As I was pondering the paper, it occurred to me that while most things are moving toward a leaner, greener footprint, the parking meters are actually going the other way.

Old school parking meters require no electricity.  They generate no waste paper. They don’t involve dial up or broadband networks to process the transactions.

Moving to a system that is more “efficient” has actually moved us to a system that generates paper waste and consumes electricity (albeit relatively small amounts) for the computing power to handle the credit card transactions and keep the kiosk running.

At a time when we say we want things to be more green, we’ve replaced almost the perfect green model with one that is arguably the anti-green solution.  It just demonstrates that our commitment to environmental friendliness ends when we can come up with a solution that makes our lives a little easier.

Apparently, the latest offense is the most serious, warranting a parent teacher conference. His latest crime? (Again, I kid you not) He was recruiting a group of other toddlers in opposition to Circle Time. That’s right. My son the community organizer was no longer content to simply sit out of Circle Time. He was actively recruiting other children to join him in his non-conformity. I think the school is afraid my little cult leader may stage a coup.

While I am concerned about his long term development on many fronts, this really isn’t one of them. I just don’t know if it’s a great idea to teach toddlers that a) they must conform to what everyone else is doing, b) they must be a happy part of the collective, and c) they must never question that authority that demands they go along.

On many levels, I find it amusing, and even reassuring that T2, at a very young age, is displaying the traits of an organizer. The ability to not only refuse to be a sheep, but to also teach others not to follow blindly, is quite admirable. From a teacher’s perspective, I get that it can be quite challenging. On many occasions, I have been trying to get his sister to focus on something only to have him lead her away. It’s annoying, to be sure.

Also, from a teacher’s point of view, conformity is key. If the kids were expressing individuality, and pursuing only those things that interest them, we might end up with a world of innovative thinkers. It’s good to have teachers who will choke out the weed of self-expression and creativity. The productivity of the collective demands that we create a workforce of nimrods capable of simply pushing a button all day because they were told to. I get it.

From my point of view, however, I’m strangely proud of my child for resisting the brainwashing. I’m actually excited that he won’t simply go along with the crowd. I have even considered introducing him to Facebook and setting up the group “One Million Strong Against Circle Time”.

Well… maybe that can wait until he’s four.

When I clicked through, though, I was disappointed. The article, in fact, has nothing to do with me – not even casually. Instead, it focuses on right wing nuts that donated to the Pro-8 movement in California.

I have long known that there is at least one Michael Turk in CA. He’s a physical therapist with a shitty website. I’m not sure if he’s the one that appears on this site. There are apparently four listings for Michael Turk in Cali, and only one of them seems to be the nut in question.

For those who might stumble upon that list, and think it’s me, let me again state for the record that I think my party is completely backwards on the gay marriage question. We’ve staked out territory in a really bad place, and need to pack up and move the tent.

I have not now, nor will I ever, contribute to a cause that wants to allow the government to decide who can marry. As a matter of fact, I would be more than happy to have the government get out of all marriages – gay straight or otherwise.

So as the title says, “Just to be clear, I’m not the right wing nut in question.” Thanks for listening.

On another note, if you’re the physical therapist version of Michael Turk that is mentioned above: Dude, I’ll redo your shitty website for free just so people who accidentally confuse us don’t think I did that. Contact me through the link to the right to discuss.

Aaron is in a Chaotic Neutral mood.

For those who don’t get the reference, chaotic neutral refers to one of nine character “alignments” in Dungeons & Dragons. Think of them like a matrix. Lawfulness versus Chaos is essentially your adherence to the laws of society, whereas Good and Evil are your moral/ethical disposition.

Now here’s the problem, and the jumping off point for the discussion with Aaron. I contend that chaotic good and chaotic evil are false choices. Good and evil, just like law and lawlessness, lie on a continuum. That is, there is an order to them. There are degrees between them.

Chaos, on the other hand, is completely random. There is no order at all. Therefore, a chaotic character would be just as likely to be good as evil. As Aaron said, everything becomes situational. A chaotic good character would always tend toward the good. If they are chaotic evil, they would always tend toward evil. By that logic, they have applied order to their own lives. They have chosen a path, and a path, by nature, is not chaotic.

It’s like Johnny Depp’s line from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest.

A truly chaotic person can always be counted on to be chaotic, and that means they’re just as lokely as not to swing toward good or evil. As Paul Rodriguez (@pjrodriguez) said, “[A] Chaotic Neutral person might hit you in the face one day and gave you a $100 bill the next and then borrow your car, use all the gas, but [leave] a TV in the back seat.”

That’s pretty much exactly it. In a fight against long odds, a chaotic person would be just as likely to stay with you and fight as they would be to stab you in the leg so they could outrun you in retreat. They’re chaotic, and chaos defies patterns. If they always tend toward good (or evil for that matter) you could always know what they would do within a certain range.

So do chaotic good and chaotic evil exist? I don’t believe they can, and therefore the whole D&D continuum is off. I think the continuum should look more like this:

Anything below neutrality in regard to morals (good and evil) and lawfulness would fall into a base category of Chaotic. You would have no idea what they would do or what their moral leanings would be. I think it would be a much better framework. Frankly, with people stabbing each other in the leg, I think it would make the game more interesting.

If you have ever read The Perfect Storm, there is a great explanation of the three weather phenomenon that came together to create the system that is the focus of the book. The movie glosses over the explanation, so read the book instead.

What we are witnessing this week is the same interaction of three deadly factors. Any one of the three would be destructive. In total, however, they have just cost you and I a trillion dollars. And don’t for a moment think the total will end there. Mark my words, this bailout has only begun to cost us.

The Three Factors

Under a Republican congress and Democratic President, Washington expanded a Carter era relic called the Community Reinvestment Act.

The Community Reinvestment Act is intended to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound banking operations.

In other words, banks will make loans for houses to people who are ill-equipped to pay them back. The “encouragement” came in the form of penalties for not doing so.

Add to that another bill passed by a GOP controlled Congress with a Democratic President. That bill, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act sought to:

Enhance competition in the financial services industry by providing a prudential framework for the affiliation of banks, securities firms, insurance companies, and other financial service providers, and for other purposes.

In other words, prior to the law, Insurance companies could sell insurance, banks could do loans, securities firms sold stock, and never the three should meet. After the law, it was a free for all. Banks created securities out of the shitty loans they issued under the CRA, Insurance companies under wrote those while creating their own shitty securities, etc, etc.

Now into the mix you have to throw the American people. They look at the news and see home values going through the roof. The react the same way they did during the Beanie Baby craze. They rush out to get a piece of that action. They can buy a $5 stuffed animal and sell it for $300 on eBay, so they buy the hell out of Beanie Babies.

Unfortunately, economic laws will only support that for so long. The company will make more (thereby reducing demand for the things), people will lose interest, or some other force will enter the market and suddenly your left with crates full of stuffed animals rotting in closets. Beanie Babies were an artificial market.

In the same way, people saw home ownership as a great way to make money. Home flipping became the rage, people took out second mortgages to buy second homes, and suddenly everyone had to buy a house.

The Perfect Storm

The trouble is when you have people who can’t afford to buy houses meeting up with people who have to sell houses to keep from running afoul of laws designed to promote home ownership among the poor, you wind up with a) a guy who will lie about his income or b) a guy who will lie about the value of the house or the terms of the loan.

So suddenly a lot of people are invested in houses they can barely afford anyway, and the real terms of those notes go into effect. People can’t pay, so the value of that note becomes worthless.

Since you have built shitty securities on the value of that house, the value of those securities go into the toilet. When that happens, the debt that the mortgage company is carrying becomes unsustainable and the house of cards comes tumbling down.

This is exactly what we’re witnessing. We’re seeing exactly what happens when an artificial market comes tumbling down. There never was a market for housing for people who can’t afford it. The government created one, took their eyes of the guys who were managing it, and is now asking us to throw another deck on the house of cards so people who can’t afford to borrow can keep doing so.

DC is Fundamentally Broken

I have said that Washington DC is so fundamentally broken it is going to drag the rest of the country down with it. I am more convinced of that than ever today.

With this bailout, we’re solving nothing. We’re simply allowing people who shouldn’t have credit to keep on borrowing. We’re enabling addictive behavior. The Congressmen who voted for the bailout should be tried as traitors.

Despite all of that, I was forced to watch to politicians on TV last night both of whom blamed “the greed and corruption of Wall Street” for the mess while giving a pass to the incompetence and stupidity of Washington. Make no mistake. This dismal situation was the result of horrible policy that started with, and was supposed to be overseen by, Congress. They passed the laws that allowed this to happen and ARE TAKING ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSIBILITY for the mess they created.

What’s worse, is both candidates for President, and both candidates for Vice President, appear to have learned absolutely nothing from watching this happen and are pursuing the same ridculous policies that have crippled our nation.

I believe you can absolutely count on two things.

First, when the next Administration is about 6 months or a year into its term, they will have to deal with an economic disaster of Biblical proportions. This is a band-aid fix for a missing leg. It’s stupid and will do nothing but punt the problem into an off-year when the sheep aren’t watching.

Second, if you think we dodged a bullet with this bill today, you haven’t seen anything yet.

I had previously posted on Matt Stoller’s late spring run in with the business end of a fist, and didn’t have the story quite right. My earlier post was based on a report that Matt had an argument with someone that turned violent. While I still stand by the person who gave me the story, it seems there was a little more to it than meets the eye.

Matt has always claimed that the guy sucker punched him. When he made that claim here, I pointed out that I have been in a lot of fights, have never been hit or thrown a punch without knowing exactly why that happened, and was pretty sure Matt knew why he got hit.

Well it turns out that Matt did get hit out of the blue, but the story of why was still untold – but I was right, Matt knows why.

The story was the ex-boyfriend of Matt’s then girlfriend saw the two of them together, and punched Matt in the face. That appears to be true.

Sources, however, tell me there was a bit more going on. It seems Matt was banging the assailant’s girlfriend while she and he were engaged to be married. Mr. Fisticuffs was apparently a little upset that trust fund baby was nailing his fiance. When given the opportunity to exact a little payback on Stoller, he took it.

As I said at the time of the original post, “I suspect there is at least a fair probability that it was provoked.” Turns out I was right.

On a related note, conversation also turned to a psychoanalysis of the type of girl that would date Matt to begin with. There was heated debate over whether she must have serious daddy issues or simply massively low self-esteem.

Consensus was reached on one point, however. In trying to describe the awkward thought of Matt and his paramour being in union, everyone agreed it probably went something like this:

(As young lass is trying to pleasure Matt, she hears) No. Nobody does it that way. Anyone who does it like that must be stupid and not worth my time… It feels awkward… Like knowing that John McCain will die of cancer in office… By the way, did I mention that Republicans are all racist? They are…

One note of caution, Matt. Watch out for those teeth when your girl wakes up to your bullshit.

Subj: Police Activity At Our Building Last Evening

The police activity which prevented many parkers in our garage from leaving last night was due to a couple of young men trying to elude the police. Those being pursued jumped the fence on one side of the [building next door] and then scaled the fence on the other side … only to jump to the grate over the garage and then onto the ramp of the garage where they were stopped (injured) due to the height of the jump.

One of our staff was a witness and reported the activity to me after giving his statement to the police. I apologize for the inconvenience this caused many of you as you tried to leave for the day.

I actually find the last line amusing. I was always taught to apologize for things that are your fault and move on when they’re not. I would count “Perp jumps a fence, falls very far and breaks leg thereby blocking garage entrance” as something firmly outside of your control. But I do appreciate the apology…

With regard to the actual incident let me say one thing. The jump referred to above is high… like, really high… bordering on crazy high… This is a story that should go down in the “stupid criminals” file simply because anyone dumb enough to think they could make that jump and not get hurt is just fooling themselves.

As we started talking about politics, one of the guys at the table (we’ll call him Dan*) made a joke that the California Supreme Court decision was going to end up costing him north of $10,000. We all asked what me meant and he proceeded to explain.

In 2004, Dan and his partner were watching coverage of the San Francisco Mayor allowing gay couples to marry. They saw images of the lines around the block waiting for marriage licenses, and decided to hop a flight the next morning to SF to marry. They had been together for 9 years at this point.

As they were making arrangements, Dan called his mom to tell her what they were doing. She immediately booked a flight to California – as did his brother, and father and various other family members. His brother was the first to arrive in San Francisco. Dan’s brother picked up his own brother-in-law and they headed to city hall to hold a place in line. As they stood there waiting, the couples around them asked how long they had been together. They joked, “Since 9 o’clock this morning.” After explaining, they chatted about the couples around them.

Dan arrived in San Fran and over the next few hours, family from all over arrived and began waiting with them. Due to a technical limitation, the city was only able to issue 400 marriage licenses per day. They soon ran out. Dan and his partner were still in line. They and the gathered family stood in line outside city hall for 28 hours, waiting for another opportunity the next day.

The next afternoon they made it in to city hall, got their license, were immediately married by some city official. After getting the license certified, they walked out the door and were showered by strangers who had gathered outside to shower the newly married couples exiting with rice and flowers.

Six months later, the court vacated his marriage.

While they still have their marriage certificate, it legally means nothing. The recent ruling did not reinstate those marriages conducted in 2004.

So now they’re planning to do it all again. In Dan’s words, they are doing so because it is important to them to have some permanent record that they meant more to each other than simply being co-signers on a mortgage.

So here’s what the GOP doesn’t get. For every member of the base opposed to gay marriage, there are independent, soft D and soft R voters who will hear stories like this and get it. They will listen to a friend recount their story of happiness and love. They will tell stories of joyous weddings that rival those any boy-girl combo.

When they hear these stories, these mainstream voters will understand that for two people in love, marriage means more than owning property or getting health benefits. They will see that heterosexuals do not have an exclusive on feelings. They’ll think about their own wedding day and realize what that moment meant to them. They will never again question the motives of two people in love wanting to have it recorded in the annals of our community histories.

Slowly, but surely, the tide will turn against the religious zealotry that makes the absurd argument that somehow, a gay marriage makes mine less meaningful. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the GOP clung to racism to win elections, and has only recently apologized for the error of its past. It will, someday in the future, make a similar apology to those it fought so hard for preventing the recognition of relationships just as real and deep as their own.

* I’ve changed my colleague’s name because I did not ask his permission to retell his story. While I am sure he would not mind, I do not want to identify him absent that approval.

Still, reprimanding him may cause future McCain operatives to think twice before doing their job. Is McCain recommending a sort of “limited war” in which the enemy can shoot at us, but we can’t shoot back?

Standing on principle is a good value, but so is supporting your subordinates and so is loyalty. It takes political courage to stand up for your team — even if it may cost you politically. Is McCain too concerned about wanting to come across as a nice guy?

The bigger point, and one I think that’s been lost in this, is that Soren was using his personal accounts in a personal communication. Unlike the Amanda Marcotte dust up, Soren was not hired as a spokesperson for the campaign and simultaneously promoting himself and his personal ideological agenda.

He didn’t use a campaign e-mail address to send the link to the video. He didn’t even use a McCain sponsored twitter account. He used his own personal accounts to share a thought with people he felt were friends about online politics – a field he happens to have both expertise in and familiarity with.

This was not like the Samantha Power incident where an adviser (albeit an unpaid one) was speaking with a reporter. This isn’t closer to the cases of Linda Olsen and Judy Rose who were fired for forwarding the “Obama is a Muslim” e-mail. While it was never clear to me whether the women in that case used official campaign addresses or their personal accounts, the material they sent was untrue and potentially slanderous.

Soren’s incident has none of that. The material in the video was predominantly Obama, his wife, and his pastor. Granted the video contains footage of Olympic athletes and Malcolm X that it should not have. The statements of Michelle Obama and Jeremiah Wright are more damaging without all that.

But again, Soren did not create the video. The message was not sent from the campaign systems. It was a personal note. He was not a spokesman, he was a private citizen working on a public campaign and using a personal address.

One thing about this incident sends a chill down my spine. Many people are afraid to run for public office because they fear the rectal probe that is our electoral process. They fear the media scrutiny and the potential that some past indiscretion – no matter how small – will make them a public spectacle.

Do political operatives now have to fear that their private communication will become tomorrow’s news story? Do the people that give selflessly in political campaigns have to dread every workday wondering if they will be the campaign’s latest black eye?

How many e-mails did you send today that, taken out of context and publicized on the news, could be an embarrassment to you or your employer? How many of your personal notes contain jokes about the office, your company’s competitors or some other matter best kept private?

If we have rewritten the political rules so every piece of personal communication sent by campaign staff is now fodder for political advantage, we will further degrade our political process.

Me: Hey, did you get a chance to review that document I sent you yesterday.

Lawyer: I sent it to a couple of other people for some additional feedback. I’ll get it back to you shortly. Refresh my memory, what was this for again?

Me: It’s a post for the blog.

Lawyer: Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot about that. That’s a really stupid idea – that blog. People parse every word in legal filings that nobody ever reads and then we go say any damn thing on a blog. (Apparently he senses my shock at his comment) Sorry… I know the blog wasn’t your idea.

Me: Actually, it was.

Lawyer: Oh. Forget it. What do I care. I’m retiring anyway.

So there you have it. The world we occupy and the way the rest of the establishment sees it. Damn the man! Save the empire!