Men in Blew

Meet Sam Peterson II, a Cedar Springs, Michigan toolmaker. Forty years old, the volunteer firefighter has never had a criminal record until one day last March, he dared to commit the most nefarious of deeds: USING TEH INTARNET!!!

Peterson was using laptop to connect to a local wireless network. The network in question was provided by a coffee shop and was free for customers. Rather than sitting inside, Peterson chose to log onto the network during his break from the comfort of his car. And really, what is more threatening than a man, sitting in his car,
staring intently at his crotch (don't make that noise, you know that's exactly what it looks like from the shoulders up)?

Apparently, a barber across the street decided he was a world class villain, and sicced the cops on him. What did he have to say for himself when the truth got out? "I felt bad about it, but we've had problems in the past. I'd rather be safe than sorry." To this, I say LIAR LIAR PANTS ON I HOPE YOU GET AIDS YOU SHOULD ONLY GET AIDS. If you'd rather be safe, then there's no way you actually DO feel bad about it. However, I guess his fears were warrented, since his hot stylist has had stalkers before (except that hey, the stylist never said anything about recognizing this guy).

Now, the statue that Peterson was prosecuted under doesn't really bother me that much. It's designed to keep people from leeching your WiFi, which kinda sucks. But it could use some clarification, especially in the days when free wireless is becoming more and more prevalent. No, what pisses me off about this is the police.

The officers were called in to investigate Peterson as a stalker. This was quickly dismissed, so they decided to search the books for obscure laws to pin on him. Why? Because the officer "still felt that a law might have been broken." This is the problem with the po-po, assholes who go out of their way to find ways to stick it to you.

Police officers have a citation quota to fill each month, most of which are filled by traffic violations. If it feels like you're more likely to get parking or speeding tickets near the beginning or end of the month, that's because you are. There's a traffic light in my hometown with a little delay between the green signal and its corresponding Walk sign to allow for left turns. Of course, pedestrians often make a quick glance and, lacking any left turns, start to cross before the little red hand goes away.

I witnessed a uniformed officer waiting at this intersection, standing in the middle of this crosswalk. As people started to cross (before the walk signal), he started handing them tickets for jaywalking.

WHY?!?!?!

We're not talking about firing live guns in public. We're not even talking about firing water guns. It's walking across the street with no incoming traffic. There's no justice being upheld here, no protection of civilians or moderation of conflict. It's just persecution for the sake of bureaucracy.

What happened to the image of the policeman who was your friend, someone that you could talk to and seek for help? It's as if an edict of disassociation being enforced, turning the policemen into automatons that follow strict code. Only during extreme crises does the image of policemen change. Why is that? Because it's the only time we ever see them interact with us as people, rather than statute data banks.

Maybe if this happened more, we would feel differently. A guy who patrols the streets, stopping to have a word with the public that he's charged with protecting is more appealing than an aloof jerk who only meddles.

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Terrorism, and What it Means for Your Weekend

A couple days ago, Homeland Security had something to cheer about. Instead of just waving their "Look out, terrorist pirates behind you" flag and foaming at the mouth, they arrested three men plotting to blow up JFK Int'l Airport. And I say good for them. It's their job to get the extremists, the ones that would inflict violence on innocents. My beef with them is when they get in the way of natural rights, like bring toenail clippers on a plane or monitoring my Internets (which, I can assure you, is 50% porn like any average male). They do their work, we hear about it, and life goes on, yes?

Well, some people decided that the lack of hand-shaking and leg-humping was strange. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been awfully mum about the whole thing. I mean, it just happened two days before, why hadn't he said something or handed out medals or given coupons to Red Lobster? Bloomberg was previously known for donating a metric f**k-ton of money to Johns Hopkins University and then riding around campus on his Segeway. (I did not actually see him or his Segway, to this date I have not seen a Segway, do not bring it up it is a sore point!). So how does a philanthropist like Mike answer the burning question of why he hasn't said anything about the latest blow to terrorism in the name of democracy?

"Get a Life."
And I couldn't agree any more.

The average American life expectancy is about 75 years. A third of that on average is spent sleeping, leaving you with about 50 years or conscious thought. How many of those 438 thousand hours would you like to spend worrying about something that you can minimally affect rather than doing something to make you feel better about life? You can think about ephemeral forces that lie just outside your sphere of influence, eventually developing neuroses or psychoses or however many other -oses, until you're convinced you're on some spinoff of the OC except that Seth and Marissa have been replaced with Allah and a WMD.

But those aren't the only things out there. Your body, right now, is waging war against bacteria and viruses and bits of meatloaf you had last week that just won't digest. The battlefield is different, but the outcome is the same: sickness or death at the hands of Un-American Dirt. Will you hermetically seal yourself away for your own protection, plastic wrap everything while in your own personal enclosed sanitary enviro-suit and take up anti-bacterial arms against the terrorist (literally) cells that threaten you?!

I'm not invoking "...then the terrorists have won." Vigilance is not something to be stamped out. What I'm talking about is living in fear all the time, and letting that affect everything you do. Moving away from a city you love and have lived in for thirty years because such a major population is a terror target. Leaving a public bus because a guy with a turban just hopped on. Calling for a teacher to be fired just because she told your children to think about what the news said rather than take it at face value.

Fear is a natural response to danger. But if you calculated all the risks in your life, from driving to living in a city to using a ladder in your home, the safest thing for you to do would be to not live. That's the only way to be free from danger. So what do you do? Do you live in fear? Or do you grow a set of balls (or ovaries) and get on with your life?

You've got one life as yourself on this Earth. Afterlife takes place in another realm, if you believe in it, and reincarnation is by definition another life. And you can quietly whittle away your hours, thinking about how you could die in the next five seconds, or you could pound out that presentation that'll nail you that raise. You can decide to stay inside where it's "safer," or you can walk across the quad and actually ask that cute girl with the glasses out for coffee.

You can live fearing terrorists. Or you can actually live.

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A Few Good Gays

I'm a heterosexual man. Mr first crush on a girl was at the age of five, and aside from the knee-weakening power of Andy Lau, I've not questioned the allure of a female's vagoo. I'm also an American. I was born in the United States, so I speak English fluently, to the detriment of my native Taiwanese. Any time I want to get my ideas clearly and concretely, I get somebody to translate for me.

So why would the military, with much greater stakes than "what do you want to eat tonight?" decide that a personnel's sexuality is more important than their linguistic skills?

For years (yes, it's been that long) the White House has been drumming it into our heads that we, Americans, are under the threat of terrorist attacks at any given time. You could be bombed at work. You could be sniped while commuting to work. You could be injected with anthrax via the television broadcast waves of "the liberal media conspiracy." The Department of Homeland Security was created for two purposes: One, to make it a frickin' hassle to get out of/into the country, and two, to give us that Terror Alert graph.

Look at this piece of crap. Every single color on there is associated with some level of danger. The implication is that a NO TIME are you safe. I mean look, even forest green, possibly the most serene of all existing colors, has low risk rather than none at all. I know, it's not very realistic to say there's never a risk. Hell, look what happened last time we were caught flat-footed. But from top to bottom, the thing is blatantly designed to make you crap your pants over hypothetical levels of danger.

Officially, we engaged in Gulf War II (Electric Boogaloo) to overthrow a despot who was planning to attack America with WMDs. Realistically, everyone knows that Bush personally wanted to kick Saddam in the nuts because hey, it worked for his dad. I'm not going to debate whether Hussein was a terrible country leader, that's too one-sided and we all agree he's scum. But his absence has left an undeniable vacuum of power that so far we've only been able to plug by throwing in wave after wave of our own men.

No one has a clue how to come out a winner. If we pull out now, some other tyrant will grab the top office. We stay, and we bleed ourselves dry for a conflict that we started in the first place. Bush won't commit to a time line or a fixed budget because he has no idea how much it'll cost (and he's never balanced his own budget). In a situation like this, you'd think he'd throw everything he had his disposal. it hasn't come to that yet, but it will.

And yet, gays. Able-bodied individuals fit and willing to serve their country's military. And boy howdy, is that last qualification hard to find these days. Better yet, they speak Arab, a handy skill when you're ordered to occupy an Arab-speaking country. So you've got people who want to help, and have the skills to help in great ways. They just like their partner's sex organs to mirror their own. So they get kicked to the curb.

Wait, what?

That's right. If America was locked inside a death trap with a man who could read the instructions on how to get out, he'd strangle him first for wearing a pink triangle.

You suck, America. You're so goddamn homophobic that you're making choices that are obviously wrong to even junior high kids (I know, I asked my students). Forget for a moment that you're afraid of anybody who doesn't watch NASCAR on the weekends after hitting on the head cheerleader. If you want a job done, you're going to have to pick WHO CAN DO THE JOB, not what they do in their spare time.

What's distressing to me is that the military chose the content of the messages as grounds for discharge, rather than his method. If they had kicked him out for using a "secret level" computer for personal use, I'd have no problem with that. Computers designated for high security data transfer shouldn't be used for Instant Messaging. But no, it's where his likes to stick his pecker is the overlying issue. Congratulations, Homophobic America, you just made us weaker.

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