Unablog

Joe Stack, the guy who crashed his plane into a building in Austin, Texas, is now being accused in death of being both a Tea Partier AND a liberal.

There was a Facebook group (gone already), lauding him as a hero. And a patriot.

I have skimmed his manifesto, or whatever you want to call it. It’s no Unabomber screed, but it’s close.

He was mad at a lot of stuff, including the Catholic Church and the IRS. Mainly the IRS, because he was being taxed more than he wanted to be as an independent contractor.

In his “manifesto” he described how he spent most of 1987 dealing with what he considered the unfairness of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, Section 1706. He spent $5000 of his own money doing… something. And a thousand hours, at least, making contact with figures of authority urging them to strike down this unjust provision.

He drove around L.A. (Many, I’m told, do.) Finally, he moved to Austin, Texas. Where work was scarce. And yet, there he was, he wrote, “…with a new marriage, a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention a new asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle.”

A piano? What? I thought he was broke! Who buys a piano when they’re not working? Somebody with an over-developed sense of entitlement maybe?

Here’s a conclusion from a San Francisco Examiner op-ed piece:

“Joe Stack was one of us.

At one time or another we've all been pushed, poked, prodded and pounded nearly into submission by the big government-corporatist-unionist establishment bosses.

Joe Stack was, and he snapped.”

The thing is this: He wasn’t one of us.

Why? Because he had an airplane.

I don’t have an airplane. Do you?

If I did have an airplane, I wouldn’t fly it into a building. I’d sell the fucking thing. And the fucking piano too.

We are the blog.

Haiti Relief

A bunch of musicians have banded together to make a song a video designed to spur relief for Haiti. That song? “We Are the World.” This was first recorded way back in 1985, to benefit famine relief in Africa. It’s great that Celine Dion, Josh Groban, and the gang can assemble themselves for a worthy cause. But isn’t it kind of insulting to offer up a second hand tune?Couldn’t somebody have written a new song for the event? I mean, how hard can it be?

Which will it be, boys? I’ll be over in the corner downloading porn.

From Mark Cuban’s blog:

“A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don’t rule forever. That’s the reality.

“Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes, highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions ‘dead and boring.’ The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

“Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.”

Daniel Lyons, in Newsweek January 24

“To many in Silicon Valley, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who ‘get it,’ and those who don't. The people who get it are the ones who understand that the Internet is the biggest thing that has ever happened in the history of the human race, a wave so huge and so powerful that the only way to cope with it is to jump on and hope to make money building a new world once the tsunami has laid waste to the old one.”

A typical tweet:

“I enjoy following twitter.com/iTod. He updates regularly with news about Fluid.app.”

A bad tweet:

(From a Luke Allnutt op/ed piece in the Christian Science Monitor)

“’Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you.’

“That was one of the text messages that fueled interreligious violence in central Nigeria earlier this month.”

Teenage Dancing

Last night, I was awakened by the Wee Bride, pushing me away from her aggressively. I had been forcing her off the bed with extreme gyrations and, I was told, trying to smother her with a pillow.

I have no excuse for these actions.

I was, however, dreaming that I was watching a video (actual videocassette, in the dream) called “Teenage Dancing.” It was a training video for older folks like me to teach us how to dance correctly For When the Teenagers Come Over. In my dream, I was awaiting these very teenagers, throngs in fact (awaiting them anxiously, I should add), and trying to master the subtle and minimalist dance moves that would allow them to permit me into their circle.

I deeply regret trying to murder my wife as part of this learning process. On the bright side, when the teenagers finally get here, I think I’m ready.

On the street

Getting off the bus and heading for the video store, I heard a voice behind me:

“… born in Africa. He’s an African citizen.”

Another voice, impatient: “Oh, come on!”

Unable to restrain myself, I said over my shoulder, “He was born in Hawaii!”

I was surprised to see that the doubter was a young black man. He looked like Huey Newton, actually. He said to me fiercely, “Wake up!”

I turned away, and walked on. A black birther! The hell…?

Twenty minutes later, I was walking away from the video store (with a P.D. James mystery, a Glenn Ford thriller, and O’HORTEN, a quirky Norwegian comedy – yes, that’s right, shut up).

Coming towards me on the sidewalk was a fifty-ish Rastafarian (complete with Bob Marley tee)... on a Segway. The hell…?

Who knew?

Robert Pattinson, inteviewed in DETAILS: "I really hate vaginas. I'm allergic to vagina.”

Washington Post has a head-scratcher!

On Sunday, reporters Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick had a story headlined, “Under Obama, More Targeted Killings Than Captures in Counterterrorism Efforts.”

The gist of the story was that when troops are confronted with a possibility of either capturing or killing “terrorists” in the field, we are now often choosing to blow them away. Yay us! I guess!

In the interest of fairness, the reporters include this paragraph:

“Republican critics, already scornful of limits placed on interrogation of the suspect in the Christmas Day bombing attempt, charge that the administration has been too reluctant to risk an international incident or a domestic lawsuit to capture senior terrorism figures alive and imprison them.”

So. Obama is soft on terrorism because he encourages the killing of terrorists. Wrap your head around that one, okay? I’ll be over in the corner downloading porn.