Bike Trailer Shopping!

Yes, that is a whole box of firewood strapped to the bike trailer.

Wait, you are coming to our housewarming party tonight, right?

Derrick is cooking in the kitchen. I got here super early, the rest of the guests will arrive in about an hour. What better opportunity to do some political blog reading?

I just subscribed to the Fire Dog Lake RSS feed today. I think I like… from today’s post, titled The Anti-Bush, Or Bush Lite?:

If Obama were a Democratic Dubya doppelganger, he would have made it clear from Day 1 that he would not settle for anything less than big wins on financial and healthcare reform, economic stimulus, and carbon emissions, and he would have used the presidential megaphone to make the case for them loudly and aggressively. He’d talk about his mandate from the American people, lean on Congress, accuse the Republicans of obstructionism, and refuse to sign any bill that was not to his liking. If he failed, so be it, but at least he’d go down swinging.

I find myself thinking to myself more and more, about Obama: I told you so (1, 2, 3, etc)

It would be funny if it weren’t so horrific.

Of course, there are other reasons, but this is probably the biggest one. It is nicely summed up in two paragraphs in the article Whirlpools and Turbulent Flows by Geoff Olson in the September/October issue of Adbusters:

David Suzuki is another skeptic and he offers a great anecdote about economic thinking. While at the University of British Columbia, Suzuki figured it would be a good idea to supplement his academic background in biology with an understanding of economics. During the first class, Suzuki’s instructor stood at the blackboard drawing lines in chalk to show the flow from the resource base into the market, with subsidiary industries adding value and creating wealth for investors.

Suzuki pointed to the side of the blackboard that was empty of equations, the resource base, and asked whether the calculations took into account the effect of human activity on the environment, the diminishing reserves and growing waste that Suzuki reasonably regarded as a cost mortgaged into the future. “That’s an externality,” the instructor responded drily. In other words, the environment is something external to the grand human workings of the market and not worth factoring in. Suzuki left the class on the spot.

I was at the protest against Chevron on Saturday in Richmond, CA, at the Richmond BART station and at the Chevron refinery. Among the various charges made on that day against Chevron:

• Chevron has been damaging the health of Richmond residents for decades, causing major problems like asthma.
• Chevron has been tasked by the city of Richmond with cleaning up the emissions from their refinery. Instead, they are also retrofitting their plant to be able to process dirtier crude.
• Use of fossil fuel is a huge part of the global warming problem. As one of the most profitable corporations in the world (~$24 billion last year), Chevron is a critical piece of this.
• Chevron has a hand in the death and exploitation of workers in oil-producing nations around the world, such as Burma
• Chevron is an active war profiteer, processing Iraqi oil that has been stolen from the people of Iraq

This long list of charges motivated many groups to coalesce against Chevron on Saturday.

The events of Saturday were disorganized and largely ineffectual. The day started off with a music, food, booths, etc, at the Richmond BART station parking lot. There was much singing, dancing, and overall merriment. Yes, a good time, but I don’t agree with the several people who said that we were celebrating our resistance. Guess what? Protests of this kind happen very infrequently, and when they do happen, they don’t last long, and everyone goes home afterward. That’s nothing to celebrate.

I was at the protest with the Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) “contingent,” which was basically nonexistent. From DASW, there was myself and two other people. Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) was also there, and I spent my time hanging out and marching with them.

We marched the 2.5 miles to the Chevron refinery where there were more speakers. Towards the end of the speakers, some commotion broke out. Thirteen courageous individuals took it upon themselves to rush around the side of the police line and into the Chevron parking lot with cleaning supplies. The cleaning supplies were to add a message of “we’re going to clean up Chevron” to their action. They then played dead in the Chevron parking lot, surrounded by cops. At this point, the mass of people moved over towards that side of the parking lot and people lined up behind the police tape. The tape eventually fell down and people inched forward a little bit. I was right up at the front, feeling more angry than scared. The cops were remarkably frightening. They were all armed with billy clubs that they had out and ready. Some had large tear gas guns. Most of the cops were absolutely huge men. There were probably about one hundred police officers in full riot gear, guarding the Chevron facilities.

A short while later, a reverend with the West County Toxics Coalition (the local folks who have been fighting Chevron for years) stepped forward closer to the police, and unable to provoke them by his advance, negotiated his arrest. At that point, Dr. Henry Clark, the leader of the West County Toxics Coalition, grabbed the bullhorn and told the crowd that we had accomplished what we had come for. This completely diffused the anger of the crowd, and the crowd slowly dispersed.

While this protest had some positive elements to it, I think it and most other protests misses the point. The point is that this isn’t a game. We shouldn’t be out just to feel good about ourselves, eat, drink, listen to music, and then go home. These issues are vitally important.

The anti-war movement and the environmental justice movement need to step up their games. These protests need to have increased seriousness and frequency. I am currently reaching out to like-minded individuals to get serious about accomplishing our goals. We are at a critical moment for our society, for us as individuals, for our communities, our country, and for the world. Let’s not mess around.

In trying to automatically upgrade Wordpress to 2.8.3, I got the following error: “Missing zlib extensions”

I am using apache 2.2.11 and FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE-p3.

To fix…
cd /usr/ports/archivers/php5-zlib
make install
apachectl restart

Voila…

Posted to fix the nonexistent Google results, hopefully.

Now that everyone and their dog is hooked up to the Internet, over-the-air radio stations don’t get much ear time, especially among my demographic of young tech workers living in big cities. But I still like it for its simplicity. You hit the power button and it is on. It also isn’t as completely overtaken with utter crap like television is.

Usually the only place that many people listen to the radio is in their car, that place where audio technology lags behind the home by a good ten years. Well, thankfully, I rarely drive. And I am not about to put ear buds in when I am on my bike. No, that wouldn’t be safe

When I was in New York City last summer for a week or so, my first Couch Surfing host had a radio in her bathroom that she kept on most of the day. I had an awesome Grundig radio sitting around that I wasn’t using, so in our new place I’ve put it to use in the bathroom.

So far I have been just listening to KQED, 88.5, San Francisco’s NPR station with some of its own local programming as well. I have been getting pretty frustrated with it lately, because of problems that I already knew existed. NPR is essentially a bull horn for the government’s propaganda machine, even though they do it while attempting to sound respectable by leaving out the yelling, the majority of ads, and the fancy sound effects and gimmicks. Surely, this is an improvement over corporate TV news, but what really matters is the substance of the broadcast, and in this area they are just as bad as corporate TV news.

In multiple mentions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have not heard talk of the civilian death toll, which is probably over a million combined, or the United States’ responsibility for this death toll. These things are by far the most important aspects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention the war in Pakistan, which gets no mention). The guests interviewed or quoted for NPR’s pieces on these wars are US, Iraqi, or Afghan government and military officials, never representing or discussing the will of the people of any of these countries.

I wonder what would happen if NPR brought on Dahr Jamail, Amy Goodman, or the unthinkable – the parent of one of the countless children that had been murdered by the US war machine.

I think I will be learning how to set the station favorites on my radio and trying out KPFA and KPOO.

Update: And, of course, Pirate Cat Radio, which is what inspired this post to begin with.

I realized yesterday, not for the first time, but maybe most poignantly so far, that I spend almost all of my waking hours consuming someone else’s ideas. Even in my downtime, I am often reading. In the many times per day when I have the opportunity to be occupied solely by my own thoughts, I often break out the iPhone to read emails, RSS items, or Twitter updates.

Even at work, I am implementing someone else’s software.

Sure, I do create my own things from time to time, but this creativity is not frequent enough and it is often small in scale. Posting a tweet, designing a system or network, discussing my ideas with someone… these are the kinds of things that are usually my only creative outlet.

Things I would like to do, just off the top of my mind, are blogging, journal writing, meditation, building a bike trailer, contributing to open-source software projects, and DJing.

Hopefully these thoughts of mine will mean more posts here

What is it about our culture that makes us care so much about one dead pop star, and so little about so many others? Why do you have to go back two hours on Twitter to get twenty mentions of the Uyghurs, but you only have to go back one minute (!) to get twenty mentions of Michael Jackson?

Twice today I counted the occurrences of the word “Jackson” on cnn.com. The first reading caught twenty-seven instances. The second reading caught twenty instances. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China/Uyghurs got one mention each at most, and all mentions were pushed down to a much less prominent part of the page.

Our mass media is broken in that it promotes insignificant stories and neglects extremely important stories. It is also broken in that the stories themselves are filled with propaganda. But the mass media isn’t the only thing that is broken. Our culture is broken in that, when people go to cnn.com and see it plastered with “MICHAELJACKSONMICHAELJACKSONMICHAELJACKSON” they don’t have a mental gag reflex that says, “What the hell is this? I came to this website to see the news, not this crap. Surely there is a better source of news. I am going to go look for that source right NOW.”

What is it that causes this blatant disregard for the rest of the world, the significant things that are occurring in this world, the horrible injustices that are being carried out, many of them in our names?

“How does it become a man to behave towards this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” – Thoreau

For the first time in my life, really, I am being smart with my money. There are many factors contributing to this, but I think the key recently has been frequent and small transfers to pay off debt and into savings.

What I have been doing is every few days I’ll log into my credit union’s website and look at my checking account balance. If I notice that I have breathing room, which I almost always have, then I’ll make a transfer into my savings or pay off some debt. Previously I would get paid and be overly ambitious on putting money into savings or paying off debt, and only do it once per month. So what would happen is I would run out of money in my checking and either have to put money on a credit card or empty out my savings again. Now what I have been doing is when I get paid, I still put in a larger amount of money. But this time it might be $125 to pay off debt and $125 in savings. Three days later I might log back in and put another $50 in savings. Getting close to the next paycheck I’ll see that I have plenty of money left in savings and maybe transfer out another $100 or $200.

This gives me a better idea at all times of how much I have. I also am good at thinking of the next several days of expenses but not good at thinking of a whole month’s expenses at once.

Also to prevent taking money out of savings I try to keep at least $200 in my checking account at all times. The only time when it should get this low, anyway, is right before my next paycheck. And anything that needs more money than this can easily wait an extra couple of days.

I’ve also made it much harder for myself to borrow money. Probably about a year ago I canceled my two credit cards, having paid them and another loan off with a debt consolidation loan. So I haven’t borrowed any new money in this time. I only have this and one other loan to pay off currently, the smaller of which should be paid off in the next two or three months.

By the time I get this smaller loan paid off, I should also be pretty close to having three months of living expenses in savings, which is my short-term goal. In this case, any extra money I have will be able to go into my debt consolidation loan, which will make it easy to pay this off very quickly.

I should make a small point. As personal preference, and after seeing it suggested in at least two places, I’ve decided that a good strategy is to pay off smaller loans first even when they have slightly smaller interest rates. Certainly if it was 12% vs 19%, I’d pay off the 19% first. But in my case, twice now I’ve chosen to pay off a loan that was .5% to 1% lower interest rate first. The reason for this is this makes it less to worry about, less to manage, and less chance for late fees and such. Better for my peace of mind

I’m very excited to be debt-free. But I also get excited each time I pay off more of a loan or put more money into my savings. It feels really good. Once I am debt-free (hopefully in about a year), all of my extra money will go into savings. I don’t intend on working eight hours a day, five days per week my whole life (at least, not for someone else), and being able to consistently save money while I am working will allow me to live off of these savings for months or years at a time while doing something that isn’t making me a ton of money. Like school full-time. Or going on a cross-country bicycle trip. Or traveling the world (frugally, of course). Or spending my days reading and writing (self education). Or finally starting to write that video game that I’ve wanted to write. The possibilities are endless, and the decisions that I made today, and day-to-day will help me realize any number of these things more fully and for longer periods of time.

You might be asking yourself why I would choose to not have any credit cards. Having a small number of credit cards in good standing and with a balance of about 40% (I think) of its limit can help your credit score. Well, I try to think of things in terms of risk/reward. In my case, the risk of having a credit card was higher than the reward of a higher credit score. After I am completely debt-free, I will worry more about improving my credit score. As it stands, my credit score is good and landlords in Mags and my recent apartment search have been eager to have us as tenants due to our credit scores. So it isn’t a huge concern right now.

Of course, you can’t save or pay off debt unless your expenditures are much less than your earnings. I am comfortable with my earnings. Comfortable enough that I have recently turned down an opportunity to greatly increase my earnings (because I love my current job). As far as expenditures, I have cut down on them significantly since I moved to the city. When I first moved here, I had a one-bedroom apartment in Russian Hill. I had a car, too. I didn’t really think about how much I was spending and why. Now, I am splitting my studio apartment with Mags (in the Tenderloin), I don’t have a car, and in many other ways I am spending less just by constantly being aware of how much I am spending, if I could get the same thing for less somehow, and if I really even want or need what I am buying. It certainly helps that I enjoy my more frugal lifestyle more than my more extravagant one, even if you were to ignore the money aspect. I avoid driving as much as I can as it tends to stress me out and make me depressed. The driving, suburban lifestyle was, after all, the primary reason why I escaped the Maryland suburbs. I also enjoy communal living, and too much space equals too much stuff and too much clutter, which also depresses me. So it all works out well in this case.

Of course, it has taken me too long to get smart with money, but it could have taken a lot longer or never happened, as happens with a lot of people, so I feel fortunate of where I now stand.