With DNC in mind, city bans carrying urine, feces

Poo and pee dominated a public hearing Monday on a new law that prohibits people from carrying certain items if they intend to use them for nefarious purposes.

What other purpose might there be for carrying these “products”? I’d say monger away. This is a law whose time has come!

Representatives from some of the groups planning large-scale protests during the DNC this month said the ordinance was unnecessary and accused city officials of fear mongering.

No Pun intended? 

“The intent of this ordinance is to try to smear protesters and make them look as if they are somehow criminal or somehow going to engage in some kind of gross conduct,” said Glenn Spagnuolo, an organizer with the Re- create 68 Alliance.

The ordinance makes it illegal to carry certain items, such as chains, padlocks, carabiners and other locking devices. It also prohibits the possession of noxious substances. Two of the most frequently used examples of a noxious substance are a bucket of urine and a “feces bomb.”

Police have to prove that people carrying such items intend to use them to block public access or emergency equipment or to thwart crowd control measures.

“Our intent for this bill is not about suppressing or chilling First Amendment rights,” he said.

“Young man!”

“Yes Officer?

” Just exactly what do you intend to do with that shit?”

“Exercise my first ammendment rights?”

“Put down the poop son. Before I get pissed!”

Is e-mail ruining your life? Delete … now

According to a report to be published in October by the New York-based research company Basex, unnecessary interruptions such as spam, other unnecessary e-mail and instant-messages take up 28 percent of the average knowledge worker’s day.

So if I spend another 28 percent of my day in the bathroom and another 40 percent blogging…wow! That’s like 106% of my day spent…(I’ll resist finishing that sentence).

Behind the e-mail backlash is a growing perception that — despite its convenience and everything positive it has brought to work and social situations — it is a monster that’s threatening to ruin our lives.

“It chases you,” said Natalie Firstenberg, a Los Angeles therapist who said the subject of e-mail is a frequent subject with her clients. “There are no business hours.”

Methinks her clients needed therapy before they got a smart phone (a misnomer if ever there was one). My friend Smithers has a more colorful moniker for these devices.

As legions of “knowledge workers” vacation this summer, the question of whether to take along the BlackBerry is more complicated than ever. Do, and the vacation might not be such a vacation after all. Don’t, and you’re likely to return to an in-box that takes hours to clear or, worse, the dreaded “your mailbox has exceeded its limits” message.

We covered this here and here. 

The Matrix can be our friend. Or our enemy. It’s only as smart or as menacing as we allow it to be.

Well…unless your boss hands you a crackberry on the company account and says “Don’t leave home without it.”

Then you’re pretty much screwed.

And some people (or their parents) are just plain stoopid unfortunate.

The nation’s youngsters will soon be headed back to school and making new friends in new classes, as well as catching up with old buddies – activities that these days typically spark a flurry of text-messaging, especially among teens and young adults. But the nation’s emergency physicians say they are seeing a dangerous trend that can go hand-in-hand with texting: a rise in injuries and deaths related to sending text messages at inappropriate times, such as while walking, driving, biking or rollerblading.

“In March, [we] were driving and saw a  woman in her twenties step off the curb and get struck square by a pickup truck,” said Dr. Matthew Lewin, MD, PhD, an emergency physician at University of California San Francisco Hospital in San Francisco. “She was unconscious and it appeared she’d suffered a massive brain injury. You could tell she saw the truck at the last moment because her cell phone was dropped right where she was struck just off the curb, and she was thrown about 20 or 30 feet.. It was horrifying. The truck stopped. The driver was devastated. I was amazed to hear she survived all the way to trauma center but died [in] the ER.”

So unless your boss superglues a Blackberry to your wrist, it behooves the wireless warrior to keep your wits about you and condition your fellow thumbinistas. Yesterday on a bike ride I received two phone calls from a client who didn’t leave a message then proceeded to text me:

“JR call me back ASAP. I have to talk to you.”

So I stopped what I was doing, which was biking (Yes, I pulled over), thinking maybe he had had a death in the family or something (I do insurance planning too) and called him only to find out he wanted me to confirm some rumor about one of my colleagues.

Sigh.

I told him that since he had texted me I thought his call was urgent and if it’s okay with him, could we please carry on this conversation later (or not at all).

I used to tell my clients that I return all phone calls within twenty four hours but if you email me “it’s like you sent me a letter – give me a couple days.”

That doesn’t really work any more. In fact, many of my clients see email as more urgent than a phone call, probably because they really don’t use the phone any more. The upside of this is that I in turn can get a lot more done and can communicate a lot more efficiently using email.

Expectations do have to be managed and in a service business such as mine, that must be done in a cordial but firm manner.

It cuts both ways. There’s no such thing as “email tag”, which is a good thing.

So for now, as long as I am able (though I rarely do) to disconnect, I am Master of My Domain on The Matrix; not the other way around.

I like to keep an open mind to other cultures, viewpoints and philosophies and recently listened to Pema Chödrön’s 3-CD set “Getting Unstuck” during my recent road trip to Milwaukee. It was recommended by a favorite client of mine.

Pema Chödrön (formerly known as Deirdre Blomfield-Brown) is an ordained Buddhist nun in the Tibetan vajrayana tradition, and a teacher in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa. The goal of her work is the ability to apply Buddhist teachings in everyday life.

I hate to boil the whole of Buddhism down to one principle, but my experience is limited to this CD set and the gist of the application of Buddhist teachings in everyday life is quite similar to a quote I cited in my last post at Roosh Five:

It isn’t the burdens of today that drive men mad, but rather regret over yesterday and the fear of tomorrow. Regret and fear are twin thieves who would rob us of today.

That is to say, my takeaway was learning to be “present” as Pema Chödrön puts it, and I thought the audio CD and another recent experience was relevant to the discussion in my previous “Matrix” post.

Now, watch as I turn this whole concept into a justification for the rental of a motorhead boy toy.

Friday, two colleagues and I rented Harleys (mine was actually a 1300cc Yamaha V-Star if you must know) and rode from downtown Minneapolis, headed East, and toured both sides of the Minnesota/Wisconsin border, Wisconsin side down to Pepin and back up the Minnesota side. Our tour terminated in Stillwater where we joined the festivities of Lumberjack Days, already in progress.

We put on a few hundred miles, stopping for whatever reason we saw fit; a beer, a view, or a funnel cloud (we think) over lake Pepin in Lake City.

The essence of riding a motorcycle is the freedom you feel. The disconnection. It’s not just the warm wind buffeting your face, the soundtrack of the big-cans and pipes, the copious torque available at the flick of a wrist or the 360-degree unimpeded view. It’s the fact that done right, a bike ride is on no one’s schedule but your own. One caveat: in the interest of self-preservation, your constant attention to the now is required. Hence, motorcycling requires you to be “present”; or else.

We had no radios, no CB’s, and our Swiss Army Personal Digital Assistants, with their chirps, buzzes and warbles fell on deaf ears buried in the depths of our saddle bags.

I observed one of my colleagues light a cigarette at a red light and smoke it behind the windscreen at highway speeds, but I have never once seen anyone talking on a cell phone or reading a newspaper or texting on a motorcycle. It’s against the laws of nature, I’m sure of it.

As such, we would go as much as a couple hours at a time without connection to the modern world, the fact that we were riding fuel-injected hogs with trip computers and electronic ignition, notwithstanding. Completely incommunicado.

In fact, we rarely even spoke to each other. It was us, the road, the sun and the aural interplay of the throaty rumble and crack of our pipes as we rode in staggered formation through the winding two-lane highways along the river and it’s bluffs that make Western Wisconsin and Southeastern Minnesota some of the most popular and scenic territory for bikers.

Calls went unanswered. Text messages failed to generate urgency. Emails stacked themselves neatly. Severe weather warnings went unheard. The stock market did what it does; just without us on this day.

And it was good.

The other day I was thinking about the ever-increasing forms of information and mental stimulation we are subjected to in the course of a day in America.

I wonder if the modern human species has lost its ability to truly relax and do nothing; and in doing so, can the species achieve a state of mental pause?

I would submit that in order to relax, by definition, we have to shut out all external inputs and information sources:

Television
Text Messaging
The Web
Chat
Satelite Radio
Email
Amber Alerts
Cell Phone
iPod

As unlikely as it is for someone to choose to do so, it is of course physically possible but that really isn’t the question is it? Can we stop thinking about what we are missing if we are not connected? If so, how long does it take the brain to adjust?

Has anyone gone on a vacation recently and actually disconnected completely? Did it work? Was it worth it?

Can we ever break free of The Matrix?

At his best, Michael Yon is among the best journalists around, in the classical sense of the term.

This piece – about an American, pseudonymously “Charlie” – journeying up the Irrawaddy River in defiance of the Burmese junta’s ban on foreigners after Cyclone Nargis, which killed hundreds of thousands and exposed the corruption, cruelty and incompetence of the Burmese government – hit me where I live.

The local people, even the monks, expressed open hatred for the government of Myanmar. The people wanted guns as badly as they wanted shelter. They had no idea what to do with the guns, yet Charlie was deeply moved by the robust character of these people, to whom democracy and freedom were not cynical conceits argued over coffee or crumpets, but ideals for which these simple denizens of the river yearned, believing deep in their hearts that the United States of America could bring change to this far-off corner of the world. They hoped that the U.S. would swoop in and bring justice to the Irrawaddy by deposing the Myanmar military regime. But these hopes would be dashed by real-politik and shifting geo-strategic priorities. Something about the universality of man’s desires occurred to Charlie, how, he thought, we all want the same things—freedom, dignity, a chance to make our own way in this world. Between village visits and dodging patrols he would sit quietly on the bow of the boat and ruminate under the same night sky full of stars that had witnessed men struggle through folly, fiasco, and victory in the pursuit of these very ideas.

This quote smacked me right in the gut when I read it. It resonated on so many levels, both low (this is why the Second Amendment is a right “of the people”, and don’t you ever forget it) and high – this is what America, and the small-d democratic ideal that founded us and, at our best, binds us together, means to those looking at us from outside who really know what it is not to be free. Ignore the eurotrash; douse the stench of Berkeley from your nose; take those breathless articles about America’s supposedly diminished stature in this world and wipe your bottom with them on the hottest day possible, too good for them as it is.

The quote sums up why we’re here.

Naturally, you need to read the whole thing.

Bob Collins at MPR sets just about the wrongest possible tone for any upcoming summer festivities:

[NYTimes “New Old Age” blogger Jen Gross] writes this week about a recent presentation that asked people when they wanted to die. Most, as you might expect, chose when they are “old.”

Then the presenter asked : When the room was not thrilled with cancer and then heart disease, they were told that they’d just chosen “dementia and frailty.”

“How many of you expect to die?” she asked.

…Dr. Lynn, who describes herself as an “old person in training,” offered three options to the room. Who would choose cancer as the way to go? Just a few. Chronic heart failure, or emphysema? A few more.”So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?” Dr. Lynn asked.

Dr. Lynn must be a riot at parties.

I, for one, choose “shot by a jealous husband when I’m 95”, thanks.

I was having an email discussion the other day with a friend who took exception to my continued criticism of Strib columnist Syl Jones.

To be fair (to Jones and to me), unlike most conservative commentators I’ve actually found reason to agree with some of Jones’ work – but it’s been a rare thing.  For starters, I’m desperately sick of his whole “ice people” slur – the whole Melanistic conceit that people of color are inherently emotionally and mentally healthier than white people because their sun-drenched past made them more open and less repressed they’ve “got no soul”, in effect.  Leaving aside the simple fact that no white commentator could get away with doing the same thing in reverse for any reason (assuming they’d want to – and what, indeed, is the point of slandering an entire race’s “soul”, anyway?), it’s a stupid conceit; anyone who can say that a strand of ethnic groups (linked only by skin color, for crying out loud) that produced Bach, Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Turner, Shakespeare, Tolstoii, Byron, Chekhov, Mahler, Ibsen, Hemingway and Ramone “has no soul” is pretty clearly deluded.

But I come neither to bury nor praise Syl Jones.

One of the remarks in my email exchange that grabbed me was the idea that my criticism of Jones was “white-guy-apologist stuff”.  Which prompted me to think – calling someone “white male”, to a fair chunk of our society, is taken as a sort of rhetorical trump card.  The twin involuntary sins of being Caucasian and male are taken as an explanation for the whole gamut of offenses; colonialism, the oppression of women, war, the despoiling of the environment, the alienation of the Industrial Revolution, bad awkward dancing.  Throw in Protestant Christianity (the dreaded White WASP male), and you add emotional rigidness and frigidity, homophobia, unsatisfying sex and patriarchalism.

It’s an “argument” (and I say argument in scare quotes, since there really is no discussion; “you’re a white guy” is tossed out like a rhetorical stun grenade, intended to knock out everyone in the room, without much backup plan as to what happens if it doesn’t work.  One left-leaning woman, on meeting me a few weeks ago and learning I was a conservative, snarked “a white male who’s a conservative.  There’s a surprise!”.  I chalk it up to my inherent restraint that I didn’t respond “a white, upper-middle-class, never-married, childless fortysomething professional woman that’s a DFLer?  Ibid!”) that I’ve pretty much seceded from.  What, indeed, is the point?  Can someone criticize, say, Syl Jones for his many individual misapprehensions of fact (which have nothing to do with anyone’s skin color), as well as the generalized caustic ugliness of constantly referring to “ice people” in his columns – itself “racist” by any rational measure – without having one’s own race dragged into it?

Or does a white male need to subcontract his own critique out to, say, a Hispanic lesbian ghostwriter for it to be valid?

Whatever.  I’m not the one to untangle this society’s angst about race, which started three centuries before any of my anscestors came to this country. Still, if I must be seen to engage in “white guy apologetics”, I’ll just get it out of the way right now.  Every society on this planet that must interact with other societies, from tribes in the New Guinea highlands barely removed from the Stone Age (many of whom have waged constant war on each other for millenia) to tribal clans in Central Asia and the American steppes (whose inherent discrimination against other clans is reflected in the very language the culture uses; the term for “human” in many indigenous languages around the world becomes more derogatory the farther removed from the home clan the subject is), to large, multiethnic societies throughout history.  And of all the thousands and thousands of such societies, from extended family tribes to globe-spanning empires, which ones have been the ones to even attempt to combat systematic racism, to make the genders equal, and to build societies that transcend such bigoties and hatreds?

I’m just saying.

I can’t begin to untangle the issue of race in this society, much less worldwide – partly because a fair chunk of this society’s punditry considers my opinion invalid (I’m a white guy, remember?), and partly because whatever my skin color, I’m not smart enough.  Nobody really is.  It’s something that’ll resolve itself despite the demigoguery and the rhetorical short-cuts and all the other baggage, eventually.  I  hope.  Maybe the demographers are right – the whole race issue will diffuse itself in another fifty generations, as all the races interbreed and the whole planet comes out looking tan.

So maybe the whole “white” part of the “white male” conceit will die off on its own, eventually.  But the “male” part?  That’s where this gets interesting.

Now, I am and remain the foremost feminist I know.  And it both troubles and amuses me to note that many of my fellow guys who call themselves “feminists” seem to feel that the only way for a guy to express “feminism” is to prostrate oneself before women and demand their forgiveness for the sins of ones forefathers, whatever they may have been and whenever they may have happened.

This, of course, is not only rubbish, it’s dangerous – to feminism.

I have a question.  Feel free to discuss it in the comment section.

Background:  This earth has tens of thousands of different societies and cultures.  Many of them – Islam being a key example – are intensely patriarchal (run by men).  However, many are very matriarchal, either behind the scenes (many Asian societies at the family and clan level) or quite overtly (many African cultures).

It’s a given (for most) that boys and girls are different, of course; in kindergarten, boys tend to be physical and spatial, while girls tend to be verbal and social.  Girls, stereotypically, play in groups and gossip about each other (and no, it’s neither a sexist stereotype nor a product of middle-class Western culture, so don’t go there); boys tend toward aggression (almost always stylized, although the feminization of the school system has arguably destroyed the socialization that taught boys to control that aggression, leading to ever-more real violence), physicality and a more-detailed conception of the physical world around them (recognized even in preschoolers as boys’ typically-greater conception of three-dimensional space compared to girls – which helps counterbalance girls’ greater verbal skills).

History’s great conquerors, of course, have all been males; Alexander, the Romans, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Ditka, the British (who were sometimes ruled by queens, but the queen ran a very patriarchal system) and so on.

Who have been the great rulers of matriarchal societies?   Who knows?

The theory I’ve heard – and I can’t remember when or from whom, sorry – is that matriarchal societies tend to be more inward-focused; it’s in matriarchal socities that it’s believed that “it takes a village to raise a child”; according to the theory, a matriarchal society behaves more or less like a group of girls will act; verbal, group-oriented, alternately supportive and undercutting.

Patriarchal societies, says the theory, act like boys; outward facing, rules-based, individualistic.

Most societies, of course, mix the two in some way or another, more or less.  And when two societies collide in conflict, it’s usually the patriarchal one that prevails (see:  the spread of intensely patriarchal Islam across heavily-matriarchal Africa).

Again – as I noted above, the only large, significant society in all of history that has seriously addressed the notion of equity among races, beliefs and genders is the patriarchal, Judeo-Christian western civilization.

Question:  If the Judeo-Christian West were a matriarchal society, would it have developed into small-l liberal democracies?  Or would they be recognizable to us today?  Would they be viable?

Discuss away.  Stupid comments (as judged by me and only me) will be excised.  Not mutilated; I want to stay on the subject, not on a bunch of tangents introduced by certain commenters’ peculiarities.

Oh, and anyone who replies “why does Mitch Berg hate women?” will earn a rhetorical wedgie.