like this, so it became part of the culture and that was that.  I guess I’ve just never understood why such a look became associated with fun or happiness.  I’m clearly not alone in this thought process because clowns are all over horror movies.

So now that social media has enabled the rest of the human race to see clowns my way, it’s turned into mass hysteria.  I don’t understand why.  Look, on any given day you could walk by a complete psychopath on the street.  He or she could be just wearing jeans.  You’d never know they were evil.  But now, since this clown thing is a thing, the psychopath’s are very helpfully dressed up as clowns.  Now we know they’re lunatics just based off their choice of attire.  It’s win-win!

We should support this.  And thus, anybody wearing a clown suit should be immediately arrested by the secret police and sent to a special island.  China’s building all those new islands in the South China Sea, right?  What we do is buy one of those new islands and put all the clowns on it.  Can you imagine the horror of an island with 9,634 clowns?  The thought sends chills into my soul.  But it’s okay.  If we get too freaked out by this, we can always get China to bomb the island.

evil-clown

The sweet & tangy taste of human flesh appeals to this man

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and so you shall stay where?

In Season 5 of Mad Men there’s a drawn out sequence where Don and Megan fight horribly over a variety of issues (mainly that they probably should have never married, idiots) while in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant during the height of its iconic days. If you haven’t seen it I won’t bust the plot, but suffice to say this entire episode is a horrific depressing mess that makes you want to cut yourself. It’s wrong even by Mad Men standards which says an awful lot. When this episode is over you need a shot and a shower.

don-draper

 

In any case, what you didn’t know when you were watching this episode years ago is that same feeling should have been also applied to Howard Johnson’s itself. When you watched the episode, you were like, “Oh, I remember Howard Johnson’s. That place was alright.” It may have evoked images of a happy family road trip when you were a kid. The place wasn’t a palace, but it had clean rooms and decent food. It was the consistent oasis that made it successful. But I bet when you had that nostalgic moment you didn’t realize that Howard Johnson’s was already on life support? Did you? I didn’t.

 

For you see, even though you or I hadn’t stayed in a Howard Johnson’s in decades you probably just assumed somewhere in the back of your brain that they were still around. That they were this eternal thing that was out there still, somewhere. They were not. A few weeks ago the one in Bangor, Maine closed. Now Lake George, New York hosts the only remaining restaurant. Essentially Howard Johnson’s is dead. What the hell happened?

howard johnson's.jpg

 

Well when I was a kid plane flights were very expensive. So the family would at times drive say 11 hours to get to our destination. Most of the time we’d do the drive all in one shot with my Ma and Dad rotating the driving duties, but not always. Sometimes we stopped along the way, thus the motel. What’s changed this reality today is that airline flights are just that much cheaper. Southwest can bargain basement you most places within half the country for a hundred bucks a ticket or less. Somebody from AAA will tell me this statement is garbage, but I suspect the percentage of families who drive north of ten hours to go somewhere has mostly tanked in the last two decades. So if you were Howard Johnson’s and you built your business model on long road trips, you were screwed.

 

Also the brief corporate history of Howard Johnson’s is that after Daddy died, the son appears to have made some horrible decisions on brand diversity. He opened a bunch of unrelated restaurant chains (all of which are now gone) and basically lost focus on the core business that made Howard Johnson’s successful. Then as people started to drive less Howard Johnson’s didn’t take the hint. They didn’t diversify or try new things or innovate. They stuck with the same Howard Johnson’s brand, even if they did eventually discard the neon orange roofs. In a culture that today values relatively fresh food, uses airlines when it can, and isn’t so tied to nostalgia? Maybe these guys were always doomed. Fast food joints and extreme discount motels are at the bottom end. Or you can get creepy rich food and burn $156 a night on the high end. What ground was there in the middle for Howard Johnson’s to continue to exist in?

 

Has something been lost though? I mean other than the basic nostalgia? In terms of the restaurant piece, I don’t think so. It’s not 1960 anymore where stop points might have been rarer. Regardless of what highway you’re on at any given time you likely have dozens of different restaurants to choose from in terms of cost and quality. If you don’t, you’re likely driving in an area where Howard Johnson’s never existed anyways. But in terms of the hotel loss, I think there might be.

 

Towards the end, Howard Johnson’s hotel side of the business was bought out by Wyndham. Wyndham also owns 14 other major hotel brands of varying size, style, and price. Marriott recently bought Starwood and thus created a hotel / motel colossus that owns over 30 major hotel brands. Howard Johnson’s might have been all over the place, but never in their wildest dreams were they ever this dominant. It’s part of a growing trend in American business where there are many brands, but only two or three actual owners to choose from. This of course cranks up the price because in a near virtual monopoly environment the customer loses, always. If you don’t think hotel chains collude on price just like the airlines do, you’re kidding yourself.  It makes one yearn for the quaint, family owned reliability of Howard Johnson’s.

 

And so you shall stay where? Without getting gouged? Well I guess first off, thank god for things like Airbnb. I hope the global commons takes the big hotel chains by the balls, I really do. Because there isn’t a global commons for large airliners, so at least we can have competition for hotel rooms. I bet if you look at all the local and state government efforts that are trying to crush Airbnb on missing taxes, that they’re all mostly funded by lobbyists hired by the big hotel chains. Also, no matter what, always consider different means to travel. If you’re like me and you’re almost always traveling on a limited budget, don’t get caught into the same routine every time. Always investigate new websites for new deals. Try different chains. Don’t always be ultra-loyal to a loyalty program without re-verifying it’s still your best deal. Because you never know when a chain’s going to get bought out without you hearing about it. Or that one of their rivals went bust and they jacked up the price on you. Do your research. Stay flexible. In a manner which Howard Johnson’s was not.

don draper again.png

Don explaining to Megan about the paddling Howard Johnson’s is predestined to take.

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do not watch this debate

Ponder if you will this typical suburban scenario.  There’s these two folks who live down the road from you, we’ll coincidentally call them Don and Hil.  They’re both running for president of your development’s homeowner’s association.  You kick yourself every time you remember that you were foolish enough to buy property that had an active association.  You got cited last year for the length of your garden bush’s fronds.  You had to look up the word fronds in your dusty dictionary to determine what you were being sited for, yeah that’s right, the freaking dictionary.

Don is retired and used to run the town’s largest real estate firm.  He made a whole truck of money but his company had a reputation of mixed success with questionable business practices.  He lives at home with his much younger trophy wife and he dotes on his kids and grandkids.  Don’s generally a likeable guy who will chat with you while you walk your dogs.  But he only ever talks about himself and tends to yell a lot.  He also randomly picks pointless fights with others in the neighborhood over shit nobody controls, like where the town holds its 4th of July fireworks display.

Hil is vice president at a local insurance firm.  She’s hardly ever home as she travels a whole bunch, and in any case lives alone as her estranged husband is never around.  The rumors say he lives in Thailand.  Folks who know folks who work at her firm say she’s efficient, works hard, and generally does a decent if mostly average job.  She hardly knows anybody in the neighborhood.  When she talks to people it’s generally very brief and reserved, and she’s then on her way to somewhere else.  She’s filed multiple complaints via the current homeowner’s association leadership about how her neighbors keep their homes.  Nobody really knows why, since she’s never around that much.

The campaign kicks off in earnest.

Don walks about the neighborhood accosting folks even when they don’t want to talk.  He’ll lay his hand on their shoulder and speak to them anyways, about three inches from their faces.  He makes disparaging remarks about Hil, other neighbors, The Zoo, and random cereal brands.  He makes no promises on what he’d specifically do as association president other than that he’d “liquidate” the existing association order.  Folks find this appealing as they’re sick of the association being in their faces about what color their damn shed is.  But Don also talks about how he’s going to “demolish” city hall and “kill all those fuckers”.  Folks don’t really like or understand this as the local mayor, Zelda, is an extremely popular and competent grandmother of five.

Hil covertly compiles the demographic details of every member of the neighborhood and then hires a Pilipino based data analysis firm to produce a multi-hundred paged detailed report on an effective campaign strategy.  When the neighbors discover this, they’re naturally concerned that their lives are being looked at in such a matter.  Hil denies everything, but one of Don’s friends later finds a half-burned copy of the report in the neighborhood park dumpster.  Hil’s plans for the association are fairly sensible, but are presented in an arrogant, aloof, and sterile manner.  Folks who speak with Hil on the street get upset because they think she talks down to them when they say they don’t understand her plans, or want to complain about the way she filed complaints against them last year with the association.

They debate at the association contractor office tonight.

You can’t stand either of them.

So, do you get in your car and drive 15 minutes to watch the debate?  Only if you’re an idiot.  Instead, you sensibly decide to stay home and watch the game surrounded by your family and dogs, and some beer.

Do not watch this debate.  Neither of these people should be president.  In fact, none of the four Democrat losers or 37 Republican morons who competed against them in the primaries should either.  God I hate both these political parties, so very much.  It’s a sad and troubling time for our democracy, folks.

But it seems tonight’s debate is set for record viewing numbers.  I think folks are watching it only to see the horror show on display.  Like how if a blimp blew up over your home, you wouldn’t be able to look away.  Both these idiots have negative approval ratings of like 87%, and presidential debates aren’t about substance.  So it can only be voyeur awfulness that draws people.

Well, I’m not going to take part.  I won’t be voting for either of them.  So who cares.  I’m out.

Sigh, why can’t Monday Night Football have a decent game on tonight?  We get the Falcons, a former Super Bowl contender who have apparently faded into irrelevance faster than their host city.  And we’ve got the Saints who are a team on hospice care until Drew Brees’ career dies and Sean Payton has his contract terminated.  And you know what, I’ll still take it.  I’ll watch this garbage game, and not flip the remote.  You bet.

You should too.  Please.

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Boston Harbor – Harpoon Brewery

Some things or locations on my bucket list just kind of sit there and fester for years.  For whatever reason, this doesn’t usually bother me.  I’ll get around to it when I get around to it.  You would think I’d be more deliberate and plan things out.  I used to be this way.  But now unless I’m at work I kind of refuse to let my brain work that way, it’s tiresome.

So despite my worship of beer, I’d just never gotten around to visiting a brewery.  And I never really felt the need to force it.  I would think about it from time to time, but never make the effort to schedule it.  Ending up at Harpoon wasn’t some type of strategy either.  My Brother had been there years ago, so we decided to go again while in town for a wedding.  The discussion that led to this quick trip Downtown lasted thirty seconds, and I smirked to myself and them that this would be my first brewery ride.

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He said when he went years ago that they didn’t really have a formal tour.  They just took you straight to the tasting room and asked if anybody had any questions.  From the tasting room you can see the brewery floor.  But now they take you in the front and up some stairs where they have a full bar and waiting area.  You buy your $5 ticket, wait, and drink beer.  They also have custom pretzels.  I know it sounds terrible, but somehow we managed.

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Boston Irish Stout, Scotch Style Ale, & 100 Barrel Series #58 Secret Alloy Ale

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The guide takes you back and she talks you through what I think is a relatively small sized brewery.  I think it took about a half hour.  It’s pallets of beer and monster sized brewing equipment.  I have a general understanding of how beer is made, but don’t really get how it’s done on an industrial scale.  The problem was the tour gal kept talking too fast so that a lot of the time we couldn’t really follow what she was saying.  This was the only downside of what was otherwise a quick, decent look at how these places operate.

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I’d had Harpoon many times before.  I’ve always considered it to be decent, but nothing awesome.  Good stuff, but not great.  I’ve had a bunch more since we visited and my original impressions remain intact.  Although the Scotch and Alloy shown above were awesome.  They need to let some of their rarer varieties ship beyond Massachusetts.  They’re far superior to their regular fare.

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After the tour you get about 15 minutes in the tasting room to have 2 oz after 2 oz from about 20 taps.  It’s a neat wrap up.  The walls are surrounded by beer from everywhere on the planet, a very nice touch.

Overall this was a worthwhile visit.  But I feel I can’t really compare or contrast it with anything.  Without visiting other breweries I can’t put Harpoon into context.  I guess I’ll have to visit more of them to figure it out.  Oh darn.

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100 Barrel Series #56 Thunder Foam – I managed to stumble upon this at one of my local shops.  A dark and spicy stout, it was a fine wrap up to my evening.  Hopefully I can manage to find more of their kind at the same place the next time I shop there.

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Boston Harbor – sort of

I’ve developed this weird trend lately where I show up new to a place I’ve never been before, but somehow end up with a schedule that allows me only a few hours to initially see places before I’m on my way again.  It happened recently in Milwaukee and Detroit, and now Boston.  I’m not complaining mind you, because all it means is I have to go back.  Oh darn.

In any case, the family only had a few hours before a wedding west of Boston.  So we went down to Boston Harbor and walked around a pier or two and then toured Harpoon Brewery.  Incidentally, as much as I worship beer, this was my first brewery tour ever.  I’ll probably write about that later.  Maybe.

But whatever, here’s some random shots of Boston Fish Pier, right down the road from Harpoon.

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Boston Fish Pier is still very much operating.  All the boats there are small craft, as in not the massive trawlers that are literally raping the oceans.  You can tell from the material condition of everything that they’re owners not necessarily swimming in gold.  It all felt very classic, except that the pier itself had been renovated from it’s original creation in the early 20th Century.

 

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The Exchange Conference Center – Located at the head of the pier.  If you’ve heard me whine about the awfulness of modern architecture, here is an example of a new building I’d consider a great job of creating something that’s not a faceless glass enclosed wonder.

 

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I have discovered the fattest seagulls I’ve ever seen in all my global travels are located in Massachusetts.

 

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A lightweight anchor casually discarded on the pier.  If you look you can see why.

 

 

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the balance with life

For the first time this year, American deaths by drug overdose will overtake deaths by car accident.   If you loosely add in the suicides per year that can directly be traced to drug use as the primary causation, you enter an era where over 50K people a year are dying this way.  No other cause of death not related to old age or cancer (fuck cancer) even comes close.

In one of the mid-sized counties just north of mine, they have a sign on the way to the airport that logs death’s per year specifically from opioids / heroin.  It’s over 60 lives already this year.  That county is not that big, folks.

When it’s not playing psychotic referee to the sewer that is Washington politics, The Washington Post can actually output some high quality journalism.  They’ve run a multi-part series examining this issue in detail.  You should read each part, alongside a shorter but similar piece by BBC Magazine.

In many ways, I’m a freedom based lunatic.  And so for years I’ve been of the impression that the way to end the drug war is to legalize all drugs.  Let folks get high, whatever, tax it, and offer treatment.  However, I’m beginning to wonder if the growing drug lethality upends the game on this issue.

Science, reckless doctors, and pill companies have created drugs that are exponentially more powerful than what was available even 15 years ago.  Where it was once extremely difficult to get clean once you were hooked, it might now be nearly impossible to recover once you’d trained your brain to accept modern opioids.  When you add in the ultra vicious horror story drugs like fentanyl (which apparently is so lethal it can get into your blood if you even touch it), and whatever other death dealing nightmare synthetic drugs science will soon create, it seems we’re at a bit of a crossroads with all of this.

You can probably do a few lines of coke in your day, or smoke hundreds of joints, and come out mostly okay.  With this shit, you can literally die on the first hit, or after just a few months find yourself hooked for life without a way out.

When you add this to the already everpresent overmedication of anti-depressants, and whatever other societal ills you can think of, it becomes quite the balance with death.  It’s moments like this why I barely care about the presidential election.  Nobody has answers for these types of problems that are literally killing tens-of-thousands of Americans a year.  Neither political party is interested in proposing deep core type solutions to tackle these problems.  Instead, they’re chasing that sound byte.  Idiots.

I find more solace in those identified within these articles who are on the street, helping every day.  The elderly councilor aiding dozens in addiction classes, the local mayor putting his ass on the line to identify and fight the problem, a young man who lost his friend and now battles to save others.  When our national leadership is garbage, and the topic is as dark as this, it’s hopeful to know that folks are still fighting to save others with ferocity and compassion.

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Behold the potential cause of America’s downfall.

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Detroit – because work said so

Someday somebody way smarter than me is going to write a book where Detroit is a metaphor for all of America. You can trace the tale from the earliest French settlers, to British rule, frontier America, transition from an agrarian to industrialized economy, full blown dominance (Detroit probably single handedly out produced Nazi Germany), followed by collapse & depopulation, followed, by what?

Well, one would hope rebirth. Rather than continued slow decline. Since 1950 Detroit has lost almost 2/3 of its people. A similar trend stalks Cleveland, Milwaukee, and countless other Midwestern cities. Literally, Detroit used to be the center of the world alongside New York and London. Will it ever return to its former glory? Is it even possible? I’m not sure. So much of what drove this greatness no longer exists. What America is and does is so very different than in 1950.

Maybe I’ll try and write about it later on. But for now I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. Or at least to also offer that Detroit has some of the worst traffic I’ve ever experienced, which says a lot considering the parking lots I’ve driven in (Tokyo, Washington, New York, LA, etc). And also Detroit’s suburbs have some of the best Lebanese food on the planet, truly legit awesome stuff.

Work sent me to Detroit for all of three days. I only ended up snaking a few hours to drive around. Sadly I didn’t get to do anything reasonably fun. So I guess that means I’ll have to go on back on my own dime.

Woodward & Guardian

One Woodward Avenue (left) and the Guardian Building – One Woodward was completed in 1962, note its applicable stale awfulness.  Guardian Building dates to 1929 and is apparently beautiful inside.   Also note the weirdo sky bridge which linked the two since the 1970s.  In 2012, Rock Ventures LLC bought One Woodward.  Rock Ventures owns Quicken Loans, a bunch of sports teams and casinos, and about a 100 other companies.  I suppose it’s an example of the types of companies that Detroit has to attract in order to rebuild.

 

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Ambassador Bridge & Downtown Detroit – The busiest border crossing in North America, the bridge carries 1/4 of all trade between America and Canada.  The separate Detroit River Tunnel carries rail traffic.  In a bit of weirdness the bridge is actually privately owned by a guy who appears to behave like an evil monopoly man cartoon caricature.  A second bridge is scheduled for completion by 2020.

 

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Detroit River & Windsor, Canada

 

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GM Renaissance Center – appropriately enchained behind a fence for GM’s cheating death off the backs of the taxpayer

 

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Ruins of the Packard Automotive Plant – Completed in 1911, it built cars until 1958.  By 1966 Packard had evaporated as a car company.

 

The next three shots are of ruined houses just a few blocks away from the Packard Plant.  Once upon a time, an American farm worker could move to Detroit and get an entry job at the Packard Plant.  Thirty years later he could retire as a supervisor with a decent pension, and go buy himself one of these beautiful houses to live out his days as a grandfather.  Now it’s all gone, the Plant, the house, and this very concept of employment as part of the American Dream.  I wonder if they could have ever imagined how bad it would get?  Understanding why this all came about, and where to go from here, is central to Detroit’s future.  And perhaps America’s as well.

 

House

 

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