Category Archives: Social comment

Typifying headlines

January 19, 2016 jkkblog Leave a comment

Whether or not I place faith in the media, I feel I need to know what most of them are saying. In most cases, I do not find it hard to imagine a sample headline message that–while perhaps never to be seen word for word–sums up what I expect from them.

Here are some of the places I read:

Fark: “Dragging junk over prosecuting attorneys’ table in courtroom trifecta now in play. Fark: all perps are pregnant females”

Marketwatch: “Dow squats, strains, groans to reach positive territory”

Coaches Hot Seat: “Give those OVERPAID underworked LAZY upper-case-shirking PUNCTUATION-DEPRIVED fools HELL JOHNNY CASH! Even though YOU HAVE BEEN DEAD since 2003!”

Accuweather: “WIND ADVISORY: there will be slight wind, everyone take cover immediately”

Al-Jazeera: “This is what news looks like when America is not special”

Tri-City Herald: “Contractors to trim Hanford jobs, as usual”

Centurylink: “Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot found, no, really”

Oregonian: “New restaurant boasts pizza crust one molecule thick, competition vows thinner crust”

BBC America: “Americans mostly arguing about guns”

RawStory: “Woman fights to wear colander on head on witness stand”

Ehowa: “New online ammo shop now offering free breast pics with purchase”

Nextdoor: “We stupidly let our cat get out, now we want you to help us find it before the coyotes do”

Salon: “This just in: no matter what it is, whatever you are currently doing is the worst and most racist, sexist, homophobic, immoral thing you could possibly do”

Seattle Times Huskies: “Here’s your recap of everything you already learned from harder working sites”

ODOT Tripcheck: “If you came here, you already know the roads suck right now”

EW: “EXCLUSIVE VIDEO FROM AWARD CEREMONIES: actress gains two ounces…or is it a BABY BUMP?”

Fidelity: “We’ve redesigned our whole website to make it so you’ll have to rediscover all the same old clunky features you know and loathe!”

Yahoo NCAA: “#1 team’s best player pulled over for DWI, status for Saturday’s game uncertain”

ESPN NCAA: “Scientific proof that the worst of anything in the SEC is superior to the best of anything else outside the SEC, because SEC”

Amazon: “What the bloody hell will it take to suck you into Prime? We shall not rest until we have the freedom to charge you an annual fee to buy things!”

Addicted to Quack: “Booo hooo hooooo! We experienced a slight setback of the type that every team experiences, and life as we know it is over!”

Angieslist: “No matter what your search results said, you don’t get shit from us unless you pay; and when you do, shit is what you get”

Social comment

Useful stuff I have learned, to pass on

December 24, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

If you are out of touch with people for decades, in many cases, it’s for a reason. And that’s okay. I have rekindled a few friendships of old, but just a few. As I see it, we rekindled them because they were worth it to us.

Until you start analyzing what you are told with an eye toward why you were told it in that way, you’ll just be doing as you are told.

Doing a flawless job is not profitable, so you should not expect it from contractors. To get a flawless job, you have to learn enough to do it to your own exacting standards.

If the contractor doesn’t get back to you about a job you want done, it means that his other work is easier money for him. Whether he doesn’t know how to solve your problem, or just thinks it’s an unpleasant job, or has too much work, your job just is not very important to him. That’s okay. Find someone who wants the work.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, except when dealing with people.

Your home inspector will always miss something really important. That is just how it is.

We spend ridiculous amounts of time contending with dumb situations in our living spaces. Many involve electric outlets that are blocked or hard to reach, cables in the way, stuff that we keep bumping into, or some other irritant. Fix the damn things. Especially if it has to do with electrical access. Extensions cords and power strips are too inexpensive for their lack to impact your comfort.

If you don’t learn very basic biology, chemistry, and physics: your food will spoil, your cleaning fluids will react oddly, and your projects simply will not work. And you will not understand why.

It’s not your imagination, nor is it paranoia. In many cases, they (whoever they are) really are as stupid as they seem. Or as evil, depending on the situation.

When government appoints a ‘czar,’ don’t expect anything. (They don’t even know that the proper term is ‘tsar.’ Also, last time I looked in a history book, being the tsar didn’t end all that well.) Appointing a czar means that government really has no idea what to do, and doesn’t think much can be done, but needs to make a gesture that is meant to signify taking the issue seriously.

A lot of people believe that you can solve problems by making laws. Laws are only as effective as compliance and enforcement. To lawmakers, society is a board, laws are a nail, and they are a hammer–and they will never see any other path. I told you they really were that stupid.

Smarter people than you and I have figured out how to make money off everything. Someone is always making money. If you refrain from enjoying life because you can’t stand that, you will waste life.

You don’t have to be immune to crime, including police crime. You just have to be an unattractive target.

Democracy is an illusion. There has never been a society run by anyone but the powerful. Even when people made determined efforts, it soon reverted back to oligarchy. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t be happy; it just means one should be realistic. One might hope for the powerful to be reasonable, less than totally greedy, and somewhat sensitive to the issues of those without power.

All revolutions replace the existing unpleasantness with a greater unpleasantness. That’s because the first people executed after a revolution are the idealists who truly believed, who must die so that the opportunists who smelled dominance and bandwagoned up can promptly pervert the entire cause they all supposedly fought for.

No for-profit entity behaves ethically for long except under the lash. The only reason our precious corporations are not currently in the sex slavery business is because they see no advantage in it. The only reason you are alive is because there is no corporation who thought your death was worth the risk and trouble. Ethics don’t factor, but expediency does.

If you find love, true love, give it all of yourself unto the grave. If it is not worth dying for, it is not true love.

If you are bright enough, you will eventually realize that much of your early education was designed for social control, not knowledge.

The greatest error males make is in fearing the rise of women’s strength. Women’s strength reaches out with affection and joy, if only the males will accept it and embrace it, and it would make their lives far better. Yet they decline.

This may explain why the enrollment at colleges is trending near 60% female. If that’s any guide, on a level academic playing field, they are brighter than we are. If we were smarter, we wouldn’t be afraid of equality.

The greatest error females make is giving away their power by caring too much that someone will say mean things to or about them. The woman who fully liberates herself just doesn’t give a fuck.

Most people, in the end, will follow and do as they are told.

Pay your debts and your bets, and no harm can come to you. There is no mercy upon a deadbeat or a welcher. If anyone ever has to remind you of a debt or a bet, and you feel no shame, I feel it on your behalf. And if you can’t bear that, do not borrow and do not bet.

Your influence with the young is in proportion to the degree that they believe you support and encourage them. The second they lose that faith, your influence is over. Thus, if you are old, always encourage the dreams of youth.

If you’re young, and have a dream, get your ass in gear soon. You will put up with things at your age, in pursuit of a dream, that you will not put up with at forty, so this is the time. You can’t really lose, long term. If you attain the dream, great. But even if you do not, in the process, you will learn great skills and have great stories to tell, so do it. Close this browser and go do it.

Not everyone has a story to tell; not everyone should write. I’ve read too much dull narcissism to think otherwise.

You can use Murphy’s Law to make your life better. For example, suppose you get in an accident. Sucks! Now, one of two things will tend to happen next. You will either pump up your coverage in some area–in which case you will turn out not to need it, and end up throwing away money–or you will not, and will likely soon get in another accident in which you wished you had the coverage. See how great this is? Wasting money is bad, but not nearly as bad as a crushed front end. I follow this principle in much of my life.

If there is a word you might dump from your active vocabulary, it is “should.” Most statements involving it are statements of idealism (laudable but unrealistic) or impotence (because what ‘they’ should do is immaterial, since they won’t). Better to deal in will and won’t, can and can’t, does and does not.

The trouble with conspiracy theories is that so many of them are so dumb that it obscures the real ones, since ‘conspiracy theorist’ has become a term of scorn. Truth: a few are valid, many are just stupid.

Beware of people who just repeat bromides as if they represent received truth. If you stop to dissect them, most fall apart. If you’ve heard the same argument-ending statement dozens of times, you should be dismantling it to find its flaws.

As people age, and contemplate an end of life that probably involves cancer and dementia and incontinence, they may just stop giving a damn. If you wonder why elders can be so tactless and blunt, it’s because they have less to fear. No one’s reaction can pain them as much as getting up in the morning.

The woman’s world is a world of change, far more so than the man’s world. This accounts for very many things. The failure of both genders to understand each other–or the impulse to take gender generalizations too far, thus departing from reality–is at the root of much conflict. You do not have to share your opposite number’s world view in order to rate it as equal in merit and good sense to your own, thus worth your respect. You have but to deem it rational when viewed through the eyes of its holder.

Most apologies are requests for enablement of future bad behavior. Few represent sincere pledges to change. If refused, the latter will understand, since the latter are taking responsibility. The former will always become angry or dismissive, because they hate like hell when their little game doesn’t work as designed. You were the vending machine, they deposited their quarters, and they didn’t get the soda, so they kick the machine. The worst legacy of religion is the insane notion that everyone must always be forgiven. No! It must not! Forgiveness must be earned or it doesn’t amount to a thermos of urine.

The lower one’s self-respect, the worse the quality of people one attracts. If you are trying to build self-respect, you know you are succeeding because the users and parasites will dump you, telling you that you’ve changed (and it’s not meant as a compliment).

If you’re blessed with a good sense of humor, be glad, and use it. “She made waitresses smile and grocery checkers laugh” would be a wonderful epitaph.

A society that cossets children and protects them from all risk also protects them from all learning and maturation.

We have few social problems that could not be remedied by impartial, universal early education that worked just as well in the ghetto and the village as in the wealthy suburb. However, it would take twenty years of sustained effort for the gains to show. Therefore, it won’t happen until we Americans develop a national patience and perseverance toward long-term goals. I do not see us doing that.

Quality-oriented people who take pride in doing it exactly right will always draw the ridicule of those who just slap it together. That’s just how it is. You can learn a lot about someone by watching how carefully they turn their vehicle into the correct lane, or come around a corner without shortcutting through the oncoming lane, or measuring ingredients.

If you live long enough, you will get to watch society fabricate a false version of the history you lived.

The time to be nervous about markets is when you can see that people are doing something dumb. Minimum-wagers talking about winning in the market? 1987. Venture caps throwing sacks of money at anyone with a ponytail and a domain name? 1999. Banks lending money to people who obviously couldn’t pay it back? 2008.

Spending is not the problem. Waste is the problem.

A lot of common questions are fairly stupid, such as ‘what is the meaning of life?’ The meaning of your life may differ from mine, for example. You would be so much better choosing a worthy meaning for your own life and following it.

When elders tell you how much better the old days were, ask them how they liked their three TV channels on their black and white TVs, their party lines, their nuclear drills in school, and their 25c/minute long distance calls. Also ask them about the joy of the library card catalog over Google, major cities with the air quality of Beijing, conscription, and not being able to plug in multiple phones (or move the one you had; it was hard wired). Some things were better, yes, but some were much worse. Did you have to type all your college papers three times on an electric typewriter? No? Be glad. I did. Every single one.

If everything happens for a reason, then someone explain to me what could have been the reason behind the Holocaust. And if everything is a divine plan, explain to me why I’d give homage to an entity who planned the Holocaust.

Want to get smarter? Learn to spot when people are conflating several questions into one. A lot of simple-sounding questions really need to be broken apart in order to answer them sensibly.

Also, look out for words that have different valid meanings from different mouths. For example, ‘respect.’ There is a shading of respect that includes fear. There is a shading of it that includes love. There is a shading that includes a certain admiration without affection, often for a skill or personal quality. I respect the police, for example, in that they can ruin my life or kill me outright. I respect my wife in that I hold her morality, skills, and personality in such high regard that I desire no other woman as my special partner. I respect the skill and creativity of a renowned artist, even though I have no idea what people are seeing that I cannot see. Thus, if you let someone tell you what respect means in simplistic form, you surrender the narrative and permit them to impose their own narrow definition on you. A number of words are this way.

If people’s opening approach to you is ‘give to me,’ might ask them: “Any plans to give me anything in return?” Usually, they don’t. Me, I prefer to give unasked, in which case it was my choice, and I don’t feel that question roiling about inside.

Discussion is too precious to cast its pearls before the swine of conversational terrorism. The worst kind are those who misrepresent what you said, thus always forcing you to backtrack and reclarify. I just don’t talk to them.

There’s usually a lot of social pressure to whine about the weather. I suggest resisting it, and bearing up as tough as one can.

You are not required to be your relatives’ enabler of bad behavior. That brother-in-law who’s a drunken racist? The other one who’s a deceitful gaslighter? You are not required to make nice with them. You can choose to, but if you do, you are choosing pain. For what gain?

In family situations, it is very hard to change perceptions because all the old roles and viewpoints are like comfortable grooves into which everything falls. Take it from someone who refused to run in his designated groove.

The doctors are just people. They are people who, in most cases, went through a protracted and hellish initiation process. Sometimes, they just don’t know the answer. If you ever find one who has the integrity to admit it, you’ve found one of the good ones.

Don’t get so hung up on a tax advantage that you forget what it cost you. When we paid down our mortgage, more than one person sounded astonished that I would willingly pass up the mortgage interest deduction. The deduction’s tax benefit was far less than the saved mortgage interest would have cost! Furthermore, they didn’t even consider that maybe our deduction didn’t exceed the standard deduction. There’s a lot of really bad financial advice out there.

Court is pretty much set up so that the winners lose and the losers lose more. Better to arrange life so as to stay away from court.

Happy holidays to all the dear and faithful readers of the ‘Lancer. I have appreciated your time and attention in 2015 and before, and I hope this blog will continue to provide you with interesting content going forward.

Social comment

The question beggars

December 16, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

Most people these days who are all ideology and no practical sense (the majority of Americans paying attention to politics or world affairs) fit into this category. Whatever their passionate pet issues, in most cases those issues’ edifices rest upon unproven (perhaps unprovable) foundations.

They are the question beggars.

‘To beg the question’ is a phrase whose meaning many people mistake for ‘to suggest/imply/demand/ask the question.’ That’s incorrect, and someone cares enough about this to have created an educational webpage on the topic. What it really means, borrowed from that website and quoted with gratitude:

“Begging the question” is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.

So. We see a lot of this tendency to assume something is self-evident, when in fact it isn’t. If pundits repeat this something often enough, they hammer it into the popular mental canon of fact. The audience will come to assume that a given statement is the proven, fundamental fact, rather than a simple unsupported assertion. Another term for this is ‘propaganda.’ Joseph Goebbels produced it very effectively for the Third Reich. Nowadays it is about all we get, and it is about all most of us want. The question beggars, and those who propel them, have discovered two golden truths:

Very few people have time, skills or inclination to check all the facts behind every statement. David Irving got by for years on this, trying to paint Hitler and Nazi Germany in a less awful light than do the facts. He finally ended up in a lawsuit in which the court sicked a couple of real historians on his source material. Neither it nor his interpretation of it held up. And yet, believe it or not, Irving still has some surprisingly articulate partisans.

Very few people seem to believe that someone who sounds authoritative would engage in gross distortion. It amazes me, because I hear and read of so many people who claim not to believe most of what they hear and read. In the next moment, they will be citing it as gospel. And when you ask them what underlies their belief, they have nothing. “It is because it is.”

One finds question beggars in multiple ideological neighborhoods. When the question beggars hit the streets, it’s common to give their ideas cover in something that is socially unbearable to assail. Religion and patriotism are among the more common, but the bolder will venture forth into editing (typically distorting) history.

===

I drafted this around Thanksgiving 2013. It has sat in my drafts folder for over two years.

I think this bond has just reached maturity.

Investing, Religion, Social comment

Sitting by the window with my checkbook

December 13, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

One of my investment philosophies I call “sitting by the window with my checkbook.”

Imagine there’s a downtown building, not too tall for openable windows. It houses mostly investment people. They are rich, but are too small to do it like the big boys, and have the public cover their biggest losing bets. If they take a bath, they’re wiped out.

They’re taking baths today, and they’re jumping from the 8th floor window. They cannot face their families with the news that they are falling out of the upper middle class. They will have to sell the cabin. The children will have to go to public school. The eldest will have to start doing yard chores, because the gardener is too costly. They have become what Trump calls ‘losers.’

They mistook their wealth for their sense of self. It’s impaired, and they are fundamental cowards who panic rather than hunker down and toughen up. I like that. I plan to profit from their pain. I’m not making any money today off anyone who isn’t a coward.

I’ve watched a few cowards jump already this morning. I judge the markets by the number of jumpers. When that number rises, I get my checkbook, grab a seat by the window (but not in their way; they will run you over), and wait.

They’re all still done for. They are all having trouble selling their shares. In fact, the shares have not declined in value that much, and will recover in time, but all these men (no women are this stupid) think purely short-term. They have become losers in life, according to their own hypercapitalist, left-hand path world view and assessment of human value. They would have to get real jobs.

I wait for them by the window. I keep the window down when no one’s jumping, to slow them down long enough to talk. As each one comes to the sill, we have a conversation. It may go like this:

Me: “Hey. Before you jump, think about this. Those shares you paid $11/share for? I’ll give you $6/share for them.”

The jumper looks at me in angry moral outrage. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me! Why would I do that?”

“Well, you’re about to jump. If you find someone to buy them, there’ll be something to pass along to your family. If not, there won’t. Your call?”

“What kind of human being are you, to stop people on their way to this window and offer them bargain basement prices without trying to talk them out of jumping?”

“A smarter kind than you, apparently. You’re jumping and I’m buying. But if you don’t want to, feel free to jump. Another jumper will be along.”

“That is beyond evil. You don’t care about me.”

“Of course I don’t. That’s how this works. It’s how it worked for you until today. It’s not as evil as playing casino under rules that say you can’t lose. At least if I lose, I truly lose, and truly have to pay up. Or jump, if I’m afraid to face my consequences. If I were the jumper, you’d be happy to get a good deal from me before I jumped. Look in my eyes and you look into a mirror.”

“God! Okay, I’ll sell, you horrible bastard.”

Pleasant smile. “Price went down to $5.50.”

“You are insane!”

“$5.40. Deal or no deal?”

“Fine! Give me my $5.40! At least by jumping now, I never have to see your face again!” *leaps, screams, goes splat*

“True. Don’t care. Ah, another jumper. Hey, hold on just a sec, man. I don’t mind if you jump, but before you do, I’ll give you $5.25 for those shares…”

Evil? Yes, in the purely capitalistic, satanic sense of self-interested evil. Capitalism is the purest form of satanism, of left-hand path worship. In LHP worship, one takes what one can according to a few morals and one’s own self-interest and ability. There are reasons why the Judeo-Christian scriptures equate money with a big-ass demon, and say that one cannot worship their god and the demon at the same time.

It’s very amusing to me watching rich televangelists ask poor people for their money–and get it, up to nine figures of it. The televangelists are Anton Szandor LaVey’s wet dream of Satanic principles in action. If people are stupid enough to give them the money, take it, and live high on the hog! the old carny and bunco artist would say.

I’m not LHP, but I play one for the markets.

If I were truly that evil, I wouldn’t come out here and tell you how I do it.

If you think this requires six figures of disposable wealth, think again. Entry point is about $5000 of investable capital.

Interested?

=====

There’s a junk bond selloff. Junk bonds are bonds that pay high yields because they have low ratings, i.e., the chance they might fail is greater than infinitesimal.

When any selloff happens, it means people are very fearful. Buffett tells us to be greedy when people are fearful. Therefore, this morning, I am greedy.

What that means is that I’m shopping for closed-end junk bond fund shares. I find that this topic is eye-glazing for many people, so I am going with very short paras that won’t lose folks.

First, Sunday is a good day to do this, because the market is closed. Prices aren’t moving. If I make any decisions, I have all day to think about them, chicken out, whatever.

Mutual funds are pooled investments; in essence, you send them your money and they invest it for you.

Closed-end mutual funds are also pooled investments, except that they already got all the money, so when you buy the shares, you buy them from someone who wants to sell, at the market price.

All mutual funds have both a market price and a net asset value (NAV). NAV is what the fund’s actual investments (the bonds themselves) divide out to be worth, per share of the fund in existence. Market price is what you can actually buy or sell those same shares for.

With old school open-end funds, you have to pay NAV. With CEFs, they may trade (could also say: “market price may vary”) at a discount or premium to NAV.

I like discounts, the bigger the better. I especially like them when they come from people’s panic and irrational behavior, because I believe courage should always defeat terror. I am not only willing to make money from freakouts, I find it sardonically satisfying.

Since mutual funds must adjust their investment values to agree with the markets, and since the markets are affected by fear and panic (or euphoria, in its time), we can agree that the NAV incorporates fear into its price, right?

If we agree that fear is priced into the NAV, it follows that a discount to NAV means that said fear is priced into the fund’s shares a second time. It has to be.

Example: If the JKK closed-end fund holds securities that the market has pummeled down to a total NAV of $20/share, but you can buy JKK on the markets for $15/share, obviously the market is adding a second dose of fear. That dose is irrational. The markets already beat it up once.

It’s too bad there isn’t a CEF that invests purely in CEFs of junk bonds. We could get yet another level of fear pricing.

When you look at a yield, the % is meaningless without understanding how your payout money would be calculated if you bought it.

One buys CEFs mostly for yield, not growth. If they appreciate, that’s a bonus, and the best way to have a shot at that is to buy during fear.

That goal harmonizes with the goal of maximum yield, so it’s even greater reason to go full avarice at those times.

That has me updating my CEF shopping list. I might sell some and buy others.

I keep a list of CEFs. Now and then, I look them all up and note the NAV, the market price, the payout, how many of those payouts per year. All that is easy to discover.

From that, the list will calculate the annual yield at market price (this matters), yield at NAV (this is fantasy, since I can’t really buy it, but it helps me compare and gloat), and current premium or discount of market price relative to NAV (of reality to fantasy).

If I see a good chance for a great yield emerge from that list, I consider buying. If I still feel like buying on Monday, I make a note to place an order.

Of course, by then, the market rate will have fluctuated. Naturally, I am not satisfied with a ridiculous bargain. I hold all the leverage here and I’m going to insist on an even bigger discount. If no one will sell it to me for that, fine, no deal. No hard feelings.

Therefore, if I do buy on Monday, I’ll place an order at a price lower than the day’s lowest market price. It will be good until canceled (I’ll have it expire about a month out). Maybe it will reach that price and fill, today or in days to come. Maybe not.

The best deals are when people are jumping.

At first, they all lose more money. That’s fine. A few of the underlying junk bonds may even go bust. All of them won’t. And all the while, every month (in the case of most CEFs), they will send me my yield payout. For years.

Today, I’m checking to see if any of those payouts have dropped, and how they relate to the prices I might have to pay as I sit beside my window with my checkbook.

Days like this come less than once a year, so I’m taking a comfortable seat.

Social comment, Sports

What makes a Rotten.com bowl game?

December 3, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

Some of my close friends (those who will not feel their souls seared by even casual sports talk) know what I mean by the above usage. For the rest of you, I have to explain.

US college football’s Division I-A (they changed the name to something stupid a few years back, which I refuse to acknowledge; you all should realize that the privilege of naming is a sort of subtle tyranny to dictate how people will think, a principle well understood by marketing departments and news channels) is the top level of collegiate football play. It has upwards of 125 teams. For the past century or so, season’s end and the Christmas holidays have meant a number of additional games, called bowls. Some bowls have a century of tradition and history by now. Others have none, nothing.

Each year, as bowls happen or cease to happen or change names, the pecking order shifts. For example, suppose that in the BigMarketingSalezzzzzzzz.com Bowl, the bowl sponsors and NCAA have agreed that the 7th place team in the Big Ten Conference (which calls itself the B1G–see what they did there?–and has fourteen teams) will receive an invitation to the BigMarketingSalezzzzzzzz.com Bowl, held December 22 in a warm-weather city with a suitable stadium and seeking to clamor for national attention. Nearly no spectators will actually attend the game, a fact that the TV cameras will do their best to conceal. After a lackluster matchup between a 6-6 Big Ten team and a less prestigious conference’s #3 (again for example), attended by approximately seven people, BigMarketingSalezzzzzzz.com decides not to blow wads of cash sponsoring a bowl next year, and another Rotten.com bowl has come and gone unlamented.

How did I pick 6-6 as a record? Because the crony system made a rule: can’t be bowl-eligible with a losing record. What the crony system failed to do is to stop the proliferation of Rotten.com bowls. Now there are eighty, with just over 125 potential teams in I-A. Not enough are bowl-eligible. Some 5-7 teams will get invitations. Some will be fool enough to refuse them.

Rotten.com is by now just a bad memory. In its dubious heyday, it was the website where you’d find some of the ugliest stuff on the Internet. Beheading videos? They were the ghoul’s first draft choice. I wasn’t an enthusiast, but I knew what it was and how to avoid finding it. Well, comes the dot-com era, and the year 2000 or so, and numerous companies arise whose names are web domains. The first may have been the scrofulous Insight.com Bowl, but soon there were more, such as the unbearable GalleryFurniture.com Bowl. As that trend developed, I decided that the lowest of the bowl low would probably have to be a Rotten.com Bowl, presumably played someplace repulsive. Since there’s no evidence that Rotten.com was ever an actual business name, that’s why it was satire.

Where does the money come from, since hardly anyone attends most of the games? Even the bowls with proper names (Rose, Sugar, Cotton, etc.) have taken on sponsorships. I remember the first time I heard about a “Federal Express Orange Bowl,” and the difficulty with which I contained the sudden quease. The sponsors weren’t fundamentally bad; what was/is bad was the media’s fellation. Print, online, and broadcast media, with absolutely nothing to gain, were and are glad to help out a corporate buddy by including the sponsor name in all instances of coverage. Evidently a few did not play ball, which is why some companies who sponsored Rotten.com bowls just named the whole bowl after themselves. If it has no other name than the Enron Bowl, the media have nothing else to call it.

To this end, I propose the Rotten.comness Rating System (RcRS). Its goal is to rank the bowls from useless to useful. The more points a bowl game accumulates, the worse it is, the champion receiving the dubious honor of the Rotten.com name prefixed to its official title in full, just as if Rotten.com still fully existed, were a company, and had ever sponsored bowls at all (it didn’t, but if it had, it would have to receive some special consideration). Thus, you might have the “Rotten.com GoEvilStepMommy.com Bowl.”

This does not need to be complicated. Do note that the full result cannot be determined until the end of bowl season, since attendance figures are required. Award one point for each of the following that is true:

Has no history under the current name
Has three or less years’ history under the current name
Has ten or less years’ history under the current name
Has twenty or less years’ history under the current name
Name is also the name of a corporation
Name is a corporate name that sounds like a word but isn’t (e.g., Taligent, Verizon, Ensighten, Disadvantis)
Name is a corporate name that in no way indicates what the hell they do
Name is a web domain
Name is so blazingly stupid it beggars all common sense (limit one per year, otherwise this would be overused)
Invites no nationally ranked teams (top 25 in either major poll)
Invites a team with a losing record in conference play (count independents’ overall record as a conference record)
Invites a team with a losing record overall
Invites two teams with losing records (unlikely, but we’re getting there one of these years)
Invites only teams with losing records (the logical conclusion to this farce)
Invites the University of Idaho Vandals (whom I like, but they are a longtime punching bag whose very arrival in a bowl game would raise its Rotten.comness)
Halftime show includes Celine Dion or Justin Bieber
Halftime show includes Kardashians (one point per Kardashian)
Bowl is played on or before December 20th
Bowl is played on or before December 23rd
Bowl has actual attendance less than 10,000
Bowl has actual attendance less than 20,000

Subtract one point for each of the following that is true:

Bowl is named Cotton, Orange, Sugar, or Rose
Bowl has an amusing wardrobe malfunction at halftime show
Halftime show includes the Stanford or Rice marching band
Halftime show’s outrageous gag results in the marching band being banned from a venue
Bowl name is amusing (imagine a Post Cereals Bowl, or a Tide Bowl, or a High Times Bowl)
Invites a top ten team in either major poll
Invites Army or Navy (because these were powerhouses in days of yore, thus an invitation represents tradition)
Has no corporate sponsor’s branding (dream on)
Sponsor’s executives are under indictment during bowl season
Sponsor declares bankruptcy during bowl season

Some of the conditions may go unmet each year, but we must think both ahead and positive.

And there you go. If there is sufficient interest, I may even take time to compile the preliminary rankings once all the lineups are set, which should be a few days away.

Social comment

Official Oregon Relocation Questionnaire

November 6, 2015 jkkblog 2 Comments

I participate on a message board with regional forums covering most of the world. The Oregon and Washington forums in particular are full of bright-eyed folks who want to live in the Pacific Northwest. While I can understand that, they often have less than realistic explanations.

I originally drafted this as a post for the board’s Oregon forum, then decided I’d rather just share it with my own readership.

===

Official Oregon Relocation Information Form

Hi, we too are interested in moving to Oregon. We are drawn by the (check all that apply):

[ ] Great job market, so we have heard
[ ] Low cost of living, it just has to be
[ ] Excellent educational system (better than Mississippi)
[ ] Low property taxes (you should see California’s!)
[ ] Lack of sales tax
[ ] Beautiful scenery
[ ] Granola people
[ ] Trees (we are from Kansas)
[ ] Seismic activity
[ ] Great climate (we love [ ] rain [ ] sun)
[ ] Show ‘Portlandia’
[ ] Ability to have someone else pump our gas
[ ] Strange laws
[ ] Legal weed
[ ] Number of preppers
[ ] Bicycling
[ ] Sailboarding
[ ] Rajneeshees (we saw an old documentary)
[ ] Emptiness (we plan to live in south Malheur County)
[ ] Assisted suicide laws
[ ] Gay-friendly attitudes
[ ] Pockets of True Biblical Marriage outlook
[ ] Pendleton Roundup
[ ] Monsanto Roundup
[ ] Kicker
[ ] Punter
[ ] Long snapper
[ ] Other ________________________________

Our monthly housing budget is:

[ ] We plan to trade weed for it
[ ] $500
[ ] $750
[ ] $1000
[ ] Surely we can get a three-bedroom something for $1250
[ ] Under an overpass
[ ] We’re preppers, we plan to build our End Times fortress

Our children have the following special needs, for which we will want social services:

[ ] Autism
[ ] ADD
[ ] ADHD
[ ] Veganism
[ ] Lactose intolerance
[ ] Other child intolerance
[ ] Spina bifida
[ ] Attitude disabilities
[ ] Learning disabilities
[ ] ODD
[ ] SAD
[ ] Gaming addiction
[ ] Ketamine habit
[ ] Others (list all in this dinky space) __________________

We have the following number of pit bulls and other large dogs (and if you don’t like them, you suck):

[ ] 5
[ ] 6
[ ] 7
[ ] 8
[ ] 9
[ ] 10+, and if you falsely accuse our dog breed of being violent, we will have them rip you to shreds; they are sweet and loving and would never harm anyone

We are coming from:

[ ] California
[ ] Florida
[ ] Arizona
[ ] Texas
[ ] The East
[ ] A flat farmy state

We feel the following about soccer:

[ ] The beautiful game
[ ] Sport for communists
[ ] We think sports are stupid

We are very (check all that apply)…

[ ] liberal
[ ] conservative
[ ] tidy
[ ] slovenly
[ ] insular
[ ] outgoing
[ ] peppy
[ ] crabby
[ ] racist
[ ] guilty

…and would like to live only among our own kind.

In college football, we plan to root for:

[ ] The Ducks
[ ] The Beavers
[ ] The Vikings
[ ] Whoever is doing well
[ ] Our current team
[ ] The abolition of college sports, they suck

We simply must have:

[ ] Lots of green space
[ ] A view of mountains
[ ] A view of the ocean, or at least a river
[ ] A view of puddles, at least, for pete’s sake
[ ] All the things we have checked and specified

Will we be killed immediately for being:

[ ] From California?
[ ] Christian?
[ ] Conservative?
[ ] Gun nuts?
[ ] Screw you, I’m from Idaho, bring it hippies

We have heard that there is terrible gang violence and imminent danger. We can tolerate:

[ ] Not even a loose gum wrapper on the street
[ ] A little tailgating
[ ] Limited diversity
[ ] Petty theft
[ ] Regular gunfire
[ ] Regular automatic gunfire
[ ] All of it–we are a new gang looking for turf

We are willing to endure the following commute:

[ ] We expect to be able to live in our workplace
[ ] One minute
[ ] Five minutes
[ ] Ten minutes
[ ] Fifteen minutes
[ ] Surely there can’t be any commutes longer than fifteen minutes!

We are bringing the following savings to sustain us while we get established:

[ ] You’re kidding, I assume?
[ ] $50
[ ] $100
[ ] $500
[ ] $1000
[ ] Some stash
[ ] None needed, we raid dumpsters

So those are our needs and wants and hopes and dreams. Where should we live? Thank you!

===

Book reviews, Social comment

Recent read: Assholes*, a theory

October 13, 2015 jkkblog 4 Comments

No, that’s not for shock value. My dear and longtime friend Melissa recommended this book to me.

Melissa is not a constant or pushy TV, book, or movie recommender. She is an advanced thinker currently studying at an institution where ‘advanced thinker’ is a baseline expectation, and a hell of a nice lady. We disagree on a lot of things, but I respect her viewpoint.

Thus, when she recommended Assholes* to me, there were many possibilities, including ‘good read,’ ‘thoughtful discourse,’ and ‘broad hint.’ Such is our friendship that, had it been a broad hint, I would have valued the hint. I struggle in some ways with social situations; they do not come naturally to me. Now that I’ve read it, I’m glad to see it wasn’t a broad hint (or if it was, it sailed over my head), but an analysis of how to see and evaluate some of society’s bad actors. Including, at times, ourselves.

Prof. James proposes a straightforward definition of the Asshole. The Asshole considers him or herself exempt from social conventions (waiting in line, using a turn signal, tipping the waitress, taking the cell phone call outside the restaurant, taking the screaming baby outside the restaurant, holding the door so it doesn’t slam in the next person’s face). But motive matters: the Asshole is exempt because s/he is entitled to exemption. No other reason. The Asshole is special, and entitled to ignore the social contract, just by existing.

Thus, the person who acts like an Asshole once in a while on a bad day is not an Asshole, because most of the time that person knows and does better. The person who acts that way but knows it and seeks to dial it back is not an Asshole, because unrepentant privilege is part of the core definition. The Asshole does not self-examine, except perhaps to self-admire in a mirror.

Melissa and I had been engaged in a discussion of racial privilege that afternoon, and her intent may have been to illustrate how the privileged appear in the eyes of the unprivileged. I see the point. I can drive through most areas without risk of being pulled over for being black, since I’m not black. I get different and more favorable reactions in some situations, because I’m white. I probably got paid more because I was male. It represents a natural advantage. Because of that, goes the logic, I should seek to forgo this privilege. We don’t agree about the suitable reaction to that reality, but we agree that it exists and is unjust. The author brought the question up as it applies to his own favorite pastime, surfing. Evidently surfing has an accepted etiquette, and some people show no regard for it.

For me, nothing says Asshole like bad cell phone etiquette. You can be in the middle of a restaurant, having a conversation, and someone two booths away blares in with his outside voice. His cell phone rang. He would not want all of us to do that, but he is entitled, so he does it. He feels no remorse for behavior to which he is entitled. I do not understand how a group of people can gather around a meal table, or in a room together, and all stare down at electronic devices. When it happens, I just want to leave. Yet it does, and with increasing frequency, and evidently it’s the social consensus. Perhaps it is so much the social consensus that I’m being an Asshole by believing myself entitled to interaction when the expected behavior involves staring at a small rectangular communication and research tool. Who do I think I am, anyway? By not owning one, or wanting one, am I spitting on the social convention, making everyone around me uncomfortable as they post selfies, photograph their food, seek a video for the Daily Outrage, argue with strangers on Facebook, and manipulate the fall of multicolored candy pieces?

I liked the book. James’s style is readably articulate, the tone of a learned person not out to prove that to anyone. His examples will resonate with many. There’s only one issue I have with James’ stance, and it comes late in the book, where he has the discussion of how best to respond to the Asshole. His proposed solutions never involve the one I consider most obvious, which is to give the Asshole a consequence beyond “Hey, asshole, get to the back of the line.” I think James is right; if the Asshole were correctable, we would see evidence of the correction in progress. If there is no way to reform the Asshole, then the question is how we take least harm from him or her. James proposes selective assertion, which makes sense in that it’s not practical to challenge every instance, and we have to pick our spots. What he does not propose is selective assertion with real consequences, something that makes the Asshole actually suffer. Not to help correct the Asshole, but to warm the souls of the non-Assholes present.

Of course, not everyone is equipped to do this in safety. If the Asshole is trying to bull to the front of the line, and he’s built like an NFL lineman, the woman standing five feet high and weighing one hundred pounds only after a chocolate binge isn’t going to stop him. It could be risky for her. But what if, where possible, the Asshole gets a real consequence? ‘Vigilante justice,’ people will complain, as if that phrase is an automatic invalidation. Now and then it does happen, and we applaud. I think we need more of it, not less. While it doesn’t have to involve violence (could be as simple as a milky coffee thrown on the Asshole, or a bumper sticker that says “Certified Asshole” slapped onto a Mercedes taking up two parking spaces), I’m not opposed to the notion that it might now and then take tangible and painful form.

Some people really are Assholes, and now and then, someone will kick their asses. I’m in favor.

Social comment

Cosby allegations: breaking it down

September 24, 2015 jkkblog 2 Comments

The ‘Lancer doesn’t seek out too many polarizing social issues, but I think we’re about due for some societal self-honesty on this one. After watching a show in which about a dozen of the victims spoke their pieces, let’s make this simple.

First: some fifty women have come forward, telling tales similar enough to reveal a consistent drugging and assault modus operandi, distinct enough not to be copycat. Their messages are consistent and credible: it happened decades ago, no one would have believed me, I had no power. Okay. While I think we all agree two rapes are worse than one, and fifty are worse than forty-nine, the largest gap is between zero and one. One true account would be enough to render someone guilty, in moral fact if not in legal prosecution. Thus: you either believe that all fifty-plus stories are fabrications–not just most, but every last one–or you believe that at least one rape occurred, which would render the rapist a…well, a rapist. All of the stories I’ve heard sounded quite credible, whereas the notion that all of them are fabricated beggars believability. And even one would be quite bad enough, because one is far worse than zero. Zero is the only acceptable number of rapes.

Second: why is it hard for us to swallow? I’ll tell you why. Because Bill Cosby was very comforting and congenial to white America. I can’t speak for black America, but for us, the natural reaction was like that toward Shoeless Joe Jackson: “say it ain’t so!” We don’t want it to be true. Much shatters under its impact. It causes discomfort, plus embarrassment at a sense of having been sold a bill of goods. I put it to you this way: whatever discomfort it causes me, or any non-victim, pales before the discomfort suffered by a single victim. My discomfort is trivial. It wasn’t my trust that was shattered in person. It wasn’t my body that suffered violation. It wasn’t my psyche that spent decades trying to come to terms with sexual assault. Our system is criticized, and fairly, for kissing up to the victimizer and doing too little for the victim. I’m not going to play into that. Yes, the accusations have wrecked a once-adored legacy. They have not wrecked his personal fortune. Whatever discomfort he has suffered, which is far more than anything I have, likewise pales in comparison to that of a single victim. I’m going to reserve my compassion for the victims, and my respect for their choices to speak out.

Third: an accusation of sexual assault is a heinous thing. If false, well, I do not have the letters JD after my name, but I have a strong suspicion that an uttered false accusation falls into the category of ‘slander.’ If written, I believe it is called ‘libel.’ Either way, it might give rise to those words ‘irreparably damaged,’ involving such remedy as the law might allow. All right, suppose one is libeled, or slandered, or both. Suppose one also has unlimited wealth. If it were me, and the accusation were groundless calumny, and I could afford to buy justice, I’d sure as hell go to justice Costco and get a flatcart. I’d sue every last accuser for $10 plus a public retraction and apology, just to make the point that it wasn’t about crushing the accuser beyond the legal fees s/he incurred. (It would also seem to be far easier, goes the evil side of my mind, to persuade a jury to award that, and easier to collect than a large sum of money the individual did not have and I didn’t need.) With that much money, one could do such things. If the accusation were truly false, who would not seek one’s own vindicating day in court? My logic, again uninformed by study of the law but reasonably well informed by an understanding of tactical thought and dirty tricks, goes like this: the only reason I don’t go to court in that case is if I’m terrified of what would go on the record, and if I have some sense that the truth stated in open court would be the one thing I could do to make my situation worse. Better to depend upon the sound-bite attention span of the public, and wait for the media to order the public to care about fresher and more lurid stories.

That seems to have occurred.

One can add many arguments, and people already have, beginning with the one about what a false accuser would have to gain from exposing herself to all the public inquiry when the incidents in question are surely beyond the statutes of limitations. Many such arguments are valid, but none are needed. Based upon the foregoing alone, it makes no sense to disbelieve the women, the victims–the ones about whom we should care most. And if we believe them, they must be our priority. They deserve the support of honest men and women, but men in particular, because the number of male rapists dwarfs the number of female rapists. And if honest men want that to improve, we need to take our stand. It begins by choosing to believe victims’ statements, where our reason deems them credible. Anyone who doesn’t think that’s an important service to victims is welcome to find a victim and ask him or her if being believed (or disbelieved) makes a difference. You won’t have to ask two.

I’m not writing this for my friends who are survivors, because my viewpoint is no news to them. I’m writing this for people I may not know, who have never told a soul, who live with the pain in psychological jails they constructed to get them through life. They most need the support. And if the event didn’t actually happen, no one would build such a psychological jail and live within it. The descriptions of the impact ring true with those I have heard from others. The only reasonable conclusion is to believe them.

I’m not going to feel guilty for laughing at good comedy in the past, but I’ll just have to accept that good comedy doesn’t necessarily imply good character, nor does an acclaimed family sitcom.

I’m not laughing anymore.

Editing/writing life, Social comment, Sports

Ending my one remaining newspaper dependency

August 1, 2015 jkkblog Leave a comment

Warning: wandering blog entry. Those looking for a carefully structured persuasion attempt, well, that’s why this doesn’t cost the reader any money.

A couple of days ago, I deleted the RSS feed that used to give me Adam Jude’s Washington Husky football coverage via the Seattle Times, Seattle’s surviving daily mainstream paper. My link had shifted to collecting some other aggregation of Times headlines, it needed fixing, and figuring out the new RSS bookmark was more effort than their coverage was worth.

Since I do not actually buy a newspaper, and since I do my level best to block ads, refuse cookies, nerf scripts, and otherwise sidestep every effort the news media make to eke some benefit from my freeloading, one might fairly level some accusations at me:

I’m a freeloader.
I am contributing to the death of the hometown newspaper concept.
I’m probably in violation of their terms of service.

Even if all of those are just, I don’t care. Because:

Newspapers seem to get the vast majority of their content from wire services anyway. Most of it is the same words one could read anywhere. At no time do I ask them to cover anything. They choose what to cover, and are quite immune to any desires or non-desires on my part. I don’t think that becoming a paying customer would change that much. My business just isn’t that big a deal for them to lose, if they were to gain it to start with.

The newspaper is a corporation of some sort, thus it must do or be something exceptional to qualify for any sympathy from me. In fact, Jude’s efforts at covering Husky football are a major step downward from his predecessor Bob Condotta, one of the hardest working sportswriters in the business. I’m not sure if this speaks more to Jude’s work ethic or to the paper’s spreading his available hours thinner, but I’m not required to care. I care about reading the news concerning Husky football, and the hometown paper is no longer the best source. It might not be the third best. It was once the very best, no contest. If Condotta were still covering the Dawgs, I wouldn’t be so hasty.

That’s a business decision by the paper. My choice is also a business decision: the coverage wasn’t worth paying for before, and now it’s not worth the effort to avoid paying for. If they don’t want people to make choices on how they read the material, the executives are welcome to take down the website. I certainly have no right to object. No one forces them at bayonet point to post anything.

My issue is that the expectation of empathy seems to go only one way: from everyone to the consumer. I hate that in society:

“Give to me/do for me/let me get away with/make allowances for me.”

“And in return, you will what?”

“Well…er…I’ll do the work I am paid to do.”

“Those are the key words: you get paid to do that. You are not owed more. If you want more compensation, that’s between you and your employer.”

It gets old, this business of people and institutions asking me to care about their problems without proposing to care about mine. “Give to me” is getting old. I like reciprocity. I care about my neighbors’ feelings because they care about mine. I care about letting people merge on the highway because I am often allowed to merge, and it feels like participation in a practice of cordial kindness. I care about my clients because I respect them, and because they pay me to offer them my very best. I’m not entitled to ask for extras from them. I quote a price, I am or will be paid, and that is all the compensation I have any right to request. Sure, it’s nice to get a complimentary signed copy of the finished book, but they aren’t obligated, and I have no right to guilt them about it. If it was that important to me, I should have negotiated it as part of my compensation. It’s nice to be print-credited, but the same logic applies. They aren’t under any obligation to do that unless we negotiate it. Of course, if I have done my work well, I won’t have to request it of them. That is purely on me, to leave them feeling warmly toward me and that they received better value than they anticipated. Good service leaves a client feeling expansive and generous-spirited. And it’s not up to the client to tell me how to do that. I’m presenting myself as the knowledge source. It’s up to me to figure out how to give the best service that is in my power.

I don’t have any evidence that the print news media see it that way, though I am sure there are exceptions.

I do not regard any lengthy, fine-print Terms of Service as morally binding. Want me to regard them as morally binding? Stop making them so long that no one will read them. Stop making the print so fine that they are burdensome to read. Start making them concise and straightforward. Stop sneaking really unpalatable clauses in around page four. Do it in 200 plain English words. Surely you have an editor around there someplace, what with being a newspaper and all.

I find it amazing that people have acquiesced to the statement ‘use of this site constitutes acceptance of these terms.’ It may hold up in court, because that works out well for lawyers (the more complex that legal matters are made, the more often the citizen requires a paid escort to navigate them), but since there’s no enforcement to speak of, I don’t care. If you don’t want me to look at it, don’t post it online. I won’t plagiarize you, of course, because that is against my own ethics, but neither will I just endorse that the site owner has the right to put up ten pages of legalese and consider me morally obligated to respect it. I don’t. If the site owner wants to put it behind a pay wall, fine. Then I have another business decision to make, just as they made theirs.

A good example is the New York Times. Most papers’ websites at least try to make you take cookies, or let all their scripts run. Some won’t work unless you take the cookies. The NYT, which seems to think it’s special, requires a login. Fine. Their prerogative. If I can circumvent that, I will. I’m sure their TOS prohibit that, somewhere deep in the duodenal section, and I am sure that I simply don’t care. If I can’t, that’s fine too. They aren’t that special to me.

Perhaps the biggest reason to give up on the hometown paper’s coverage of my alma mater, though, is that its coverage isn’t as good as what the amateurs are providing. All that cachet, all those resources, and still the amateurs are clobbering them. And I mean clobbering, too. The amateur coverage is prompter, more complete, more interesting, and at least as dependable. It has its homerist moments, but it has always been the consumer’s duty to read critically. Just because hardly anyone seems to bother doing so lately doesn’t relieve each of us of the duty.

What could the newspaper industry have done to avoid this decline? I don’t have the answer. They’re the media professionals, not me. But I can tell them that guilt trips and worsening coverage definitely aren’t the way to go. Is it too bad? Yeah, but it’s not as if this is bucking the trend. Our mainstream TV news is a sad joke. The main grownup world news source available to me is a channel out of Qatar, for gods’ sakes, or one out of the UK.

Of course, if I disable features, I can’t be annoyed with a site for not working as designed. So I’m not. But that’s not what happened here. The Times simply changed its RSS feeds, and it wasn’t worth the effort to fix them.

So I probably won’t be checking out the Times‘ Husky football coverage this season much. And that’s all right.

We’re strapping in for a rough season anyway, it seems. I have a feeling that reading some of the coverage will feel self-laceratory. But I’m a college football fan, and hope springs long-lived if not eternal, and I admit it: I can’t wait for the opening kickoff.

Official Oregon Relocation Information Form

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.