Thanks, Team Barry!

Then they came for Weev...

2013-03-18T13:03:26Z

By the time this entry is posted, my friend Andrew Auernheimer (a-k-a weev) will be ambling into court to be sentenced, most likely to a few years in Federal prison.

Upon his conviction, I offered first to attend his sentencing in person, and then revised that to sending a letter to the judge. Eventually, I did draft such a letter, but never sent it.

I did not send it, because its contents were too honest. As written, it would not do him a bit of good. To write a sentencing letter, I'm supposed to opine on his fine character and his importance to me and my community. The truth is that Weev can be a pretty odious individual, and having him in my life has brought me easily as much harm as good.

I remarked on these things in my letter and then got to the main thrust of it: that his prosecution is a sign of a justice system run amok, avenging the hurt feelings of corporations at the expense of an innocent man, exploiting the emotions of a technophobic public (in the form of a jury) in the process.

Unfortunately, those arguments, albeit true, would have fallen on deaf ears. And that, of course, is our problem.

The prosecution of Andrew is a crazy and criminal act. To consider his sharing of iPad users' email addresses with a reporter a form of identity theft requires a degree of credulousness that boggles the mind. It does not matter that he did it for personal gain (in this case: for fame and the lulz). A reasonable stranger would understand that "Fraud in Connection with Identity" involves extracting some sort of gain from the information itself: not, as Andrew did, from the fact of having discovered the information.

To consider requesting data from a public web service to be "Unauthorized Access to a Computing Device" because a company said so after the fact requires a craven disregard for the basic foundations of our justice system. A reasonable person would understand this, and also understand why the analogy of burglarizing a house with an unlocked door does not apply. AT&T's iPad activation server was, for all intents and purposes, a garden-variety web service. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...

It was possible to prosecute Andrew because we as a society are more and more dependent on devices and services that we understand less and less. Our entire lives in the West are mediated by technology that most of us can barely operate. This ignorance breeds fear of those who can wrangle these systems. It breeds turd-flinging contempt for those who can be painted as having breached some sort of social contract regarding these systems.

It matters not at all that the real people betraying our trust with technology are the very corporations manufacturing and selling it. Instead, we direct our ire at the person who would show that said corporations have no clothes. Andrew is being prosecuted to satisfy a corporate vendetta, and the jury that found him guilty are victims of the very ignorance that will eventually enslave us all.

Learn to hack. Learn to break things. Call out dishonesty when you see it. Call out breaches of trust. Break out of your dot-com-yuppie cloistered existence, where everyone around you has a "clue". If your family and friends and people in the larger community don't understand who's fucking them, then the Man will eventually come for you next. Your stupid Ruby skills aren't going to save you. Not for long.

There must be some mistake

2013-02-17T00:05:32Z

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Important advice for @meganphelps

2013-02-07T07:12:15Z

Megan Phelps announced today (I guess it was today) that she had left the Westboro Baptist Church. Her post about it is a good read. It's set Twitter slightly abuzz, at least the circles of people that I follow. I follow a good half of the Phelps family, mind you, so the commentary goes in both directions.

A lot of people have a lot of advice for Megan. I feel like some of you (us?) are piling upon hopes that she will transform into an atheist, or perhaps a "better" Christian (presumably more in keeping with someone else's conception of what a good Christian is to be), or maybe even that she will come full circle on LGBT issues and become some sort of advocate.

I'll let Megan undergo her own transformation, or lack thereof. My advice is unsolicited, unneeded, and comes from a nobody (me), and it is as follows: I hope simply that Megan takes care of herself. That was it. And I don't think she needed anyone to tell her that...

I have no demands for amends, because I do not feel like I (as a gay man or as a Jew) have ever been harmed by anything she or her family has done. I understand others may disagree. I understand that even she may disagree. But that is OK.

Westboro Baptist Church makes a lot of people very, very upset. But in my book, according to my values, they are a particularly unoffensive church. Granted, I know very little of what goes on behind their doors in Topeka. I have read the accusations in Addicted to Hate, and other sources, that paint a picture of a harsh and abusive existence within the family. But I have not been there. How they conduct their affairs internally, as a Church or as a family (and Westboro definitely blurs that line) are not my business. If things are as bad as they have been depicted, then I earnestly hope that everyone who has left the Church finds the healing that they almost certainly need.

I find Westboro unoffensive because they conduct what I consider to be the appropriate business for a Church: they preach. And loudly! And because, if I am to take them at their word (and why, pray tell, shouldn't I?), they do it out of what is, at least to them, a feeling of love for their fellow man. "WARN THY NEIGHBOR: REBUKE!" is not a Topeka innovation. It's basic Calvinism. I may criticize the origin of the doctrine, since I am not a Bible believer, which means I consider it (and everything that grew out of it), to be a bunch of poppycock. But to call Westboro hateful would be to ignore what I consider to be a sincere concern for the souls of mankind.

I don't need anyone's concern for my soul, and quite frankly, G-d as I understand him (she? it?) has no issue whatever with the fact that I'm gay, Jewish, or fairly agnostic. But Westboro shares, in very plain and easy-to-understand language, that they are concerned I am going to hell. That's nice of them, I guess. I may disagree with them on the basis of that "Truth", and thus on the conclusions derived therein, but what is there to really get upset about? I should hope that someone would be so kind! Especially if it were true!

And who am I to say that it's not? Who is anyone? Or, rather, who is anyone to be so certain that Westboro is wrong that they must be silenced? I cheered Westboro's victory in the Supreme Court, because it was founded, to me, not in some blind obeisance to freedom of speech, but rather in the spirit of humility that I believe is the essential underpinning of the Establishment Clause. The spirit of humility that dictates that no one, particularly no Caesar (and Washington certainly is the Caesar of our times) can be so sure that anyone else's faith or doctrine is incorrect that they can silence that person, or dictate a contrary belief as the official line of Truth.

Going to hell is very serious business. I should hope that someone would have the freedom to warn me about it. I should hope that that freedom would trump whether it hurts someone's feelings or desecrated some sacred cow (and Westboro has been very good at desecrating sacred cows over the years).

To Megan, Grace, and Libby, I wish you the best, and demand nothing of you. And the same goes to those who are still members of Westboro Baptist Church. I have much harsher words, and feelings, for those Churches that commingle themselves with politics in an ugly way. I have much dislike for those who would seek to get close to Caesar and wield his sword in such a way that their Truth becomes not only their belief, but is enforced, even upon those who do not share it. I do not share Westboro's beliefs. Any of them. But they have never sought to impose those beliefs upon me, only to share them.

To write

2013-02-07T03:02:05Z

I would like to write, but I can not sit down
  and write.
I can sit down
              but I can not write.

I would like to create "content", which is to say
  I would like to be an "influencer", or a 
  "maker", or a "thought leader" but instead I find myself

consuming, endlessly.

To wit:

Three theses flit through my synapses,
  in constant rotation, they
convolute and argue themselves and gather evidence which
  disappears at first stroke as if stuffed down a cosmic
memory hole.

Elusive, it promises to right all wrongs, to set
  conscious dialectics at ease, to
park, for good, my past and identity and present sense
  of conscience and drive, so as to form a perfect platform
  for future endeavors, guileless, and pure.

The first thesis is about race, the second about religion,
  the third about love.

I will never finish them, so judge me.

Crocodile Tears for SF Weekly

2013-01-09T21:23:02Z

So, SF Weekly has just been bought by the Examiner.

Presumably this will end their years-long legal feud with the SF Bay Guardian (already owned by the Examiner). The potential that this will reduce media diversity in SF is there, too. I'm not too worried, though. The Guardian is a joke, and the Weekly is an insult. They deserve each other. Losing either would be a deliverance. Losing both would be a master-stroke.

The Guardian is a joke because they place the blame for nearly every problem in California on a combination of Prop 13 and PG&E malfeasance. If there ever was a shred of nuance at the SFBG, they threw it out long ago. Their voters' guides tend to line up with my interests, but other than that the writing is a slog unless you're totally out to lunch. The comments section is a who's-who of local political cranks. It's entertaining the first few times, then it gets really, really boring.

SF Weekly is gentrification journalism. Its key demographic is young, upwardly-mobile transplants to SF. People like myself! However, unlike most of said crowd, I intend to stay and probably start a family. Most of SF Weekly's readership will be gone once they're either out of college or Brooklyn beckons. That, or they'll have kids and flee to the suburbs. During these peoples' brief (parentally or Valley-funded) vacations in San Francisco, SF Weekly plies them with the advertising they need (5 pages of Instant Medical Marijuana Evaluations) and a regular schedule of whiny reporting about how broken San Francisco is, lest they get the crazy idea of trying to get to know the place long-term. SF Weekly's message: don't even bother.

It is true that San Francisco has a lot of problems. The root of those problems is that city government is myopically focused on pleasing one demographic: new, young wealth. Ed Lee spends most of his time hanging out with Valley types, and the only infrastructural improvements the city seems to get these days are things like bike lanes, which are mostly useful to the young and able-bodied (myself included). Bike lanes are nice, but the school system is a disaster, Parks and Rec is basically just a graft operation, and the Housing Authority alternates between a place to stash defective administrators and a resettlement operation for poor overseas Chinese. The only diamond in the rough is DPW, who have managed to make great improvements in the sewer system the last few years. Three cheers for DPW. I digress...

Almost none of the regular business of a city, such as educating, housing, and providing services for working residents (including ones whose families have been here for multiple generations) seems to be important enough to City Hall. The reason all these things are a disaster is because the city's priority is taking care of educated out-of-towners with disposable income. And investment in public goods doesn't benefit SF's New Chosen, whose needs are almost entirely fulfilled by private enterprise. Between patronizing expensive restaurants, using fancy car services, riding chic corporate shuttles to Valley jobs, and barely stepping outside of a 1-2 square mile portion of the city, these people are easy to take care of: just make sure that nothing stands in the way of their continued gentrification of working-class neighborhoods and they won't complain. Try finding one of these people at a public pool, or their kids at a public school (if they even stick around long enough in the city to have kids of school age), or riding all but a few MUNI lines (and only with great complaint).

San Francisco refuses to invest in its own people, people who grew up here or raise families here, because there's no profit to be made from it. Follow the money. Gentrification is big business, and City Hall has long since been bought and sold by its advocates and benefactors. For all of SF Weekly's complaints about how badly the city is misrun, have they ever cast any shade onto the key phenomenon that distorts all of the city's priorities and hurts most of its residents? No? Then they're part of the problem.

I hope the Examiner eviscerates them and turns them into an arts and entertainment rag, which is all they were ever good at. And the Guardian should just be a blog at this point. I'm not sure why they keep trying. There might be room for good local journalism in SF, but aside from a handful of blogs (SFCitizen, bluoz, etc.) there's very little light in the room. And it's a damn shame.

Coming Out And Stuff

2012-10-11T20:51:46Z

Everyone's posting their National Coming Out Day stories so I'll post mine.

I used to run with a crowd of ravers and skaters. And skating ravers. It was a pretty butch bunch of guys. I'm pretty sure I was the only gay one among them. I knew I was different, because they were always skeezing on women, and I didn't get it. However, I still believed that at some point in the future I would finally get the memo and start ogling girls like they were.

I've shared about my struggles in a previous post. Needless to say, I wouldn't admit to myself that I was gay, and I was terrified that you would find out before I did and "out" me. In the end, pretty much that is what happened: after I'd moved in with her in New York, my sister asked me point-blank, if I was gay or not. I was 18.

Nobody had ever asked me that before. Because it was my sister, who has always more or less had my number, I was able to be honest about it. I told her I was "bi", and then about 30 minutes later, the bisexual phase of my life was complete and I came out as gay. It was a really short phase.

A few nights later I called my best friend in Chicago and came out to him and his girlfriend. He was pretty supportive and was mostly worried that he would have to stop saying "fag", which was about every other word out of our mouths at the time (myself included). I assured him nothing would change¹, and he was satisfied with that.

I came out to my mom in a phone call as well. She just wanted to know if I was sure, which I told her I was, and she went ahead and told my dad so I wouldn't have to. My parents may be Republicans but they're still educated socially liberal Jews. There was no hellfire or brimstone, just some patronizing concern, which has mostly gone away over the years.

A few weeks later in Chicago I drank myself into a blackout at a party with the rest of my friends, and apparently had some slurred, drunken coming-out. I had to be informed it had happened a few weeks later. I had no idea. Things were a little different but not so different that I really noticed.

By and large, everyone in my life has been cool about me being gay. I've always lived in environments that were either indifferent or supportive of queer people. That doesn't mean that I didn't spend years and years in self-hating misery, drinking, using drugs, and alternately hating and judging other queer people. Internalized homophobia is a bitch. I took all of the nasty things society said about people like me, and accepted them as fact.

I had a second coming-out of sorts when I got sober in 2006 and had to get serious about the way I've been relating to myself and the world. That broken belief system I carried for years has slowly but surely come apart. The last couple of years have been a journey of coming to terms with who I am, and growing in love and service to all of you. Coming out is a process, not an event. It began when I'm 18. It continues, today, at 29. The world is still a very hostile place for queer people, even if we live in a cocoon of supportive friends. I try to do my part every day to change that. Are you?

¹not cool now, but it was then.

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE

2012-09-23T05:22:36Z

I haven't cried like this at a movie ever.

I was a toddler when the AIDS epidemic got into full swing. I was halfway through middle school when the first PIs came out and AIDS stopped being an automatic death sentence. Through that time, AIDS was nothing more than a remote and mysterious disease that hadn't affected but one person I only vaguely knew. It wasn't even on my radar.

During High School, I started to struggle with the idea that I might be gay, and HIV/AIDS emerged on my consciousness in a new and shameful way: as an inescapable corruption that lurked around the corner, waiting to strike the instant I dared to explore the (at the time, very unwanted) feelings I had towards other men. If I was gay, it meant I was cursed.

I went to a very gay-affirming private high school with several out faculty. I am a child of educated, socially liberal parents. Coming out, to those around me, was a non-event. But I can say with conviction that the idea that "Gay = AIDS" was a powerful motivator to avoid accepting that very essential fact about myself.

The only option available, it seemed to me, would be to do everything possible to convince people I was something else; to assume an alternative identity that was so overpowering that nobody would dare question my sexuality, lest they find something out about me that I was not yet ready to confront myself. I found this in raving and drugs; not only in the activity, but in the identity, the clothing, the style of speech: anything to help people conveniently put me in a box so they could stop asking further questions.

It worked. At my 10-year high school reunion, people were happy to find out I was alive. But only because they were worried I would have died, by then, of an overdose. That I was gay was a surprise to nearly everyone.

It's only in sobriety that I've grown into a healthy perspective around my sexuality, and around HIV. I am grateful today to be HIV-negative, and to have been more or less untouched by the storm that consumed entire generations before me, even if the psychological wreckage still found a way to make a mess of my teenage mind.

This film made me realize just how much I've taken for granted. It made me realize just how horrifying things were for the first millions of victims, when seemingly every institution turned a blind eye to the plague, and many actively wished and cheered the deaths of gay men. If I think I had it bad, I've got another thing coming. The very ground that I walk on was paved by men who never had a chance to survive AIDS, and who laid their very lives down to fight homophobia, unequal access to health care, and the indifference of the medical establishment. The changes they brought about were truly revolutionary. I had no idea.

I was reminded immediately of the words of Thandiswa, singing of the generation born after another revolution (specifically, that which brought about the fall of Apartheid in South Africa). The song is called "Nizalwa Ngobani":

The world changes
Revolutionaries die
And the children forget
the Ghetto is our first love
And our dreams are
drenched in gold
We don't even cry
We don't even cry about it
know it no more
are the beautiful ones really dead

I am of the generation after a storm. I am of the generation that can waste its time on trifling things. I am of the generation that is no longer fighting to stay alive. It is such a gift to know where I come from, and such a calling to continue the fight for justice in this world.

I want to thank the brave men and women of ACT UP, and the talented filmmakers who finally brought their story to the screen. Everyone should see this movie. Everyone.

Movie Site • Showtimes

Over it

2012-09-11T18:13:57Z

11 years ago I was sleeping off an acid trip when my mother ran into my room and turned the TV on. I think the second plane had just hit the World Trade Center. I was tired and hungover, so I turned the TV off, went back to bed, and slept through the defining trauma of my generation. This is quite possibly one of the best decisions I ever made. It didn't spare me from two years of freaking out and keeping an emergency bag of Ketamine in my wallet in case I was ever trapped in a burning building. But I was spared the effect of watching it live.

11 years later, I have no interest in watching replay after replay after replay of fireballs and collapsing buildings and running people, whether set to dramatic string music or Yakety Sax. I'm so grateful today that I don't own a television and am thus insulated from the primary means of mass emotional manipulation. Thanks to the awfulness of 9/11, we built ourselves a massive police state, killed hundreds of thousands of people overseas, and got ourselves embroiled in a 1000-years war. Those images, played over and over and over, have been used to jerk us into justifying every manner of subsequent atrocity.

9/11 was awful. I hope nothing that awful ever comes along again. But I'm tired of people yanking my chain and convincing me that some nebulous other needs to be destroyed in order for me to feel safe. I'm tired of being complicit in war, hatred, and nation-destruction. I'm tired of numbing myself to the reality of what we do overseas, swathed in the comforting illusion of "it's for my safety". There are better things helping me sleep at night than the knowledge that it's open season in the Middle East.

For this world to be truly safe, it will need a lot more love in it. Today I'm going to look out the window and acknowledge that the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, it's another lovely day in my adopted city of San Francisco and I'm sober. My goal today, like it should be every day, is to inject some more love and service into the stream of life. My advice to anyone else stuck in the miasma of endless remembrance is to turn off your television, go outside, and let someone know you care about them. It will do a whole lot more than shaking your fist at the heavens.

Why what the President said yesterday matters to this gay man

2012-05-10T21:15:22Z

Let's start with some facts:

Barack Obama is a calculating individual with a thorough training in the machine politics of my beloved hometown (Chicago). The President is not big on accidents.

I have no doubt that his decision to come out in favor of gay marriage yesterday was preceded by plenty of thought, polling, and political calculation. Whether or not Biden had anything to do with the timing of that decision is of only passing importance: we know that Obama was planning on revealing this policy shift at some point.

It's also worthwhile to note that, policy-wise, his TV interview (and the various follow-up press releases) contain no additional prescriptions beyond what he's already done, which is to refuse to defend DOMA. By stating that gay marriage will continue to be decided on a state-by-state basis, Obama is basically committing himself to nothing more than his existing agenda.

I woke up in California today still unable to marry my partner of 5 years, and nothing the President said yesterday will have any direct impact on that very painful and frustrating fact.

All that being said, Obama's public statement of support for gay marriage will prove to have been a ballsy, principled, and important move. Here's why:

By making support for gay marriage a position in his upcoming campaign, Obama will ensure that the issue finally gets the nationwide hearing it deserves. I'm not talking about the legislative hearings it deserves, or the judicial hearings it deserves... I speak specifically of the conversation it deserves. We now have an election where one candidate is in favor of gay marriage and the other adamantly against it. It will figure into both parties' talking points and campaign. This is a wonderful and promising development.

In 2004, Ken Mehlman architected a particularly cynical component of Bush's reelection strategy, which was to put anti-gay marriage measures on the ballot in 11 states. The idea was to increase conservative turnout. Whether this had a discernible effect on the election outcome is debateable.

It had a harmful effect on gays and lesbians, however. Few things are more painful than knowing that your neighbors are heading to the polls to vote against your very civil rights. It hurts. It hurts on a deep level waking up the next day and wondering which of the people you interact with every day exercised their animus at a polling station. It also hurts because when gay rights are up for a vote, attacks on gays increase, both in speech and with violence. Witness the awful, ignorant things said about gays whenever there's a gay marriage amendment on the ballot. Witness the signs that get torn down and the people that get harrassed and beaten up.

An election where nobody's willing to advocate the pro-gay position resembles a bunch of one-way bullying, and little else. That's what the recent election in North Carolina looked like. Much like the campaign against Prop 8, the anti-Amendment 1 forces simply couldn't bring themselves to actually make an affirmative defense of the gay citizen's right to a marriage, or even a civil union (the amendment banned both). Instead, the usual empty paeans were made to "fairness", or "harmful effects"... extra emphasis was placed on the possibility that unmarried partners (presumably heterosexual) could lose domestic violence protections. With nobody willing to actually make a pro-gay argument (lest we rankle the feathers of voters who genuinely don't like gay people), the amendment won overwhelmingly.

We finally have the possibility of gay marriage getting a fair hearing this November. And mark my words, it will. And with a President finally willing to make a principled argument for extending a basic civil right to a suspect minority, we'll no longer be sitting in our basements waiting for the proverbial tornado to pass over our homes. We'll no longer be simply wishing we could be left alone. We'll have an advocate, and one with the best bully pulpit around: the Presidency. What Obama did yesterday changes nothing, and everything.

Thank you Mr. President

San Francisco Rant: Housing

2011-11-01T02:01:28Z

My least favorite people in San Francisco politics are Willie Brown, Willie Brown's stooge Gavin Newsom (thankfully "promoted" to a meaningless office in Sacramento where he can't do much harm), and Randy Shaw, the great Poverty Pimp of the West.

Do I ever dislike these people! Together they have conspired to cement San Francisco as the ultimate Sanctuary City for the Rich. It is a city scrubbed of opportunity for anyone middle or working class. If you want to talk about a place with no room for the "99%", it is San Francisco. Of course, the city has a healthy supply of the chronically indigent, mentally ill, and drug addicted (presumably, the bottom 1%). These people constitute the reserve army of the professional Left; always available for a vote and completely dependent on services (many of which are outsourced for big $$$). You can move them around like chess pieces while painting yourself as a hero of the poor, and it is very remunerative. But aside from the (admittedly very visible) lowest rung of San Franciscans, everyone else in this town is pretty bourgeois, has lived here a long time (and can continue to, with the help of Prop 13 and/or rent control), or is not in good longterm housing. No middle-class family is going to settle down in a "roommate situation" with 5 strangers.

I would like to be a homeowner in this city. It's never going to happen unless I make a big heap of cash (or hit my dad up for a big heap of cash). The price of housing in San Francisco is absurd. I could make this a rant about Prop 13 (because it encourages people to hoard property, and drives up the price of real estate), or even make it a rant about rent control (because it generates an artificial scarcity in rental units and encourages landlords to rent vacant units at the highest price possible), but I won't. Both of those, for better or worse, have their purpose. I may read the Guardian a fair amount, but I'm not willing to lay all of California's problems at the feet of Prop 13 and lack of enforcement of the Raker Act. One thing that would help make San Francisco more affordable would be the introduction of large numbers of vacant units onto the market, but the city has done its best to make sure that never happens. When South Beach was redeveloped under Willie Brown, the city struck a deal with the developers to make sure that only a limited number of units hit the market at any one time, lest there be even a temporary glut in housing which might cause prices to drop. Everything in this town is sold at "market rate", which might as well be called "overseas Chinese rate", since that's who's buying it and living in it (a few weeks out of the year). All those big flashy towers in SOMA have done nothing to ease the city's housing problem, nor have they made the neighborhood any more interesting. It's still a freeway. Hey, remember that deal Chris Daly struck with the One Rincon developers to put money into an "affordable housing" fund instead of actually putting "affordable housing" in their tower? Do you know that they never put that money into the fund because it was contingent on them finishing their project? Fun fact, that!

If I were Grand Poobah of this town, I would Manhattanize large swaths of it (primarily the uninteresting parts), to the point that it caused the bottom to fall out of real estate prices and allowed a few people in the actual middle class to buy or rent here. I know, that is a very radical idea. But since people jealously hold on to their overly-inflated-and-completely-out-of-touch-with-reality "property value", it would never come to pass. San Franciscans' ability to interfere in just about anything the city does leads to a great demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Because building anything in San Francisco means being dragged through 3 years of public comment and letting every stupid neighborhood group have its say, any project that actually breaks ground will be guaranteed to be:

Sold at "market rate"
Stripped of anything interesting architecturally, so as to be maximally unoffensive
Built by the small handful of companies that have greased the political wheels here sufficiently to be able to do whatever they want

Wow. Democracy! There's a reason that all the newly-built parts of this city look like East fucking Berlin.

Let's talk about poor people now, and the people that exploit them. Randy Shaw, the head of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, is almost singlehandedly responsible for destroying housing opportunity for the working poor. He makes a sizable salary off of housing the homeless via "Care not Cash" that enables him to live large in the Berkeley hills, far away from the wreckage he's caused. Housing these "homeless", by the way, doesn't take them off the streets during the day, since most of them are still crazy or hooked on drugs and have nothing better to do than sit around, panhandle, get high, and get into trouble. Meanwhile, the desperate souls penned up in his buildings are subject to constant entreaties from drug dealers and criminals, who are allowed to roam the halls for free since his entire staff is on the take. If an addict is truly determined to recover, almost nothing can stand in their way, but you can surely make it harder. Randy Shaw makes it damn near impossible. He fought the Power Exchange moving into the Tenderloin tooth and nail because they had the temerity to clean up the drug dealers off of their half of a block. What a charlatan. If you're ever walking the Tenderloin and wondering why it's such a crappy neighborhood, just remember: there's people making big bucks off of keeping it that way. And they're really smug about it, too...

There is no affordable housing for the poor in San Francisco. There used to be! The lowest rung of available housing used to be in SRO (Single Room Occupancy) units. Rooming hotels. Bed, sink. No shower, shared bathrooms. Likelihood of bedbugs: high. But if you were working poor or just getting back on your feet, they were your foot in the door in San Francisco. Thanks to programs like "Care not Cash", those rooms are now by and large reserved only for those who absolutely can not help themselves. Sorry! Randy Shaw saw money to be made! The city pays a fat lump sum (with almost no oversight) to the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (and other similar agencies) for the service of housing these people. Why rent rooms to the poor when you can just provide housing as a city service, and make a handy profit in the process? I know people who are homeless because they were not mentally ill enough to qualify for an SRO room. You can't just rent one, anymore, at a lot of these hotels. You have to enter The System, and The System is only interested in you if you're completely batshit crazy. At least one friend of mine was denied housing because he had the audacity to get and stay sober. Whoops! Perhaps he should have pursued "harm reduction" instead...

G-d help this place.

How I update my desktop

2011-07-01T20:26:15Z

* 5-19 * * 1-5 /home/tehdely/local/bin/update-kellys.sh

#!/bin/bash

PIX=/home/tehdely/Pictures/OB-KC
NEW=${PIX}/new.jpg
WALL=${PIX}/wall.jpg
SEPIA=${PIX}/sepia.jpg

curl -f http://ob-kc.com/images/current_lg.jpg 2>/dev/null > $NEW
if [ -e $NEW ]; then
  if [ "$(md5sum $NEW | awk '{print $1}')" != "$(md5sum $WALL | awk '{print $1}')" -a -s $NEW ]; then
    mv $NEW $WALL 
    # Make sure it is bleak
    convert $WALL -modulate 75,20,66666 ${SEPIA}
  fi
fi

Larouche People: I am not worthy

2011-04-05T23:37:53Z

I love trolls. I love political trolls. I've previously expressed my deep and abiding love for the Westboro Baptist Church.

Lyndon Laroucheites are pretty lol trolls. Much like Westboro, they truly believe in what they spout, and even more like Westboro, they take all antagonism from the public as evidence that they are right.

These guys set up shop outside the Bank of America branch on Fell Street. I was going there to do some mild-mannered banking and noticed a very distressed woman arguing with them. She had been trolled. She was definitely in the process of losing. I finished my banking and went home, then realized I needed to do more banking, so I returned, this time with a video camera! By this point she was walking down Broderick with her boyfriend, and she was crying. She lost. I hope she had a nice day.

I shot some video of the Larouchites and tried to antagonize them. At this, I failed horribly. I even used a technique that has proven very successful for Scientologists (another awesome band of trolls), which is to videotape my subjects while walking around them ominously. This typically makes people very uncomfortable! When that failed to raise their ire, I went into a tirade about how they were stepping on the turf of my local revolutionary Communist organization. I even tried to drop in a cheap shot or two about how Lyndon Larouche wanted to quarantine everyone with HIV in the 1980's. That also failed, and eventually I got tired and left. They won.

During this whole time, they were taping up their sign. Apparently, the angry (and visibly trolled) lady from earlier had torn it up in a fit of rage! They called her a fascist. I went into the bank to do my second bit of banking. When I returned, there were police there, disinterestedly taking a report about the sign-ripping "assault". Little did I know that this would hit the news today and be spun as an assault on an Obama supporter:.

I am not worthy. What a brilliant meta-troll. The local media's comment sites are filling up with people classing this as either some sort of statement about Obama, or perhaps a liberal pulling a Tawana Brawley to feign victimhood. You idiots have all been trolled. Enjoy your vitriol.

I am voting Larouche. Here's some video of the aftermath. Do those look like Obama supporters to you?

AWESOME

BAND MEME

2011-01-16T04:21:34Z

1. Hit random on wikipedia.com. The page that comes up is your band name.

2. Hit random on quotationspage.com. The last 4 or 5 words of the LAST quote on the page make the album title.

3. Flickr.com - click on the last seven days link at the very bottom, then click on interesting photos from last seven days. The 3rd picture is your album cover.

4. MSPaint or Photoshop it and post in the comments.

OH GOD THE HOLIDAYS

2010-12-25T17:26:21Z

Suggestion: cool your boots

It's Christmas today, in case you haven't noticed. My family is in town. We are Juden, so we are going to celebrate Christmas in the traditional fashion by having some Chinese food with other Jews at Kung Pao Kosher Comedy. I believe the origin of this tradition is that Chinese restaurants are typically the only places open on Christmas, although in the Bay Area you never know.

Christmas out here is not really a religious holiday, and as a result way more people seem to practice it, at least the "spirit" of it. I'm still getting a handle on what that "spirit" is but I guess it involves family and shopping and giving and stuff. Neat. I'm really unfamiliar with that stuff, due to the brand of anti-assimilationism practiced by my dad, with which I was raised.

A lot of the Jews in our Chicago suburb would dress up Hannukah to look like Christmas, and give their kids lots of gifts so they didn't feel left out. We eschewed such simulacra. Hannukah was a religious holiday on which we got to eat potatoes. There were also candles that got lit. The week began, and then it ended. Just another week in the life.

I fell in love with a wonderful lapsed Episcopalian some 3-almost-4 years ago, and he's been slowly roping me into his family's traditions. They take the Holidays™ seriously, in the secular sense at least, and I have to say that spending time with family is pretty neat. They also keep giving me stuff. I can count on one hand the number of gifts I've given in my life. I've never sent a card. I don't have a clue about any of this. I'll have to start.

I feel like I'm losing something, like I'm "giving in". The programming of my past really turns on right around now and tells me to ignore everything, to plug my fingers in my ears and go IT'S JUST ANOTHER MONTH, FUCKERS. THE EARTH IS TURNING, DEAL WITH IT. I've always understood that Christmas was a pagan holiday. I don't have any worry that by taking part in festivities I'm going to be like back-doored into Christianity. Hell, I've been saying the Lord's Prayer a few times a week for a couple of years and that hasn't done it; what difference will a few gifts make?

I guess for me, part of the consciousness of being a Jew is being-apart-from. I get a certain sense of smug satisfaction out of it but I know that there have been times, especially around this part of the year, where I have just felt really alone and left-out. I find it interesting that when I just let a little bit of the spirit of the times seep in, a part of me definitely revolts, even as I am enjoying myself. The Jew meme is bizarre.

Awesome Breakfast of Goodness

2010-11-08T17:42:27Z

Awesome Breakfast of Goodness, originally uploaded by tehdely.

Note: bagel w/ salmon spread, anchovies, capers, and kalamata olives. Other bagel with butter and delicious Bolinas jam. Fage yogurt w/ walnuts and honey. Two bags PG tips, cream, honey. EDD continued claim form. IRC. Twitter.

Big electoral whoop

2010-11-05T17:22:16Z

I don't like GOP control of Congress, but I'm used to it. The last couple years of ostensibly Democrat control have felt like GOP control anyway, due to their overuse of the filibuster and "our"* unwillingness to change the rules.

I'm actually used to not getting what I want, period, unless it's a handout from my parents. I'm used to gay rights sitting on the backburner, except for when they're convenient for getting votes and/or donations. I'm used to the lack of universal healthcare. I'm getting pretty comfortable with corporate mega-control of our electoral process, since it frankly doesn't feel much different from corporate only-semi-kinda-control. Money is money. People still, surprisingly, vote their conscience some times. See: Meg Whitman's missing $140 million. Couldn't buy an election with that!

I'm so not interested in what all the other "progressives" seem to be up to at the moment, which is pointing fingers and whining. This is not to say I'm interested in unity. I'm not interested in unity, either. I'm just not too interested in having strong feelings about our politics, at least not right now.

I've realized that having those feelings mostly makes me useful to others, insofar as such feelings occasionally compel me to get involved in some race on someone's behalf, but frankly I'm tired of the work. I'm tired of donating money, canvassing, making phone calls, and trying to impress upon people the CRITICAL IMPORTANCE of whatever it is I'm trying to (get them to) do.

That all being said, this election revealed some interesting things. Mostly in California, which is all I'm going to talk about, since I've adopted the Californian myopia of not really caring about anything outside California, except when it affects California. Note to native Californians: I'm not from here but I'm trying so hard to adopt your character defects. I think I'm doing a pretty good job.

Propositions are interesting. People don't really seem to make up their minds on them until a week or so prior to the election, when they finally get around to reading their voter guides. This is why polling on propositions is useless. I didn't read my voter guides and do my research until the day of the election. With the exception of two props, I had no idea how I was going to vote. There's just too goddamn many of them to really keep them all in my head.

California has a couple of different strains of politics. It's very hard to divide the state along just conservative or liberal lines. There are various types of both, from the "tax me please" San Francisco-style progressivism to the Alpine environmentalism that occasionally shows up in the mountains but rarely coexists with the social libertinism that typically arises in Alameda county, some of which occasionally run alongside Howard Jarvis-style "tax me at risk of your life" fiscal conservatism as well as High Desert "look at me funny and you'll get a 2nd-amendment remedy" libertarianism. Most of this year's propositions tickled a few of these bones, resulting in some interesting maps, handily rendered by the Secretary of State's office.

The Prop 19 map is funny. It's actually pretty easy to read. All of the counties which are chock full of people who smoke pot voted yes. The counties that grow pot voted no. It's pretty easy to side with pot legalization when you smoke it all the time and realize it's not a crime. It's pretty easy to come down against it when you realize it'll destroy your bottom line and the economy of your entire county.

When it came to Props 20 and 27, San Francisco was truly seal contre tous. We have such faith in the legislative process that we actually want our legislators to draw our districts. How fucking quaint. I love it.

San Francisco types love government largesse. We believe in it. On Prop 22, we, along with Marin, were the only ones to approve of the existing arrangement wherein the state government can borrow from municipalities at will. On Prop 24, we were joined by Alameda and Santa Cruz counties (only) in our desire to tax business more. Everyone else seemed to have a pretty dim view of that idea.

Props 21 and 26 were about protecting the environment in some way or another, whether, in the former case, by taking more money from drivers to pay for state parks or, in the latter, by being able to continue assessing fees on polluting companies. In both cases, the liberal coastal cities were joined by Alpine county, home to lots of ski resorts and people who smoke pot but also own guns and drive four-wheelers. They like trees as much as we do, both the sticky and piney varieties, but they tend to not like gays.

Prop 25 was about common-sense breaking of government gridlock by allowing a simple majority to pass a budget, instead of the existing 2/3rds requirement, a Howard Jarvis victory when it was passed. The counties that voted against it are part of what I would call the "substantial distrust of government" bloc.

Prop 23 failed miserably. California will get to enforce our global warming law after all. Every now and then the state more or less joins together, and it's hard to qualify why a particular region voted a particular way. This is one of those cases.

I like the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, by the way. Not "like" as in "agree with", but "like" as in "admire from afar", the same way I "like" Richard M. Stallman but also think he can be a batshit crazy, miserable human being. There is something to be said for Singleness of Purpose. As a general rule, I tend to use the HJTA's recommendations as my voting guide, since I simply just do the opposite of whatever they recommend. They don't have a recommendation on everything, though, because they are truly obsessed with just one issue: taxes. There is something to be said for that.

On a local level, it is interesting how 42% of San Franciscans voted yes on Prop B, which would have changed how municipal employees pay for health insurance (among other things). It was vehemently opposed by just about every local politician, union, and newspaper. You would think it would have failed by more. The next time it is proposed, it will probably pass.

Public employees and their unions will bankrupt California if we don't change the current arrangement. The fact that their benefits are starting to go up for public referendum is a sign of the future, when I expect their contracts themselves to start to go up for vote. The idea of state bureaucrats as bargaining partners is ridiculous, when you consider how easy it is to buy them off with union money. Eventually the public will be the bargaining partner, and I imagine we'll be a bit more stingy since we foot the bill.

I like unions (a lot), but public employee unions have no skin in the game. A private sector union which squeezes its employer too hard loses even harder when that employer closes its doors and lays off all of its employees; there is an incentive to not bite off more than one can chew. A state/city/county, on the other hand, can always just raise taxes and pass the burden onto me. This is why people who work for the government have such gold-plated benefits and salaries; there is no counterposing force keeping these things within reasonable limits.

Unions are supposed to be revolutionary, anyway, but in America the social power of labor has all been diverted into clamoring for more bread and circuses for workers lucky enough to be represented by one. Away with the current crop of unions!

I like this place a lot. It's the most fucked up place I've lived, outside of Israel, with which it shares a similar climate and lack of water resources. The two could be confused for each other at times. I'm a lifer. Sometimes you just find yourself somewhere so magical and filled with such interesting people that you're willing to find a way to make it work in spite of all of its flaws. I've basically married a state with a bunch of oozing staph sores, full-blown AIDS, and leprosy, but I'm willing to see beyond that for the beauty inside. Love you, California :)

* I'm not registered with any party, but more often than not I tend to vote for Democrats.

Places that have weather

2010-10-25T02:32:07Z

There are places that have weather, and places that do not have weather.

Chicago is a place that has weather. The Bay Area does not. It has "seasons", insofar as there is both a foggy season and a rainy season, but it does not genuinely have weather.

I just walked from Boys Town to Old Town in the middle of a thunderstorm, with the sky lighting up every couple of seconds (accompanied by predictably loud booms) and intermittent bursts of heavy rain. People are walking around this very instant as if nothing remarkable is occurring, save for the fact that it is precipitating and discharging electricity. Some of these people even have weather-appropriate clothing, which they take on and off as necessary. I can guarantee that none of them is tweeting about it.

My Twitter feed has been blowing up all day because of rain. Rain is a noteworthy event in San Francisco, despite the fact that it predictably occurs for several months every year. Word has it that there are blackouts and BART is fucked up. I imagine there are pileups on the 101 and 280, and Python developers are probably microwaving their socks. This shit catches you people by surprise every year, and it's barely weather. IT'S JUST RAIN. Move to Chicago for a season and watch the sky turn green, and water come down so hard it feels like it will dent your helmet. Pussies.

This test fails

2010-10-23T04:36:45Z

I guess they didn't have a result for "you will sit around in San Francisco coffee shops until your trust fund runs out".

Career Inventory Test Results

Extroversion	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	73%
Emotional Stability	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	33%
Orderliness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	23%
Altruism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	26%
Inquisitiveness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	63%

You are an Inventor, possible professions include - systems designer, venture capitalist, actor, journalist, investment broker, real estate agent, real estate developer, strategic planner, political manager, politician, special projects developer, literary agent, restaurant/bar owner, technical trainer, diversity manager, art director, personnel systems developer, computer analyst, logistics consultant, outplacement consultant, advertising creative director, radio/TV talk show host.

Take Free Career Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

ATTENTION

2010-10-08T21:31:58Z

21:24 <@solveew83> FIRST WE TAKE YOUR COOKIES
21:24 <@solveew83> THEN WE TAKE YOUR BUSINESS
21:24 <@solveew83> THEN WE TAKE YOUR WOMEN.
21:25 <@solveew83> BANTOWN

tehdely @ 2010-10-01T13:25:00

2010-10-01T20:25:32Z

This was a mistake.

Keep your racism out of the Castro, please

2010-06-28T20:22:35Z

The first real event of any sort that I attended when I moved to San Francisco was the Castro Halloween where 9 people were shot, leading to the end of officially-sponsored Halloween in the Castro. I left, by my estimate, about 5 minutes before the shooting, out of a mixture of boredom and concern that things were getting a bit too out of hand.

This Saturday I opted to avoid the "Pink Saturday" celebrations altogether. I've attended Pink Saturday in the past, and it definitely had its high points, but it was also marked by lots of public drunkenness and bad behavior. This year, my partner and I surveyed the scene on Church St. at 9 PM and chose to go up to Corona Heights and view the party from a distance, instead of heading into the thick of it. There was a full moon out and people were visibly intoxicated, bottles were being smashed, and things in general seemed headed towards a messy conclusion.

3 people were shot Saturday night, one of them fatally. I've witnessed, since then, something very similar to the fallout from the Halloween shootings; lots of people whinging about "bridge and tunnel" types ruining their good fun. By "bridge and tunnel", of course, we mean "young and African-American". Like the Halloween shooting, all of the parties involved were in fact from San Francisco, in this case from the Bayview neighborhood.

For those that may be unaware, Hunters Point/Bayview is a large neighborhood in a neglected corner of southeast San Francisco where you can find lots of superfund sites, air pollution, freeways, and low-income people of color. These people are San Franciscans, as much as we sometimes like to pretend that they aren't. They also like to enjoy themselves, sometimes in neighborhoods other than their own. There is not much going on in the Bayview, a legacy of decades of disinvestment and neglect. Large street parties attract young people who like to party, some of whom are going to come from areas like the Bayview.

Some of these people will come to the Castro. There were plenty of them evident on Saturday and Sunday night. Most of them were enjoying themselves responsibly. Some of them were drunk. One bad apple pulled out a gun and ruined an entire evening. I refuse to use this shooting to tar the entire black community in San Francisco with some sort of culpability. I am, frankly, tired of the thinly-veiled racism which permeates not only the comments section of every local newspaper (the Chronicle being a particularly bad example) but also my Facebook friends feed.

The Castro does not belong to gay people, nor does it belong to privileged white people. I find it funny that until a young black man shoots another young black man dead, nobody has found a bone to pick with the tone of celebrations in years past, which has included plenty of drunken and foolish behavior on the part of white people. Do white people have an exclusive right to get fucked up in public without black people "crashing" their party? How about the queer people of color, who get caught in the middle every time this "us-vs-them" bullshit rears its ugly head? I saw more queer people of color at Pride this year than I ever have before. It warmed my fucking heart, and frankly it's what pride is about.

Short of canceling the celebration altogether (i.e. "I'm taking my toys and running"), or instituting a regime of racial profiling at future events to make sure that the "wrong people" feel unwelcome or afraid to "step out of line", we are going to have to live with the fact that young African-Americans (and other people of color) want to enjoy themselves at street parties in the Castro. We should not only live with this fact; we should embrace it. Most everyone I saw was happy to be having a good time, and knew exactly where they were having it. I encountered little to no hostility as an openly gay man in San Francisco's gay neighborhood, despite the presence of straight people, some of whom were nonwhite.

If we are going to play hosts, let's play good hosts. And if we don't want a recurrence of Saturday night's shooting, we may want to ask the San Francisco police department why they were so lax on the countless open-container violations, public urinations, and fights which led up to the night's unfortunate conclusion. We may also want to take a look at our own behavior, and ask why it's so acceptable to get absolutely blotto in public. Demand for drugs attracts drug dealers; it may come out that one or both parties in the shooting were involved in this illicit trade. It may also come out that it was simply a gang battle that took place outside of its usual turf. Or perhaps it's none of the above, and we need to stop jumping to conclusions before the jury is out. How many people would have guessed someone like Dave Clark was responsible for the rampage on cyclists at the beginning of the month?

Please take a breath.

On cheating death and/or serious injury

2010-06-08T05:43:16Z

Let me preface this by saying that I'm no stranger to injury, having had a few ER visits in the last few years, along with two ambulance rides. I seem to attract automobiles like a lightbulb attracts flies, although the trend tapered off in 2008. Here are three stories that make me feel unusually blessed. Make of them what you will.

I graduated from high school in 2001 and decided to defer enrollment in college for a year, having had absolutely no life skills to speak of. What made this possible was my sister's offer to move to New York and live with her, presumably with the intent that I would learn how to manage the basics of an urban existence (at which I utterly failed), or perhaps to distance myself from some habits and friends she found unsavory (at which she mostly succeeded, as long as I stayed in New York). We were supposed to drive out on September 9th, but I decided to go to a rave instead on the 8th, the aftereffects of which left me in no condition to face humanity or a long car ride, so she went by herself. My plan was to go find a job as a runner at NYMEX while I got on my feet. If it was anything like how I had found my previous runner job at the CME, this would have involved my going to the office of every firm I could find at the World Trade Center and dropping off a resume. Lucky me!

Two weeks ago I was breaking in my fabulously gay new surfboard at my favorite spot, Bolinas. After about 30 minutes of surfing alone in front of the channel, I decided that my board was insufficiently waxed and decided to head in and go put on a bit more. I got back into the water 20 minutes later, and had just started to paddle out when two other surfers (who had showed up in the interim) yelled "shark!" and we all went back in. From land, we watched a shark eat a baby seal for lunch in the precise spot where I'd been surfing, alone, only 30 minutes earlier. Lucky fucking me.

The first Wednesday of the month I attend a board meeting up on Cathedral Hill for a local service organization. It goes from about 7 PM to 9 PM. Normally, I like to follow this up by heading down to a spot in the Mission and joining some friends at a 10PM event. What makes this possible is my bicycle, and my route down to the Mission would take me down Gough, followed by a little jog across Market onto Valencia, then a left on 14th, then straight down Harrison to 24th. Done it many times. This particular Wednesday, I was feeling tired earlier in the day and decided to take MUNI to my board meeting and go straight home afterwards instead. That night, someone forgot to take his meds (or perhaps started taking the wrong ones) and went on a rampage, hitting four bicyclists, starting at about Harrison and 24th at 9:45 PM. Aren't I a lucky one?

Let's hope my luck doesn't run out.

IT DOES THIS WHENEVER IT'S TOLD

2010-06-01T05:47:36Z

05:33 <&Al> guys i just had to rescue a great big fat woman who fell into
            the gas mains excavation outside my house
05:34 <&Al> you have no idea how hard it was
05:34 <&Al> resisting the urge to stand over the edge of the hole and
            scream PUT THE FUCKING LOTION IN THE BASKET

Quiz Time!

2010-05-24T20:40:11Z

There was a time when I used to try to fake a blue-collar Chicago accent, in a desperate attempt to sound different and not so mundane. God's honest truth is that I was raised in an upper middle-class suburb and taught Midwestern Non-regional Diction from an early age.

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

Neutral. Not Northern, Southern, or Western, just American. Your national American identity is more important to you than your local identity, because you don't really have a local identity to begin with.

Take this quiz now - it's easy!

Smooth Rides

2010-05-10T21:31:08Z

Smooth Rides, originally uploaded by tehdely.

Beautiful, tiny morning @ Kelly's. Images courtesy of ob-kc.com, music courtesy of Boney James.

Look closely near the end for a brief cryptomail cameo.