It's come to my attention, as LiveJournal is slowly consumed by the Russian kleptocracy that's been busily spammenting every other entry here faster than I can delete them, that I don't really contribute anything here other than references to other things and comments on the few blogs that I read that are maintained here still.

It was a good ten years or so, tho.

Anyway, if you want to read what's up in my life on the Internets, it's mostly going on here and here.

My opinion of the new Transformers movie is still roughly concurrent with my production notes.

With permission, springheel_jack's response to the German Greens and the German government's decision, prompted by their increasing clout, to entirely eliminate nuclear power generation within 10 years:

"Politically I'm left, I'm Red. I'm not Green.

The reason I don't trust the Greens is that theirs is a paranoid worldview that sees industrial capitalism as not an unjust system but a huge conspiracy, out to poison their food and skin baby bunnies. Everyone who gets a livelihood from it on any level is Part Of It and just as evil as the capitalists who run it, as the system itself, and so they all deserve to suffer just as much. That's why the Greens will never do shit for the working classes. Their politics is based on a bourgeois neurosis and oriented toward a fantasy of arcadian purity, a fantasy of a deracinated and depopulated world. They are more comfortable with people in their own immaterial management caste - designers, advertisers, educators, technical people - than they are with people being ripped off and brutalized by the system that makes the Greens themselves prosper. The Green Party is a dream of the somnolent Western middle class. It is a narcissism.

This idea places essentialist attitudes and Cold War psychoses over the very real issues of sustainability about which Greens claim to be centrally concerned. (This goes doubly on the local level; upon their ascendancy to the governorship of Baden-Wurttemberg, they decided to cancel long-standing high-speed rail projects because it would result in the removal of trees near Stuttgart. They are the official monster bou'gie NIMBY party.)

This isn't a problem exclusive to Germany; theirs just shout the loudest. In both Canada and the United States there is the same irrationality combined with an absurd nativist undercurrent. Yet a leader of the Canadian Greens has the audacity to claim they "don't believe in ideology, we believe in just doing what's sensible." But by "what's sensible", they mean getting the public to pay for dowsing rods and water that remembers what was in it.

People who deny ideology have no business explaining what sensible is.

I believe a just and sustainable world is one of the most central struggles of our generation, but I don't know that I can call myself an environmentalist. (That I have such trouble with this makes Dick Cheney's claim of being "a pretty good environmentalist" all the sicker.) Is it really possible to be "bright green", or must things eventually cave to essentialism at some point? Essentialism isn't bright.

I want to spend a minute explaining a few things about responsible bikesharing.

Last night I planned to do some errands prior to getting on the bus. This morning I overslept and in order to do any of those errands at all I had to rush out the door on the way to catch my bus on K Street between 1st NE and North Capitol.

I normally borrow a bike from Capital Bikeshare to get from here to there. I've done it hundreds of times prior for various errands.

As it happened, the bus was very nearly leaving as I arrived. In a panic I parked the bike in the driveway and ran to the bus and asked my housemate to pick up the bike so that it was parked somewhere, anywhere, I really didn't care, it just needed to be docked.

He responded by telling me that I'm "a fucking moron" for doing this (...which, admittedly, yes, yes I was) and reporting the bike abandoned. So the likelihood of a $1000 fine for a lost or stolen Bixi bike had increased.

I then started calling or texting a number of friends to see if they could help with this, most of whom were at work, or school, or incapacitated or whatever. Finally, nauseous and at the verge of tears, I called Capital Bikeshare to tell them I had left a bike near an open lot and was unable to retrieve it, and that I needed someone to pick up the bike to prevent it from being stolen.

More than five hours later, they picked up the bike and docked it somewhere in Farragut. I was not billed, but my account was temporarily suspended. I was then called by one of the administrators of Capital Bikeshare who, in much more polite language, reiterated that I'm indeed a fucking moron, and given my contrition and certitude that this would never happen again, restored my account and set the billing for the previous rental to zero.

Anyway, don't do what I did. It is a horribly stupid thing. If you were even in my exact situation, renting a car or buying a ticket on the next bus is vastly less expensive than paying $1000 for a rental bike to be replaced. I'm glad it didn't happen to me, and I hope it never happens to you.

I am increasingly convinced that as far as SUP's investors are concerned, the amount of Russian spam infesting LiveJournal isn't a bug, it's a feature.

I don't have a lot to say about Fukushima, because I don't know what's happening. The closest thing I've seen to a coherent explanation is from springheel_jack, who has been keeping an exhaustive analysis under his fukushima tag. It's less visual than Rachel Maddow, who I think has been surprisingly good, but in greater depth and more regularly updated.

Meanwhile, enjoy "Nuclear Boy", TV Tokyo's attempt to explain the meltdown to small children by way of a very extended poop joke. Ganbatte!

I'm not sure why "tropical" and "paradise" would be in the same sentence, unless it was Honolulu or Singapore. Wait, does Hong Kong count as tropical?

In any case: money, clothing, iPod, laptop, phone.

Originally posted by lavenderfrost at ...WTF.

For some reason, I've been having a great deal of difficulty connecting to public, unencrypted wireless networks. This goes doubly for Megabus, where it seems most of the time either the electrical outlets work or the WiFi works but never both.

I don't know whether the problem lies on Megabus' end or mine. I run Ubuntu on my laptop and I'm told other users have had routine problems connecting to WiFi as well. But when I try to demonstrate this to other users, it seems to work well enough. I'm also told I need to Google it, but this is a catch-22 when I don't have reliable internet access. I'm not even sure what information I have seen about my problem actually pertains to my problem, or is addressing an ancillary but similar connection issue.

I mean, it recognizes that outside wireless networks exist. It spends several minutes connecting to a network at my request, all the while simultaneously claiming to be already connected to AND in the process of connecting to said network. But I can't actually use the internet while this is happening, and the "search" for the connectin ultimately fails. This even happens at Starbucks, and over the school network even when I'm standing right next to it. Is it me? What's going on?

I don't know that this is sufficient information, but I just don't know what's happening or who to ask for help anymore. It's getting in the way of my studies, especially during the two-hour-each-way downtimes of my daily bus ride. I'm running out of books and getting bored and unproductive. Ugh. Halp?

Still reading Nickel and Dimed on the way to and from school; man, it's an interesting book. Ehrenreich has expounded further on the chemistry of why "drug tests" (or at least piss tests) are meaningless for practically any drug other than pot, and thus are effectively either designed to punish marijuana users, serve as an act of security theater, or both:

A poster in the room... warns job applicants not to "waste your time or ours" if you've taken drugs within the last six weeks. If I had used cocaine or heroin there would be no problem, since these are water-soluble and wash out of the body in a couple of days. (LSD isn't even tested for.) But my indiscretion involved the only drug usually detectable by testing, marijuana, which is fat soluble and, I have read, can linger in the body for months. And what about the prescription drugs I've been taking...? What if Claritin-D, which gives you a nice little bounce, shows up as crystal meth? ...It rankles - at some deep personal, physical level - to know that the many engaging qualities I believe I have to offer - friendliness, reliability, willingness to learn - can all be trumped by my pee.

...The whole [piss test] venture, including drive-time and wait, has taken an hour and forty minutes, about what it took for the Wal*Mart test, and it occurs to me that one of the effects of drug testing is to limit worker mobility - maybe even one of the functions. Each potential new job requires (1)the application, (2)the interview, and (3)the drug test - which is something to ponder with gasoline running at [x] dollars a gallon, not to mention what you may have to pay for a babysitter. (125-135)

Also she describes the squalor and unique trans-cultural intrigues of a couple of Indian-owned independent weekly motels she's been staying at, which reminded me of the unique joys of working at a few in my own low-wage ignominy:

[The] owner's wife (or maybe she's the co-owner) goes around from room to room every morning with a cleaning cart, but her efforts show signs of deep depression or possibly attention-deficit disorder. Usually she remembers to replace the thin little towels which, even when clean, contain embedded hairs and smell like cooking grease, but there's nothing else, except maybe an abandoned rag or bottle of air freshener, to suggest that she's been through on her rounds. I picture an ad for a "traditional-minded, hardworking wife," a wedding in her natal village, then - plop - she's in Clearview, Minnesota, with a Desi husband who may or may not even speak her language, thousands of miles from family, a temple, a sari shop. (161)

This digression struck me as maybe a bit orientalist and dismissive of Minneapolis' diversity, tho the scenario didn't seem out of the realm of possibility, and honestly it all reminded me of my old manager (referred to here as DBBM) at the erstwhile fleabag on 29th and Pacific, and whether he ever managed to find a wife or was still giving the prostitutes upstairs reduced rent in exchange for favors-in-trade.