the lexfiles

Obligatory Morning Post

Fairly good weekend. My 'Skins had a bye (actually, they were two and a half point underdogs to the bye, and still couldn't cover the spread) so I didn't have to watch them lose.

On Saturday I went out to a little wedding party for James and Eva, who came back from the left coast for their wedding. I'd throw a congrats out to them, but if they're even thinking about reading blogs for the next couple of weeks, there's something terribly wrong with them.

Saw Ilen for the first time in years - Loved and lost a few years ago, to put the long story short. Met her husband, quite briefly. It was all right. I might not have handled it well a year ago, certainly not two, but even I can get over things eventually.

Sunday I headed out to Renfest with Braylen and Bride. Also bunches of fun. Mostly I hung out at the White Hart, as per usual. But slipped away from time to time to catch a couple of shows, including the appropriately named Medieval Baebes. Ran into a bunch folks that I haven't seen in a while, looked at the eye-candy, and generally had a good time.

5-1 on the Atomic pool, heading into Monday night, which I feel pretty good about. Only slipped on Oakland's pounding of Tennessee. Could have been worse, there were a couple of close games in there too.

Ah well, time for the monthly ritual of Paying The Bills. Joy.

More anti-globo nonsense

The "protests" continue.

"What today is all about is who decides, who pays, who writes the rules, who builds the future," consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader told the crowd.

"We have to subordinate the power of corporations to the sovereign power of the people," he added.

It really sounds a lot to me me that he's thinking that corporations aren't, in fact, made up of and run by, well, people, beholden to shareholders, who are also, you guessed it, people.

The "protests" this weekend got me to thinking about what motivates these folks. I think that they woke up to see half of the world's people covered in shit, and decided that that must be the fault of the half that isn't. From their point of view, the accident of birth allows some people greater leverage in accumulating wealth, without noting that the leverage is the result of generations of good old fashioned hard work and capitalism.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck."
- Robert A. Heinlein

They see the wealth of the world as a constant sum, and they see that some people have a bigger share of the world's wealth, which is patently unfair. The goal of socialism is the equal distribution of the pot.

But they fail to note that Capitalism increases the size of the pot. Capitalism charges a price for a person to increase their share of the pot relative to everyone else - and that price is innovation that makes the pot bigger for everyone else. People don't become wealthier compared to everyone else without providing something that makes everyone a little better off. The increased share provides the incentive for innovation, but the innovation increases the wealth of everyone.

Heh.

Braylen has thanks for the protestors.

No, really.

There's some stuff in this

There's some stuff in this article that I don't agree with, but the money graf hits it about right.

Protesters may wish to note that the fancy pants executives and bankers whom they view as targets have no intention whatsoever of trying to make it to the office tomorrow. You see, they get paid whether they show up or not. The victims of this so-called People's Strike are, in fact, folks who work for a living, the office workers and federal employees, the people who cook food and clean buildings. If they don't work, they don't eat.

But go ahead, enjoy your sport, shut down the town. What do you care? In a couple of years, some of you will grab your diplomas, leave your chants and phony claims of solidarity behind, and head off to the latest high-tech ventures, brimming with rhetoric about how this isn't like old businesses and how new technologies will erase economic inequalities. And then, if you're real lucky, you can shaft another generation of employees and stockholders, knowing that when you were 19, you were down with the people.

Wankers.

(Link via Dave Tepper)

Sorry again for the light

Sorry again for the light posting. Busy at work and uninspired to boot.

Barely awake and ready to face the idiots downtown, and for a change, I don't mean the tourists.

Braylen has a couple of interesting posts on the protestors. I've got my own little issues with them.

Members of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence – the group loosely coordinating today's protests – said violence isn't on the agenda. But they said disrupting the "vicious cycle" of capitalism is.

Do they mean that vicious cycle whereby I get paid for doing work for The Man? Are we talking about the paycheck that lets me live in a house? That vicious cycle?

"None of us knows it all," said Rae Valentine, one of several Anti-Capitalist Convergence organizers. "Our ideology is based on the fact that we're decentralized and non-hierarchical."

Read: Disorganized, unbathed, spotty kids.

More rain is in the forecast today, but protesters said weather would not be a deterrent.

Rain is always a deterrent. They always say they will come, and then it rains. And it always seems to rain when they plan on protesting. Instead of protesting they end up sitting around sniffling in the nearest Starbucks, whining about how it always rains on them. The Gods do indeed have a sense of humor. The IMF is considering only holding meetings in drought stricken areas, because everyone knows it's going to rain on the protestors, then they'll get fed up up and cold, and head to the nearest Starbucks to contribute to the Capitalist Menace.

Wankers.

This could be fun. Stephen

This could be fun.

Stephen Green for President.

Obligatory Morning Post

Wow! Big thanks to Megan for the link love .

I'm really not in the mood to go to work today. At least, not in a mood that would be productive should I go to work today. Adding to my list of things that separate me from the gruntled masses is the fact that they want me to move into a different office. I'm not particularly pleased.

I'm actually so far from Pleased that even if I were to get there, the commute would be a pain.

My motivation to go in is not in any way assisted by my decision to go out drinking last night. Speaking of which, I ran accross one of those fun sorts that swears by The Confederacy but won't say why. "I jes' like rebels" was all the response I could get from him, and you know that, me being Lex, I tried.

I'm kind of at a loss as to how I run into these folks, but I suspect that the shaved head makes them think that I must be on their side or something. It's somewhat interesting that once they figure out I'm not a fellow racist asshole, the friendliness dries up. I didn't help things with my constant badgering, I guess, which is a habit that I'm sure will get my ass kicked one of these days. But I've little room for people who like to espouse that filth but won't say why.

Ok, I've little room for those that will say why, but at least there's some spine to them. I even offered this guy the "State's Rights" out, but he didn't take it (and I'm not sure that he understood the issues well enough). What's left is yearning for the days when we had our boots on the backs of the niggers, an attitude that I'm all to happy to see go the way of the dodo.

Back to the drinking. Ah yes, The Drinking. It's left me a little out of sorts this morning. I guess that I'll have to deal with it, at least until it's late enough to have another beer.

Want a beer?

It's only ten o'clock!

Oh, right...

Scotch?

Bowling night tonight, [how Apple Pie is that?] which has become a happy diversion. There's the fact that I get to spend time with Braylen and Bride, and the added bonus of meeting new people and staring at new cuties. Good stuff.

This brought a bit of

This brought a bit of a giggle.

And therein lies the rub. ''People imagine that the reason so many famous leading men of the past shaved their chests was out of censorship, as if the sight of a normal hairy chest would send the audience into a foaming frenzy,'' Reuter says. ''The reality was that lots of those guys, like Robert Mitchum and Burt Lancaster, who are remembered as so macho, only had pathetic spotty little patches.'' And as most men know, chest hair is unruly; it rarely grows in a symmetrical, aesthetically pleasing way -- there's usually too little of it, or too much -- unless, that is, you're Sean Connery. Well, actually, even if you are Sean Connery.

The article touches briefly on the important point that it's becoming popular for men to behave like men again.

We're not talking about a "I'm gonna go home and smack my bitch" thing, or a "hurry up and fix me a chicken pot pie, bitch" type deal. Fortunately, the women's movement [Hey, any bird who wants to chain herself to my railings and suffer a jet movement gets my vote.*] has blunted the worst of it, but I think we're allowed to watch football again.

While this doesn't permit pointless bar fights (sorry guys), it does permit us to go back to the point where we can win arguments with our girlfriends.

Ok, I made that last part up.

But it really does mean that I can go back to being continue to be an unrepentant, round-heeled, flatbacked slut without worrying that one of my female friends will accuse me of "abusing women", or somesuch nonsense.

*Rick Mayall, Blackadder Goes Forth, in response to "I'm beginning to see why the suffragette movement won the vote".

This week's Tuesday Morning Quarterback

This week's Tuesday Morning Quarterback is up.

Agent Mulder: Do you believe the Steelers are missing all those tackles by accident? Certain Mayan ruins contain prophecy glyphs depicting missed tackles just before a cataclysm envelopes the Earth. The figures in the glyphs are labeled with words that translate as "men of steel." I'd take you there and show you, but access to the ruins has been mysteriously sealed off by elite commando units.

Agent Scully: You're being too hasty. Maybe the Rams' plodding, robotic behavior has nothing to do with the slimy symbiot organisms found in their locker room. If only the slimy symbiots hadn't mysteriously disappeared just as I arrived with the containment team! This might explain Mike Martz, though.

Agent Mulder: Carolina beats Detroit by 24 points. The next week Detroit takes the mighty Green Bay Packers down to the final seconds. Coincidence? An unusual metallic alloy dye was found in the arm tattoos of Panthers players. The origin of this dye might not be of this world.

Agent Scully: I've been kidnapped by aliens, killed and brought back to life, impregnated with extraterrestrial tissue in a secret government project aboard a cloaked battleship that later exploded, suspended in protoplasm found at a starship crash site, attacked by invincible genetically engineered super-soldiers and infected with a million-year-old disease designed to turn humans into zombies. But I don't believe any of your wild speculation!

Nice to see that Braylen

Nice to see that Braylen is playing nice with the neighbors.