What is especially destructive about the shenanigans in Washington is that they are rewarding the fuckups and punishing prudence, quite splendidly and candidly. I really wish that those who were still working hard to keep up and managing to stay above water would get a bone here and there.

Since we’re already nationalizing risk and converting ourselves into a command economy, maybe we could do a few small things to encourage still-employed taxpayers to keep going to those jobs and funding the bailouts for the fuckup businessmen? Here’s a few things I’d propose:

• Cut a point off the interest rates of all mortgages that have been consistently paid on time.
• Bump up 6-month+ CD rates by a point to reward savers who are keeping the banks solvent with their miniscule savings.
• Give one cent tax credit for every dollar of cash worth an individual with zero debt and zero equity investment has (especially good for older savers from our more prudent Depression-era past).

On the one hand I still feel this way - I feel that if I’m to have any sort of sustainable and productive life that the majority of people I meet will be straight, since the majority of people are straight. I also am still somewhat anti-social and socially inept and the idea of going to any of the events or gatherings that typify ‘gay life’ makes me shudder with dread. On the other hand, I’ve started to see that most homos have sort of ‘come of age’ with the advent of partial large-scale tolerance and the recent issue of same-sex marriage and partnership rights.

This makes me feel like I need to start being a bit more conscientious about my obligations to defend the rights and freedoms we have as humans for other homos. Maybe it was just a long bout of internalized homophobia over what I saw as the trivialization of life by the “live fast die young” party-obsessed contingent of the gay community. I came to see this stereotype as indicative of gay-identified individuals in general.

But I have started to change my mind. Five million Californians came out and voted to protect the civil rights of their fellow citizens, gay or straight. The issue of marriage has mobilized the largest gay civil rights movement in American history, and mobilized more Americans behind gay rights than ever. Despite my own ambivalence over the institution of marriage and the wishy-washy separation between religious and civil rights it dredges up, I think this has shown me that my own isolation from the ‘gay community’ has blinded me to the diversity of homosexuals as individuals, and the threats to my own safety and happiness implied by the implementations of laws specifically targeting people and behavior which describe me.

And this realization has, more than anything, made me realize what a horrible job I’ve done defending my own rights. I’ve been a free rider, feeling that I had no responsibility to go to Pride marches or freedom demonstrations because all I wanted to do was be a happy middle class normal domestic queer, not a big raver who walks down the street with my shirt off and waving my arms over my head. Internalized homophobia could be defined by this attitude.

And it also makes me realize that the whole rave-party culture is something that, to some extent homos need to counter the persistent prejudices of daily living. The discotheque has played a role similar to the black churches of the south, where refuge was found that meant “different” didn’t have to register on the radar for a while.

Because homos are still ‘different’, even to the friends, family and coworkers that march with us and vote in favor of our rights. Just like black people are still ‘different’ from white people in everyday life. America elected a black president, and no one is being color-blind, they’re just expressing appreciation that they elected a black man with some good ideas and a lot of charisma. To that end, even when gay rights are persistent, deep and widespread throughout American society, homos will always be different and some people won’t let us into their homes or be comfortable electing a president whose first spouse has the same erogenous equipment.

To draw some late summary to this rambling rant, I guess my point is that I’m sorry for being a free-rider on the gay rights movement. In exploring how I can improve myself and my world, and the prospects for both, one thing that stands out is that I need to accept a greater share of the responsibility to protect and grow the lives of my community, whether it’s a community created by living near one another, knowing one another personally, or sharing a common need for change.

He’s a fab guy, but he isn’t going to fix the horrible things we’ve done to our society and our species.

We have a lot of shit to do. Our nation’s balance sheet stands somewhere in the region of -$50 Trillion. With a ‘T’. That’s over $10 Trillion in federal debt, about $10 Trillion in state and local debts, $20 Trillion in cash borrowed from the Social Security and Medicare trusts to fund war and corporate subsidies, and well over $10 Trillion in consumer and commercial debt.

The point is, we owe a shitload of money. Our society has been living on its credit cards for a generation and the party is over. Asset-price bubbles can no longer support this fake wealth, exhausted Chinese and Russian workers can’t keep paying us to buy their cheap plastic junk and hydrocarbons, and now our parents want to retire, and they actually expect that they’ll be able to liquidate all that wealth they’ve tied up in stocks and houses by selling them to us kids who are weighed down with more student loan and investment debt than any other population in history.

Most of the debt our society is carrying was run up by those same parents who now want to spend a few decades spending even more money that they’ve accumulated by investing debt. And they taught us well: in a few short years, if we don’t change our ways, we’re going to have more invested debt and consumer debt than them, in about a quarter of the working lives. Now that’s what I call ‘leaving your kids well off’, assuming you mean ‘off’ the way mafia bosses do.

It’s time we grew up. We need to be adults. We’re in charge now. The ‘baby boom’ is about to voluntarily give up control of our society and we need to step up to the plate, and not only take the reigns, but turn around and be the disciplined, frugal, austere parents to them that they never were to us. It’s time to take this country to a great big debtor’s anonymous meeting.

We must be prepared to work our asses off. The log hours we work now will continue, and the workplaces we now enjoy will become slimmer and more austere. No more video games or climbing wall. Cubicles and used 15-inch monitors all around. And we won’t be working long, dedicated years to invest in Google shares and retire at 45. No, we’ll be working until we die at the desk. Because we let this world get this way.

And we must be prepared to work this hard for less money. Even if our pay doesn’t go down, I guarantee we will be paying more tax and spending more on food, clothes and transit. Deal. Our money isn’t worth much since we inflated our debt down as far as we could. Chinese plastic pumpkin makers are getting paid as much as us now, and Bengali weaver women are earning enough to feed their families. We can’t have $5.00 shirts anymore. The oil-intensive agriculture we practice is going to disappear as our oil runs out, so a lot more human labor will have to go into that food we eat. Be prepared to start paying minimum wage or better to the millions of humans that will be replacing the billions of hydrocarbon slaves that have been making our food for 75 years. We’re going to be so broke.

And yet we’ll still have to pay lots of taxes to get our governments out of this crushing debt. And we’ll still have our own credit cards and mortgages to pay off. And we’ll have to pay it off, because every time we pay them down a little, the banks will be lowering the credit limit, stranding us in max-out land until we give up the habit permanently.

And we will also have to start saving money, because we will no longer have access to much credit. Investment will be about putting your savings toward a hard good that retains its value, not about speculating on assets that have no realistic and rational way to hold wealth for decades.

Add all this up and it is clear: we must spend decades scaling back our standard of living. We will never have the quantity of ’stuff’ our parents had, and everything we have will be a store of our own, personal labor, and it will have to last.

We must be savers. We must consider wise taxation and prudent government regulation a form of saving. We must look to our local governments and local communities for many of the services and funds we currently rely on the feds for. We’ll be settling for a lot less from our government so that they can put a lot more of our (higher) taxes toward paying off our war debts and infrastructure debts and finally fixing the crumbling roads, bridges, and buildings we’ve ignored whilst we’ve been blowing up or expatriating our wealth.

We’ll have to localize our lives. We can become involved in our local communities and municipal governments and ease the fiscal burden of hordes of paid professional bureaucrats. We can ease our schools of bond servitude by home-schooling the youngest children and putting kids to work as soon as they are able, rather than coddling them through their mid-20s like our parents did. We can care about and invest in our public schools and universities rather than wasting our money on private schools and indebting the next generation with student loans.

We can become involved in our neighbors’ lives and ban the homeowners associations that destroy more communities than they create. We can support one another and care about one anothers’ lives. We will then expect less from local and municipal government and ease their need for federal transfers, keeping federal money dedicated to the federal debt. But we’ll also be paying much higher local taxes, due to the massive debts which will go unfunded by federal transfers as local governments try to cope with energy shortages and devaluing assets.

We’ll need to support local businesses, because large companies will stop moving to our cities. New factories and plants will not be enticed to move every few years as building materials become prohibitively expensive and municipal and state governments so strapped (and creditless) that the generous incentives they’ve ladled on corporations for decades will cease to exist. But those businesses that are already there will become cash cows because their existing scale will make them the most able to pay, and they won’t be able to move away anymore.

Basically, the shiny future your parents taught you about was the future they wanted, but were too spendthrift to make real in their own lifetimes. Now we need to clean up their mess and stop ourselves before we make one of our own that’s even worse. It’s gonna be hell.

The world won’t end. We won’t starve (provided we stop playing ostrich in time). But things will never be the same. We can’t ignore the signals being sent from every corner of the planet, whether coming from peak oil, empty mines or oceanic dead zones. Ignoring it will mean the end - the real end.

Charismatic and humble leaders will be a great asset in the journey ahead. But they are not the answer by themselves. If they think we aren’t up for the task, they’ll do their best to maintain the status quo until the total crash comes. Let’s rise to the challenge, clean up our lives, balance our books and learn to live lives that don’t have to be existentially threatened 100 years from now.

Forget the sob stories of our parents and grandparents. We’re the greatest generation. We can continue to be the innovators, provocateurs, and challengers to the status quo, but we have to act, and we have to take charge now, while we have time on our side, and leaders that can listen to us because they’re a part of us, finally.

Of course, not all is peachy: California’s bigots carry the night, Winston-Salem retains its resident devil-lady.

Now the big question is: Which media companies will go under first now that Obama isn’t giving them millions in ad dollars every night?

Poor McCain. You know he was cringing at the monsters he’d created in that audience tonight, who heckled and booed in shameless viciousness in a way never before seen in concession speeches. It goes to show what a sham his whole life is now. Eight years ago he was John McCain - a Republican I canvassed for and voted for as a registered Republican (which I still am). Now he’s a sour old geezer inhabiting a body that looks like the old McCain but really bears no resemblance in any other way.

Damn Right-Wing Cornucopians.

First, I assume this is what foreign workers feel like when they go to work in a land in which they are not citizens, to some extent. I was able to vote in the Presidential election, but neither candidate is advertizing in California, so all I get are the statewide and local ads, and the disempowering feeling is quite profound.

Aside from the aforementioned Prop 8, I’ve been intrigued by Prop 2, which is a measure to enforce new animal farm rules in the state. The pro team has a lot going for it: most of my own prior reading tells me that humane, organic farming methods are very successful in combating diseases like E Coli and Mad Cow disease. It’s interesting of course, that the anti-Prop 2 site uses the same “safety” issues to encourage Californians to vote against the measure.

It’s kind of telling that the No campaign does not have any visible link allowing visitors to actually read the measure. I read it on the Yes website, and the measure itself is only 2 lines: Animals have to be able to turn around and lay down in their cages. It’s a total of 3 pages, but all but these two lines are mostly definitions and standard legalese.

It’s true that the factory farmers are scared to death of this. Commoditized animals are kept in pens often smaller than their bodies, slaughtered before they’re fully adults so that diseases can’t set in due to the conditions, and pumped full of drugs to keep juvenile diseases at bay and help accelerate body-mass production on the juvenile animals.

The scare tactics being used by the No campaign are that this measure will force Californians to buy unsafe imported meats and eggs, drive local farmers out of business, and make meat more expensive.

Imported meats are already happening, and they are much less safe and quality-controlled than most US-raised animals, so this measure won’t change that. All I can say is that you need to read the labels on your meat and food - if origins are not listed or are too ambiguous, find another brand. To the chagrin of the Yes campaign, I will say that this measure will NOT make what’s in the supermarket any easier to buy - you’ll still have to study the label carefully. But at least if this measure passes, you can just look for produce grown in California and you should be able to feel a little more confident that you won’t lose a few feet of intestine or start getting protein mutations in your brain from it.

The few small “local” farmers that might get hurt by this would be well served to study up on the relative prosperity of their peers that have converted to organic, free-range, and grass-fed farming. Of course, I have a feeling that the real “local” farmers that they’re worried about are the factory farms - which really are “local” to someone. They just aren’t especially local farmers that we should have a huge amount of sympathy for when our public health concerns override our desire to extend corporate welfare. f the welfare of small local farmers is really what you’re concerned about, then contact your legislators and ask them to extend income support and individual welfare programs so that farm workers and farm owners who really are destitute qualify for them. Corporate welfare on the assumption that large corporations are too important to be allowed to suffer always seemed quite autocratic to me - it surely doesn’t help the health of the economy over the long-term, let alone the health of the consumer (which is the point of this particular measure).

As for price, I admit that safe food is more expensive. How important is your health to you? Would you rather spend a few years with a colostomy bag and hundreds of thousands of dollars on hospital bills than buy quality food? Would you rather buy the 3.99/lb mystery chuck or the 6.99/lb organic grass-fed ground beef from the farm 20 miles away that lets you visit them and buy directly from them?

I really wish these sorts of measures would be passed on the federal level, and then I would be covered some day when I don’t live in California as much. But I feel I’m just as safe paying close attention to what I eat, and knowing that that cheap chub of sausage might have some hidden costs…

The only two arguments being made by the Yes on 8 people are 1) Half the California Supreme Court should not have been allowed to override half the California electorate (by declaring Prop 22 illegal, a ballot measure which received about the same margin of ‘yes’ vote as the May Supreme Court ruling) and 2) Same-Sex marriage will result in children being taught about homosexuality and thus boys will immediately start ass-fucking.

Of course, on the first, one of the reasons we have a judiciary is to protect rights from angry mobs. I’m sure most of these fundies would more than welcome court intervention in a popular uprising against guns or protestantism (both likely to be issues in an increasingly liberal and Catholic state).

On the second, I can only chuckle. The idea, I suppose, is that if kids learn that homosexuality exists, they’ll immediately ignite a statewide orgy and never look back. Nevermind the fact that most currently practicing homosexuals didn’t learn much about sex at all until adolescence. What’s really scary here is that these people think that avoiding discussions about sexuality or specifically homosexuality would reduce the potential of gay kids. That’s really the issue. Bigots still think that if they shield their kids from happy homosexuals that their kids are less likely to be homosexual.

If you became straight because your parents denied knowledge of homosexuality to you, please comment - I’d love to hear from you!

As others have said, the Democrats don’t exactly offer a solid set of cohesive policy positions that are materially different from the Republicans. Both parties are pretty much meaningless wafflers with nothing to show from eight years of leadership (the Republicans) or eight years of prior peace and prosperity (the Clinton Democrats).

I voted for Obama, despite my conscience telling me that if I really wanted to vote for someone I should have voted for McKinney. Instead I voted against Palin. Like 99% of all other Americans, my vote meant nothing when it came to policy preferences - it only meant my reaction against the politicians I despised.

I would become a Democrat, and a true supporter of Democrat politicians, if the new congress and administration would institute legislation improving the viability of independent and third-party politicians. There is absolutely no reason they will, and no legal incentive to make them even interested in this as a policy platform. But I think it might be the single most important issue to me right now.

Sure, the plausible financial collapse, petro-crash and bio-technological armageddon of the coming century are important items for any politicians to address, but I don’t think any politicians beholden to wide, morally ambiguous duopoly-wielding parties will ever have the courage to even suggest the major changes to our political and economic landscape that are necessary to prevent a wide-scale economic-environmental tragedy. Many parties with solid and explicit ideas working slowly in coalitions over a period of many administrations would be better poised for this.

Whether such a new America can be achieved without significant constitutional revisions is questionable. Whether significant constitutional revisions would result in anything short of the collapse of the American polity is even more questionable.

Ultimately, making changes to my own life to improve my ability to survive in any potential political-economic scenario will be the only thing that will give me true security. Democrats won’t. Republicans won’t. The US Constitution won’t. In other words, I still think my vote means nothing and I don’t think I can control my country or its direction. What I can control is the amount of debt I have to others, how economically independent I am, how vocationally adaptable I am, and how handy I am with practical skills, intellectual endurance, and social conscience.

I voted for Obama, but I still don’t have much hope.

I love you, baby.