Anitra

[Issue date 3/23/11] As I write this it’s Friday morning in Seattle and on the West Coast of the United States all the way down past San Diego, everyone is bracing for the radioactive plume from the Fukushima meltdown, and I’m highly amused. There was recently an earthquake in Japan that was quite significant and might be a reminder to West Coast Americans of some unpleasant realities attached to their choice of coast. But instead of thinking about those realities they prefer to dwell upon... Read Full Story

[issue date 3/16/11] I love liberalism. I love liberals. I married a liberal. Almost all of my best friends are liberals. But sometimes liberals can be horribly wrong. Let’s try to understand why! A fantastic example of liberals off the deep end is seen in the current liberal hand-wringing over the fate of National Public Radio. I have had multitudinous liberal friends plea that I sign on to petitions to stop the federal defunding of NPR. This is wildly strange. I won’t get started on the... Read Full Story

The whole world loves an underdog... Haha, that was your irony. The world does not. America especially does not. This country only cares about winners. Losers can drop dead. There are deep historical and cultural reasons for this, having to do with George Washington’s false teeth, the Monroe Doctrine, the fact that they had photography already by the Civil War, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” that FDR died in office instead of on a ranch, and that we have people who seriously think... Read Full Story

About a week before writing this, I was feeling more impoverished than usual. You know how it is: when you can’t pay your bills, your shoes have holes in them, and your credit card company tells you that if you keep paying off your balance at the current rate, it’ll be all paid off by yesterday -- meaning, after forever ends and time starts over again, and gets back to then. Roughly 50-85 billion years, or never, depending on how much dark matter there is in the universe. “So,” I thought... Read Full Story

A couple of weeks ago some of us at Real Change were talking about how the rise of internet background-check services has hurt poor people. Years ago it was a pain to run background checks. If someone wanted to rent an apartment from you, you had to take their application materials to an agency run out of a trailer and hand it over to a guy named Rocky. You didn’t do it because Rocky smelled like cigarettes, stale peanuts, and three day old fish, and he charged too much. But now, Rocky has a... Read Full Story

Above: A 1919 Egyptian uprising had a flag that clearly acknowledged the revolutionaries' debt to computers. Like everyone else in the world I’ve been watching the events unfolding in Egypt with great concern. How can people be so cruel to one another? I’m referring, of course, to the shutdown of the internet and Twitter. It’s insidious. We all know why it was done. The authorities felt besieged by revolutionaries. Naturally, they (the authorities) sought to deprive the revolutionaries of... Read Full Story

Whenever there are great occasions of public oration, I miss them. They always happen in prime-time, and I’m accustomed to averting my eyes during prime-time. In fact, I always arrange to sleep through prime-time. Missing the oration means I don’t know everything that everyone else does. I know the words because they’re in the New York Times the next day, if the oration is anything to sneeze at. But I miss the nuanced delivery, the dramatic pauses, the turned up eyes, everything you need to... Read Full Story

My point this week: Eastern Washington should thank Seattle in writing for being so liberal. See what I just did there? That’s a first! Fifteen years, and never before have I made my point in the first sentence! Sometimes I never get around to it at all! I’m doing it now for two reasons. One, last week I opened with what I thought was an amusing misleading statement “Today’s topic is insanity”, and nobody got it. Two, recently I’ve been obsessed by something said to me 23 years ago. I was... Read Full Story

 [We are up to date now. Reminder: these are my own versions, pretty much as submitted, with occasional graphic embellishments and added notes. The titles don't usually match.] Today’s topic is insanity. Ha, ha, that wasn’t very specific was it? Everything is insanity! The voices tell me so. Seriously, an insane man recently killed some people while trying to kill a Congressperson, and this has been taken by many as a call to action. I don’t like what happened either, but honestly a lot of... Read Full Story

[from 1/12/10] Here’s an expression I’m getting tired of hearing: “sign of the Apocalypse”. Now the End-Times are underway, do we really need to note that this, that, and everything else is a “sign of the Apocalypse”? Hey, it’s the End-Times, OK? If it’s morning, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. If it’s on the internet, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. If it’s Folgers, if it walks the walk, etc. Quit rubbing it in. We’ll all die and burn for eternity except the Christians (of the correct sect... Read Full Story