News of the week

[pyesetz]

Wifey and I emailed our absentee ballots on Monday.  On Tuesday she received an email acknowledgment that her vote was accepted.  I did not get any acknowledgment.  Oh well—every candidate I voted for won anyway.

On Tuesday I got a promotion to Team Leader.  The *fifth* person I've tried to hire as an underling accepted the job.  On Friday he sent in his work for the week.  I wrote back that it was "not the correct solution" and went into considerable technical detail as to exactly why his program doesn't do what is needed, ending with "you did a great job on everything I didn't complain about!"  We'll see if he comes back next week for more punishment.  Hey, in today's economy, a job with an obnoxious boss is better than no job at all—right?

If he does come back, I guess I'll refer to him as ‘Я’ on this blog.  The letter ‘Я’ appears frequently in English parodies of Russian text because it looks like a backwards ‘R’, but it is actually not a very common capital letter: the ‘Я’ section of a Russian dictionary is very short.  But IRL, both Я’s name and mine contain this letter.  (Actually, I've never seen his name in Russian, but I *think* it has a ‘Я’ in it.)  A millennium ago, the letter now written as ‘Я’ represented a nasal vowel, perhaps like French "in", but this fact might not have anything to do with the history of my family's name, where the initial sound might have been the same as today's palatal approximant back when Slavs were writing Я as Ѧ and sounding like Frenchmen when they pronounced it.

So, how about them Team Democrat folks, eh?  Some of them still can't believe they actually won for a change.  President Obama gave a press conference where he announced that he is NOT THE PRESIDENT yet—meanwhile Harper is already trying to get Obama to do a North American deal on global warming so Canadian firms don't get penalized by the new US cap-and-trade system.  Even Dictator Chávez of Venezuela is saying that it's a new day and maybe he doesn't have to hate the USA anymore.  Did you know that Obama is the first-ever US president whose name ends with ‘a’?  It's true!  All previous president's names ended with a consonant or a silent ‘e’.  Also, he's the first-ever US president with a living grandmother in Kenya.  Some pundits have already started using the word Dholuo when referring to the president's family-in-the-Old-Country, while the more idiotic pundits use the word "Swahili" which is the official language of Kenya but is spoken by a completely different group of black people in that country.

The John McCain we saw making his run for the presidency (unlike the real John McCain, who gave his concession speech) was utterly unqualified for higher office, yet 47.5% of American voters pulled the lever for him.  That's like 70 million Americans doing something that no reasonable person should ever do, no matter what their positions might be on abortion and gays and whatnot—you should not hand over the football to a man who is willing to pretend to be a spineless hack!  So no, I will not be moving back to the States any time soon.

Comments

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

You hit the nail on the head there. There has never been a clearer choice, and it was still close, closer than most think. And Palin? What a nightmare! Caligula's horse, tossed up almost as a mockery, and so few sw it for the blatant insult that it actually was. This election brought out everything that good Americans would prefer to have swept under the rug.

[pyesetz]

The whole point of the "permanent Republican majority" was that the Fascists had won and didn't have to hide in the closet anymore.  Now that they've lost again, they'll go back to being "lunatic fringe" and be swept under the rug by left-leaning schoolbook writers who wish to describe their country as better than it actually is.

The McCain/Obama battle was sort of like Adams/Jefferson 200 years ago.  History doesn't repeat itself, but American history rhymes in an annoying way.

[atomicat.livejournal.com]

...rhymes in an annoying way. Nice way to put it! I'm woefully ignorant of early American politics but then again, ain't my country and there is soooo much history. I'm sure if I were I'd know (wanna know about Louis Riel? :D)

I love the way their tearing each other apart right now, and hopefully will as you say, leave the Palinites (which might be a good label for all the worship the ignorance types). Thing is, they're the type that if they ever did get that permanent majority, would end up fighting over it anyways. One of the reasons I hate the Randroids so much is that they never take things to their logical conclusion... any philosophy based on greed (and theirs is no matter how much varnish they put on it) will end up in a winner-take-all situation with the last two standing strangling the last breath out of each other. Welcome to it boys! If you can't handle live and let live, it'll always end that way. Oh, and that's a great way to handle this "America is a Christian nation!" shit, ok, fine, we're all Catholic. Oh no? Well then, we're all Lutheran, or Calvin, or Mormon, or... heh. I say let em fight it out with knives in a dark room.

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Wow, a political post on my friends page that doesn't mention proposition 8.

How rare a thing!

[pyesetz]

Wow
Thanks!

on my friends page
Maybe I should get a new blog.  My rate of new furiend acquisition seems to have slowed to a trickle.  Apparently I'm just not cut out to be a Furry writer.

proposition 8
There were no propositions on my New Jersey ballot.

How rare a thing!
It saddens me that so many people are willing to accept the "gay" role that the Fascists assign to them.  Gay/straight is like black/white: a deliberate politically-motivated distortion of what is actually a continuum of humanity into two polarized groups, labelled "Normal" and "Other".  If someone is only 90% gay, does that make him a "traitor to the cause" 10% of the time?  Who says so, and why?  The point of "gay rights" isn't to help gays, but to keep them marginalized, in order to curry favour with people who enjoy it when politicians tell them that they're Normal.  What you do in your bedroom with your mate is only the government's concern because it can be used against you to win popularity contests with the voters.  That's called "the tyranny of the majority", and it's wrong.

Really, the government has no business handing out special privileges to childless married folks.  It should be promoting child-rearing, which in our modern world has lost many of its intrinsic benefits, yet it remains a necessary but strenuous obligation.  People who put in the effort to raise the next generation of voters deserve thanks from the government, regardless of their sexual orientation—and most of the fighters for straight-only marriages have children, so they would still get the privileges and it shouldn't matter to them.

sleeping dogs...

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Wrong on two counts.

First, what gay right are supposed to be: I always thought the point of gay rights was equality.

Second, about the actual process, and what gay rights actually turn into, in the US anyway: There, it's actually just an opportunity for everyone to pile on their own useless air-headed alternative viewpoints into one great big stinking heap. And nothing good ever comes out of that.

I really should not have brought this up. :-P