not falling down

Here are things that are great!

Work Made For Hire is a smart, clear, unbelievably valuable blog about negotiation and freelancing. If you have ever argued a point or signed a contract, you need to be reading it.

MANual of Style debuted at a perfect time for me, as I’m finally figuring out how to dress myself like a grownup–which is exactly what the blog is about. It’s written in a series of lessons, but it’s also interesting just as a window into trend versus classic in men’s clothing.

An author named Tony Buchsbaum proposed a ratings system for books because he was startled to think his thirteen-year-old son might read the words “cock” or (yes) “manpole.” I am curious as to how Tony Buchsbaum grew up without ever being thirteen himself (perhaps his parents considered it unlucky?), but it gets better: a thirteen-year-old named Emily takes his argument and, in two comments, completely dismantles it. It’s an Ebert-on-Schneider-level takedown.

Is the writer actually thirteen? Who knows (I don’t see any reason to doubt it), but she’s certainly much more familiar with the experience of being a teenager than the people who think they need to be sheltered from scary words. Ratings systems are harmful, and teenagers aren’t the only ones restricted by them.

Wait, wait, wait. The national Tea Party thing in Nashville only had an attendance of six hundred? Six hundred white people, many of whom wore costumes?

Guys, that isn’t national news. That is a mid-sized role-playing game convention.

I know I’m kind of harping on this, but I remain really upset and angry about the Citizens United decision, and it would appear I am not alone. Public Citizen and three other organizations have launched Free Speech for People, a campaign to fix the problem, constitutionally or otherwise. Even if you don’t feel like signing their petition or throwing some money at them, they’ve got a blog that I hope will be a good clearinghouse for news on the fight.

Uncle John has made the case that requiring full disclosure of corporate campaign spending would be a good compromise solution–that transparency would allow voters to simply turn away from candidates if they didn’t like where their money was coming from. I respect that opinion, but I really couldn’t disagree more.

We already have disclosure requirements that the decision didn’t affect, and they haven’t yet solved anything. Disclosure didn’t keep Max Baucus from getting the tiller on health care reform after taking four million dollars from the health care industry. It didn’t keep Mitch McConnell from taking three hundred thousand from coal and then, coincidentally, fighting to keep mine owners from having to measure mercury discharge. It’s already a shock when an entrenched politician manages to say a few stern words about a regressive, destructive industrial backer; actual voting that way is unheard of. Doesn’t that indicate our ingrained acceptance that our representatives’ ballots are already purchased?

About half the people who voted against Obama didn’t believe he was born in the United States. A quarter of those, in turn, believed that he was born in Hawaii, but that Hawaii was not a state. What does that mean? That people don’t vote on passive facts; they vote on what they hear and see. Money isn’t speech, it’s volume, and when you turn the volume up too high, it distorts.

Whoa, uh, remember that entry I wrote the other day about a 500% tax on corporate political contributions and campaign spending? Apparently Alan Grayson had the same idea. Like, exactly the same idea.

I sort of don’t think it will pass, especially with a figure as junior and divisive as Grayson sponsoring it, but hey! That’s pretty cool! There’s petition from Credo out there to show support for that and some others of his bills, which, y’know, is an Internet petition, but still.

Want a sneak peek at Grimm, the comic Erika and I are working on? She’s been posting pencils, and they look balls-out amazing.

So the Supreme Court made a very bad decision and now we have to deal with the consequences of this inexplicable belief that corporations have a pulse. This gives very rich people the ability to exercise unlimited political influence through partial human beings, using other people’s money. One would think we would have learned that lesson, but no! The right to free speech must be defended, where by “defended” I mean “contorted into hideous shapes.”

This is a nonpartisan issue, kids. No actual human beings are well served by infinite money being poured into politics, which is why even the people who get that money kept trying to make laws against it. If that’s like 535 heroin addicts trying to collectively decide whether to accept, y’know, a bunch of free heroin, then the Citizens United decision is effectively a mandatory heroin prescription that comes with an IV bag and drip stand. Except they’re not ruining their own lives with their addiction; they’re ruining ours.

The only way to legislatively overturn a Supreme Court decision is with a constitutional amendment. I’ve seen that proposed as one route forward, but not very convincingly. I think I have a better one, and what’s more, it’s one that the party (sort of) in power should be familiar with.

Tax campaign contributions and political spending. Tax the living fuck out of them. I’m talking five hundred, six hundred percent. Not on everything–just contributions from corporate general treasury funds, and just the ones that exceed the old McCain-Feingold limits. There’s plenty of precedent: we already do this to discourage behavior we consider legal but harmful, like smoking or self-employment. And one couldn’t very well argue that it restricts “free” “speech,” given that the production and purchase of political news or entertainment are already taxed in all kinds of ways. Want to make it popular? Promise to throw the money raised at the deficit or Social Security or tax breaks for plumbers. You don’t even have to actually do that, guys! Nobody will ever contribute enough to pay the tax unless they get caught cheating.

This is called an economic disincentive. Disincentives are about 80% of the reason government exists. It’s really, really past time we remembered how to create those and use them for good.

Sumana called me out on my 2007 goal-announcement entry and asked what the follow-up was for 2010-2012. First, HOW IS IT 2010 ALREADY. Second, I thought I’d already done an update on how those goals went, but I can’t find it if I did, so here we go:

Accomplished

• Get driver’s license

Failed

• Everything else

Okay, so at 28 I have managed to just reach a 16-year-old’s level of basic competence. Right on track! I got accepted to Clarion but couldn’t afford it, and GSP gently declined my teaching application: this indicates an unsurprising trend of nonprofit programs being happier to take my money than to give me more. I stopped running not long after I posted that entry in 2007, but I struggled into reasonable shape last summer and might be able to get there again now that I own an inhaler.

So. Let’s try this again.

My goals for 2010 are to script a graphic novel and run a half-marathon.

My goals for 2011 are to write a novel and publish a computer game.

My goal for 2012 is to be out of non-student-loan debt.

I can play hand percussion, in a sloppy autodidactic fashion, but I’ve never learned to play a normal drum set–I can’t handle a foot pedal or do fills or anything. I’d like to learn, but of course I don’t have anywhere to put a real kit, much less money to blow on a good one, and the noise would get me evicted. I’ve thought about getting an electronic one that I could plug headphones into, just to learn, but those cost even more and even a collapsible one would take up too much space.

The other night, squeezing into the living room, I finally realized that of course I do have an electronic drum kit. It’s the big, awkward drum-kit-shaped object plugged into my Xbox for Rock Band.

No, it’s not pressure-sensitive or anything, but it does have a practice mode and software designed specifically to help me play along to songs I like. I am an idiot. I need to buy a lesson book.

(Kara and I are creeping by the Portland train station in heavy traffic. I notice the beautifully gabled windows on its upper floor.)

Brendan: What do you think is up there?
Kara: Oh, offices.
Brendan: What?
Kara: Yeah, you can see in some of the windows. Look in that one–see, cubicle walls.
Brendan: That’s disappointing. I was hoping that, like… orphans lived inside.
Kara: I know!
Brendan: And had adventures.
Kara: I know EXACTLY what you mean.

Over on the Facebook feed, Stephen kindly took it upon himself to respond to my last post with 101 words that simultaneously satisfy all my plot-criteria:

Melinda looked down at her gun. “I had no idea this had so many bullets in it,” she yelled. “Turns out I’m pretty powerful, even though I am a woman.”

A pause for dramatic effect, then: “Now if I can just quit being so sad all the time, I can find out who had sex with all of my dogs.”

Melinda had thirty dogs.

Suddenly, her phone rang! It was her best friend who said, “I had sex with your other best friend yesterday!”

Dramatic pause. Then she (the best friend on the phone) said, “My desires are tearing us apart!!!!”

So that’s that, I guess. No more need to read stories! Thanks, other stories, you can go home now.