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'Tis the season for top ten lists, and other unbearable retrospective articles about The Year That Was … and while I was rather tempted to write something along those lines, really, who needs to read another list of the best, or worst, or "most memorable" of anything?

Sure, we could rehash the US presidential election, and pat our liberal selves on the back for voting a black man into office (or curse those damn liberals for letting One Of Them into the fabled halls of power … whichever you prefer, I suppose). We could rehash the financial meltdown of Western Civilization. We could do one last retrospective of Bush's documented lies, or embarrassingly misspoken quotes, or 10 biggest crimes against humanity…

…or we could just not.

I know the whole "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it" thing. Hell, Washington ought to be thinking about that one right now … "Gee, look what happened in less than 10 years after we gutted the banking/investing legislation they put in place in the 1930s to prevent another Great Depression! We're headed for another Great Depression!"

But seriously … it's been between -35ºF and -40 for the last week, and in the last couple days it's dipped far enough below -50ºF that I suspect we may actually have hit -60ºF while I was sleeping. My dogs have suddenly mastered the art of completing their morning bathroom break in under two minutes. I haven't tried to start my truck in about a week. Even the folks up here are bitching about the insane fucking weather. Actually, that's about the only thing anyone's talking about.
[continued …]

So, I received two email comments today … I do love getting email comments, even though I rarely answer them. These two arriving on the same day though, I just thought they complimented each other so very well!

First I get this (which, on the grand scale of "hate mail", is actually kinda lame):

To which I would say: 1. I can't imagine why each sentence needs to be on it's own separate little line. 2. No, your email really wasn't entertaining at all, until I read the very next email in my inbox (I got a much better "hate mail" last week, iNvoking God's love and everything!). And, 3. I swear because I like to. It amuses me. And sometimes I feel it helps emphasize a point that really needs emphasis.

And the next letter in the ol' inbox was this:

To which I would say, 1. Thank you. And, 2. Maybe I'm not narcissistic enough to think that people would actually buy a book I wrote (first email's opinion aside), but as you're the second person to suggest it, I am once again giving it some thought. I always wanted to write a book rather like All the Trouble in The World by PJ O'Rourke, now that you mention it. I think I might be able to manage a collection of snarky socio-political essays. ;-)

Welcome to the United States of Alphabitch. That's right, fuckers. Around these parts, you don't get billions of dollars of taxpayer money handed to you on a silver platter, no strings attached. We know what "government BY the people, OF the people and FOR the people" means, you spendthirft fuckwads … it means the people aren't obligated to pay for your colossal fuckups unless there's something in it for them, and we're here to make sure there is.

Now, obviously it's not in the nation's best interest to let the economy crumble to bits and swirl down the shitter, and we understand that. Therefore it is somewhat important that we keep your thieving asses in business. However, it is in the nation's best interest that you stop being self-obsessed, psychopathic pirates about your business dealings, so with that in mind, here's F*cking C*nts' Official 10 Point Corporate Bailout Package:

5 things to do before you get a bailout check…

1. Every employee of any company that asks for a handout must agree to work at the same wage/benefit package as the company's lowest paid employee. CEO, CIO, CTO, COO … directors, officers, upper- middle- and lower-management … the whole fucking lot of them. The resulting difference in payroll expenses shall be deducted from the requested bailout amount, because your executives can obviously put that money to better use than re-tiling their Olympic-size indoor swimming pools every season, no? (Oh, and let's just specify, for the sake of being specific: no fucking bonuses … yes, I'm talking to you, financial industry!)
2. Anyone working for a company requesting a bailout who is found to have approved or accepted a raise or bonus payment within the previous five years (an international company does not go bankrupt overnight, you know), who was in a position to have any significant knowledge of the company's financial difficulties, must pay said funds back. These paybacks are also to be deducted from the total of any bailout funds. If this means your corporate officers need to sell all their posh vacation homes, so be it. They won't be able to afford property taxes on all of them with their new wages anyway.
3. Any company-held assets found to be unnecessary to the day-to-day operation of the core business (such as executive jets, retreat facilities, corporate gym/spa/resort memberships, etc.) shall be auctioned off prior to receipt of any bailout funds. And guess what? Any revenue from said auctions also gets deducted from any requested bailout funds.
4. After all this? You still want/need a bailout? OK, first we're going to do some math. Not including anyone who makes more than 5Xs as much as your lowest paid employee, we're going to figure out whether it'd be cheaper to put the remaining employees on unemployment or bailout your entire company. If unemployment is cheaper, you and your entire management team can go fuck yourselves. We'll take care of the little guys, and sell your company at auction to someone with some fucking business sense.
5. When all this penny pinching is said and done, if a bailout does indeed seem to be the cheapest way to keep an economy-anchoring company in business, the government will take shares of the company equal in value to the amount of bailout funds given (starting by taking all stock owned by company directors and officers, and proceeding down the remaining shareholder list sorted by quantity of stock held). The company must show a consistent profit for a period of 5 years before they're allowed to buy back any of those shares.

…and 5 things for after we've given you shit-tons of money

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OK, so apparently, since I upgraded WordPress to version 2.7, everyone's comments are showing up blank … wonderful, no? So, I'm working on figuring out why. Hopefully it's just an incompatible plugin, but whatever it is, I'm working on it. This will be fixed ASAP. I'm sure it's meant to be a feature, not a bug. heh. *indigestion*

…is humanity.

the big three

The financial meltdown continues, with the Big Three US automakers flying their executives to Washington DC in private corporate jets to beg for money.

To which I'd say, great! Start by flying home in a fucking coach class airline seat, knowing that's still better than your office staff can afford. Then prove your honest intentions by auctioning off your corporate jets. Move your corporate bigwigs' bloated asses, families and all, to normal-size houses somewhere in a neighborhood your mid-level employees' can afford. Let your disgraced trophy wives take your squalling, spoiled offspring to a normal public school for a change.

Take all that money, and put it in this nice "matching funds" account we've set up for you. Every dollar you deposit—without firing a sub-upper-management employee, or closing a factory, or otherwise fucking anyone who makes less than $100,000 a year—we'll match with federal bailout funds.

Oh, and that also means we get a 50% stake in the company, with dividends to be used to pay down the national debt. You'll never see a penny of profit from that half of the company until you're healthy enough to buy us out, fuckers.

the biggest ponzi scheme ever

And then Berni Ponzi oops, Madoff hits the headlines with one of the oldest scams in the book, the classic pyramid aka. Ponzi scam, writ large. Oh yeah, really goddamn large. As in $50 billion in potential losses. No kidding.

Now, I would find that insanely hilarious, since most of his investment clients-cum-victims were simply greedy rich people who clearly couldn't do with normal investment funds that came with proper legal records, investment insurance, and fancy things like that. This Bernie guy? Apparently his investment returns were out of this world. Not to be missed. People lined up to join Bernie's country club, just hoping to meet him and get in on the action.

The sad thing though? Just like the ridiculous sub-prime mortgage/mortgage-backed securities debacle and the US automakers crying poor, is that regular people got caught up in Madoff's schemes too. People lost their 401Ks because the idiot in charge of their retirement investments thought that dumping all the money into a single, poorly documented investment fund was a good way to go. People lost their jobs when the foundations they worked for made the same investment error. And now the SEC shrugs its shoulders and says, "Oops. I guess we should'a looked at that Madoff guy a little closer, eh?"
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Once again, Jay Smooth of illdoctrine.com says it best… Really, there is not much more to say on the subject of Obama's election, and except that I don't pledge to "sit at home and make more videos" (because the one time I tried it, oh lordy did I suck!), I would just like to say "me too":

Let me just open by saying I'm not defending Sarah Palin here. Really, if you ignore the background scenery in her "scandalous" turkey slaughtering interview (video embedded below the jump), it's entirely clear that the woman couldn't reason her way out of a paper bag. But fucking christ people, I've had it up to here (imagine me holding my hands six feet above my head, were it possible) with the hubub about her being interviewed in front of a holiday turkey butchering session.

The only people on the face of this earth who have ANY GODDAMN RIGHT to be shocked and offended by the background scenery of that fucking interview are devoted vegetarians who shudder in revulsion when they accidentally walk past the meat counter at the local grocery store. Bonus points to those folks who've ever picketed a KFC. The rest of you? Shut the fuck up. Tell me you've never eaten a turkey sandwich. Tell me there wasn't a fucking turkey on your table at Thanksgiving (for the Americans, obviously).

You know what I saw there? A far-too-rare opportunity for squeamish pussy-ass fucking Americans to catch a glimpse of where their precious, plastic-wrapped holiday "feasts" come from. Guess what folks? Your holiday turkeys aren't inanimate objects that were grown on trees or manufactured in a space-age poultry assembly plant. This isn't Restaurant at the End of The Universe, with genetically engineered livestock that comes to your table and recommends the best cuts off its own ass for your dinner.

Do some fucking research on how industrial poultry processing plants do things. Read about overworked employees swinging birds around by their heads so fucking hard they pull their spines out … and then laughing. Read about turkeys being kicked in the guts so hard their internal organs rupture.

Look up the AOL video promoting processing equipment that allows a plant to process 6500 birds per hour (bph). Do the math as to how fast those poor fucking things are being hustled to their death. Hell, just think about the implications of the phrase "poultry processing plant."

Consider that a lot of poultry is raised in cages so overcrowded, they'll fucking kill each other if their beaks and claws aren't cut off. Consider that a gross majority of commercially raised poultry never sees the light of day in their short, pathetic lives.

And if you don't have the time or interest to bother with Google, just watch the nice video of a Butterball processing plant, posted below… and go into your local store tomorrow, look at the freezers full of Butterballs, and realize that's what you're fucking looking at.
[continued …]

So after that last wingnut post, I've gotten reactions from friends ranging from, "What were you on?!" to "Are you OK?", and I figured a bit further explanation might be in order … I started writing this in a private email, but I figured it might do well here. And no, I'm not going to get more personal, I'm going to get much less personal, because that seems to work best for me. ;-)

Everyone seemed to not quite know what to make of the whole "schizotypal" thing, and so I'd just like to make it clear that I wasn't trying to come out of the closet as a crazy person (I've already done that elsewhere in the past. And I'm much better now, thank you. ;-) … the article mentioned in my previous post about the cognitive similarities between "creative" people and schizotypal personality types just got me thinking…

My basic theory of psychology is this: Psychology is not a science, but enough people display consistently similar enough traits, and react significantly similarly to various ways of dealing with those traits, they can be effectively grouped together for the purpose of dealing with one or another specific troublesome issue. That said, there is enough variance in human personality, experience and tolerance to both, it would be almost impossible to find anyone who fits entirely and perfectly into any of the APA's offically approved groups (aka diagnoses).

I actually got the link to one of the articles I mentioned in my last post from a site written by a woman diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, who makes a very convincing argument that BPD is a coping mechanism for exactly the sort of "over sensitive" personality type discussed in the article about creative people having lowered latent inhibition. I find it quite plausible that all non-organic (and even some organic) mental "disorders" are nothing more than that: maladaptive coping mechanisms, and varying personality types tend towards different coping mechanisms.

The biggest failing of psychology is assuming there is a standard of "normal" to which everyone ought to aspire, and refusing to deal with the fact that in life's big multiple choice test of sanity, "none of the above" and "some or all of the above" are just as common (and therefore "normal") as picking the "right" answer.
[continued …]

So, I don't get people. I mean, I can understand other people most of the time … if I got a large check every time I think something about another person, then tell myself, "No, that's ridiculous, you can't possibly be right, don't be so fucking arrogant," only to have my initial hunch confirmed, I'd be living very nicely now. But I don't get them most of the time. Or, translated to Colbert-speak, while my head may understand, my gut doesn't.

I've never ever ever felt even slightly in-sync with the great masses of humanity, and thanks to a couple of Science Daily articles I read today, I'm even more convinced than ever that I never will. From a couple of studies of "creative" people comes the not at all shocking news that such people are more likely to be nuts, and nutty-but-not-insane people exhibit brain activity patterns that may explain why they tend to be more creative than the average. (And yes, that does sound like I'm talking in circles, but it was two different studies after all.)

First up is a study from 2003 (Yeah, so it's not new. It's new to me.) suggesting that creative people can't MAKE THE VOICES SHUT UP … oh, wait, sorry. That's crazy people. Creative people however seem to have a big trait in common with psychotic people: Both groups have trouble filtering seemingly irrelevant input out of their conscious mind, leaving them with a whole lot more random shit rattling around in their heads. Or, in the words of the Science Daily writers:

…the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.

The headline puts it somewhat more eyecatchingly: Biological Basis For Creativity Linked To Mental Illness

Some other people did a nice study about weirdos and their brain activity patterns, and discovered that Odd Behavior And Creativity May Go Hand-in-Hand. Now, that is not, on its face, all that shocking. But they actually mapped out increased right-side activity in the brain in schizotypal personalities, as compared to 'normal' or fully schizophrenic folks, which suggests that such people have a better ability to utilize the differing capacities of both sides of their brains when approaching a problem … makes them more "creative" thinkers, one might say.
[continued …]

I would like to take a moment to thank the voters of America for proving to the rest of the world that we're not all brain-dead racist warmongers.

Soon-to-be-ex-President Bush might want to look at the election results this time and make a mental note: THIS is what a fucking mandate looks like.