An Andy Rooney Moment

Did you ever wonder why the good guys in sci-fi movies have blue lights while bad guys tend to have green lights?

Painless Giving

When I travel I tend to fly American Airlines and have found a way to give painlessly every time I do so I thought I would pass it on. Here is the information from The Center in San Diego:

Flying somewhere?

Every time you book a ticket with American Airlines, remember to take The Center with you. When making your reservations, include The Center’s “Business ExtrAA Account#: 527593.” You will still receive all your AA miles and The Center will earn airline tickets used to create vacation packages for silent auctions at our major events or to send staff to important trainings in different cities.

Flip-Side To Oedipus

I'm not a fan of Freud and especially not of his proposed Oedipus Complex but in some form it seems to exist in contemporary psychology. The idea of competition of son with father for whatever reason and the "trauma" for both when the son comes into his own and finally succeeds/supersedes the father seems to continually appear in book after book on human relationships. Honestly I have never gone through this. I have never thought of myself in competition with my father in any way, shape, or form for anything.

Recent events have made me think though of a "flip-side" to Freud's idea. Again, it isn't anything new but I have not seen this type of comparison in the books I have read (perhaps because it is too folksy or too sentimental), but my flip-side is rather than thinking about competition between father and son, focus on the moment when the father expresses his joy for the type of man the son has become. Rather than traumatic and a source of familial tension this view creates bonding and strengthening of the familial unit.

OK, so why I am bringing this up? Today I received a card from my father. As some of you know (but most don't) modern medicine has pronounced my father's condition as terminal, metastasized cancer in several organs and lymph nodes. In the card is a very simple message. My father told me how much he loves me and how proud he is to have me for his son. Now this isn't the first time he has said it, but like most fathers the message had come when I have done something or if I was sad and full of self-hatred (a common condition of mine in the past). This time there was nothing I had done, nothing going on in my life which prompted him to take pen in hand and write that message to me. He wanted me to know, once more and under no special conditions or causes that he is proud to have me for his son. When I read that I felt like I had arrived, that while we disagree, while I have not been the "perfect son", even through the "gay thing", he loves me and he is proud to have me as his son (I know that has to sound redundant but I love writing it). Because someone I view as a real man said this to me I felt like a man.

Perhaps I am so happy to have this written confirmation because I love him and an proud to be his son, but I will save that for a later post.

Thank you Dad.

I Coulda Been A Contender

Just pulled my "Motley Fools" CAPS rating for my stock picks where you select a basket of stocks and predict whether it will outperform or underperform the S&P 500 within a given timeframe. The lifetime results I have are:

tpape's rating is 96.75.

* Score: 193.88 (92nd percentile)
* Accuracy: 100.00% (99th percentile)

A member's rating indicates his percentile rank in CAPS. tpape is outperforming 96.75% of all CAPS members. A member's score is the total percentage return of all his picks subtracting out the S&P. A member's accuracy is how often that member has made correct predictions

So out of >65000 people I'm doing OK. :-)

Poor Paul Krugman

Give a guy a Nobel Prize and they think they can say anything and get away with it as we "mere mortals" should not question their pronouncements. Take the following from his editorial The era of good government appearing in the San Diego Union Tribune on 27-December-2008. Consider the following opening from the article:

... President-elect Barack Obama, riding a wave of revulsion over what conservatism has wrought, has said that he wants to "make government cool again."

What conservatism has wrought? What the heck is he talking about? As I have said time and time again on this site (and other conservatives have said before I started writing) President Bush is not a conservative. A conservative would not have done 3/4th of the things that he and his cabinet have done over the last eight years. But while Mr. Krugman doesn't name President Bush in the opening as the culprit (he does later in the article though which we will address in a moment), he says that conservatism is to blame. Mr. Krugman, please tell me how the conservative ideology is to blame when there hasn't been a conservative in power or a real conservative majority in over a decade. We have had Republicans in power in some way, shape, or form but not conservatives. For someone supposedly as smart as Mr. Krugman this is a terrible mistake to make... but of course it's not a mistake since Mr. Krugman is simply a "liberal" who is also a hack when it comes to trying to write about politics. As people who pay attention know, Republican does not equal conservative (just as Democrat does not equal liberal).

Now what about his attempted smearing of President Bush? Mr. Krugman says

Even when they failed on the job (as they so often did), they could claim that very failure as vindication of their anti-government ideology, a demonstration that the public sector can't do anything right.

Really? What "anti-government" ideology? Bush does not have an anti-government ideology. Sure, he has given a few speeches, but look at all the expanded government crap that Bush hath wrought (just for a few consider the massive drug program for Medicaid, "No Child Left Behind", and the current trillion-dollar plus "bailout"). Let's see Obama top THAT for expansion of government power and spending!

So Mr. Krugman, for a Nobel Prize winning economist and supposed "intellectual" (according to Wikipedia) please, please start getting your terms right. Such a supposedly smart man should not be making such mistakes.

Another Reason To Detest Elected Officials

As most of you know California is about to go over the financial waterfall into the abyss. Rather than face realities, what did the democrat majority conspire to do? The b*stards tried to call a tax a fee. That's right, they engaged in post-modern slight of hand. Why did they do this? In California, in order to increase a tax you need a 2/3 majority vote but with the current composition of the assembly they can't get it. They then realized that to increase a fee you need only a simple majority! With the swindler's mindset firmly in place here is how it went... they simply replaced a portion of the tax with a fee! Let's say you have a $1.00 tax. What they would do is say that they repeal 60 cents of this tax and replace it with a fee. Now to raise that "fee" they simply need a majority vote! So they put a .75% sales tax increase, er, fee increase, a 2.5% "surcharge" on income taxes, a fee on gasoline, a business fee, all to a vote and it passed in a straight party-line vote. Disgusting. All I can say is, thank God for the "Governator" who said he would not sign this package.

Evil... these people who supposedly represent the will of the people just try to find ways to circumvent the will of the people. Of course the greatest shame falls on the California voter for putting these jokers in power time and time again.

Clarence Page and Gay Rights

I have never liked Clarence Page, he's been too much of a sanctimonious liberal for me the entire duration of my political life, so my disagreement with his editorial in the 08-Dec-2008 edition of the San Diego Union Tribune isn't much of a shock, but it's just amazing how someone becomes so noted for writing virtually nothing. In the editorial Gay pride meets black prejudice Mr. Page opens with the following:


'Gay is the New Black,' declares the Dec 16 issue of The Advocate, a leading gay-oriented magazine. Well, not quite. How about "Gay is the new gray"?... I don't oppose same-sex marriage... But gay rights leaders should think twice before drawing too many compaisons to the right for racial equality. They are tragically correct to point out the murder, beatings, arson and other hate crimes that continue to be perpetrated against homosexuals. But the history and nature of our oppression is so different as to serve to alienate potential allies instead of winning them over.


Luckily I have that issue of The Advocate Mr. Page references. What is interesting is after opening with the above salvo he goes on to show two things. First, at best he skimmed the article, and second, he says nothing at all about why gay rights leaders need to think twice about making the comparison. In fact, as to the depths of his reading the article, when you do examine the contents of Michael Gross' article (titled "Pride and Prejudice", not "Gay is the New Black" which is on the cover of the 16-Dec-2008 issue of The Advocate), you almost get the sense that Mr Page simply lifted what he liked from the article and attacked the title, but the attack he proposed has virtually no substance in his editorial. In fact, had he bothered at all to read for content rather than skim for quotes he would have found Mr. Gross making the following statement:


Too many drew a simple parallel between our struggle and the black civil rights movement... There is someting to this, but it's dangerous territory, and we have to be careful not to lose our bearings here. Gay is the new black in only one meaningful way. At present we are the most socially acceptable targets for the kind of casual hatred that American society once approved for habitual use against black people... The comaprison becomes useful, though, in forcing us to consider the differences, between our civil rights struggle and theirs.


And I am sure that had Mr. Page read the article he would have liked the following penned by Mr. Gross:


Our oppression, by and large, is nowhere near as extreme as blacks' and we insult them when we make facile comparisons between our plights. Gay people have more resources thank blacks had in the 1960s. We are embedded in the power structure of every institution of this society.. Almost all gay people have the choice of passing [for straight]. Very few black people have that option.


* sigh *

Page's simple rendering of the the issue surfaces in his indignation of not only the comparison of gay rights and the Black civil rights movement (which if he had actually read the article he would have seen that was not the intent), but also that pointing out 70% of the black community voted for Proposition 8 which stripped away the right of gays to marry is mean spirited and a "bum rap". Now he does note that Mr. Gross says the same thing (wow, what a guy) but the sad thing is what typically happens when a liberal commentator writes about statistics... they speak about things of which they have no knowledge. In an effort to be politically correct both Mr. Page and Mr. Gross try to dance around the fact that ethincally blacks voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 8. So what if they are only 10% of the voting electorate, if they had voted in the same percentage as Whites or Asians (less than 50% of those blocks voted for for the proposition) Proposition 8 would have failed (after all it passed by a 52/48 vote so if Blacks voted for it less than 50% that two percentage point swing in the overall population would have been enough). Trying to make comparisons with how Mormons or Catholics or Evangelicals voted is a false comparison (especially evangelicals since ethnicity and religion here probably overlaps quite a bit and the percentage fact is focusing on race rather than religion or any other factor).

So the fact remains... 70% of people in the black community voted for Proposition 8. Now the question to ask is "Why?" I am sure that most gays had a false sense of security given the Obama affect as well as the usual support for what is often considered liberal causes (though I think a strong conservative case can be made for gay marriage), I was saying early on not to do this. Most people who have studied sociology know that there does run through the black (and hispanic community)of social conservatism (more aptly called perhaps traditionalism). Both Mr. Page and Mr. Gross point this out and use it to attack the statistic but rather than attacking the statistic with it we need to address this. Rather than dancing around the percentage of blacks voting against gay marriage we need to address their underlying reasons. If we can tie our issue to that of civil rights (and it is because civil rights means "everyone's right" or "the rights of the public"), we have the opportunity to swing the percentage around... and that is what politics has become, a game of percentages.

Everyone Can Give Something

This morning I was listening to KFI and my heart was breaking. The station is doing a Radiothon for the Salvation Army. Donations are off from last year and service requests have nearly tripled due to the situation out there. Bill Handel was telling people just give up Starbucks for one day and donate the money and that anyone, regardless of how bad off you think you are, can donate something whether it is time, goods, or money. So acting on both good conservative principles (individuals give to help other individuals) and in some part in answer to a bit of a guilty conscious (thanks Mr. Handel) I upped my giving to a couple of local charities. Now I know I am blessed in so many ways and can do this, but if you can't that does not exempt you. Maybe you can help a friend or neighbor having a hard time, maybe you can take a couple of cans of food to a local food bank or donate time at a shelter... but you can do something to help people less fortunate than you. If we all did this, if we got off our behinds and did something no matter how small and tell ourselves "This is for those less fortunate than I am" just think of how much better off the world would be.

Just to help, here are some links to some of my favorites at this time of the year (and you don't even have to search the site as these links take you right to the donate page):

National:

Salvation Army

Feeding America

Children's Health Fund

San Diego:

Mama's Kitchen

And one for you east-side Missouri folks:

St. Louis Foodbank

Words From Yeats

One of the benefits of being educated in a small, Midwest high school was being made to read and memorize famous works of literature. With all that has been happening in the news I am reminded of the following lines written by Yeats in his famous poem The Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

How Much Does It Take To Buy The Presidency?

And here people worried about Ross Perot back in 1992. You can read the full story here.

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama, who rewrote the book on presidential fundraising, amassed more than $745 million during his marathon campaign, more than twice the amount obtained by his rival, Republican John McCain.

In his latest finance report, Obama reported raising $104 million in more than five weeks immediately before and after Election Day. It was his second biggest fundraising period and a fitting coda to a successful presidential bid that shattered fundraising records.

In the end, Obama still had $30 million left over.

Overall, Obama exceeded the combined finances of the two major parties' nominees four years ago. George W. Bush and John Kerry pulled in a total of $653 million in the 2004 primary and general election campaigns, including federal public financing money.


Of course, this was the man who repeatedly said that if his rival took federal funds so would he. First promise he broke... and no wonder.

Non Sequitur

But Hunter will understand it...

World AIDS Day

Today marks the 20th World AIDS Day... how many of you knew that? How many of you cared? I am old enough to remember, and participating in those early years of the fight. It's strange to look back at what we did then compared to the attitudes of today.

Tonight I have my own little memorial service. A glass of wine and some 15 year old picture of a young, smiling blond man I had in my life for a few years before he fell to the opportunistic diseases that is often the end of too-short life. Jerry Heard came out when he was 17 and had his first sexual encounter... six months later he tested positivie for the HIV virus. I met him right after I moved to St. Louis. We were part of a large group who met to see a local production of "Pippin" and have dinner afterward. He sat at the opposite end of the table from me but he kept looking at me and whispering to his friend. After a few awkward dates we decided to make a go of it. He was always up front with his disease and told me that if at any time I wanted out he understood (he said that was why most men didn't hang around him). I didn't leave. When his health was in steep decline I asked him what he wanted more than anything else... he said to be married. We were, if not in the eyes of any government we were in our eyes and our hearts. I was with him when he died, holding him in my arms. He was 25.

So today, as I have entered a relatively new chapter in my life, on this 20th annual World AIDS DAY I am thinking of how HIV has impacted my life. I am sure many of you have more stories you can add to mine. What we have to remember is that the fight is NOT over. There is no vaccine, there is no cure. We have no solid evidence that long-term application of the new drug "cocktails" (with apologies to Larry Kramer who says that cocktails are supposed to make you feel good while his HIV cocktails gives him severe intestinal problems) can be tolerated and while in the short term a better quality of life exists, after almost 30 years of it being out in the open we still have not beaten this enemy.