Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I’m not sure how this happened. In order to be in the running for this year’s prize, he had to be nominated by February 1st. That means he had been officially in office barely over a week.

He hadn’t DONE anything but get elected. So, effectively, he was nominated on the basis of him giving some really good speeches during an ELECTION CAMPAIGN, and getting the majority of U.S. citizens to vote for him.

Don’t get me wrong – I LIKE Barack Obama. He’s a compelling figure… a gifted speaker… a thoughtful man. So far, he has made American look a lot less like the “You’re with us or against us” Texan rednecks that the previous administration had seemed to actually want to cultivate on the world scene. He has many ideas for change, many initiatives that could help the world that he wants to put into place, and tremendous charisma.

But he hasn’t really DONE much of anything yet. He’s just used lots and lots of words.

I read an article that was an interview of a member of the Nobel selection committee. That fellow claimed that the prize wasn’t only for awarding past actions, but it may also be used to motivate someone to future efforts to bring about peace. But – Barack Obama is the President of the United States, and got elected on the promise that he would do better. I think he probably didn’t need a lot more motivation.

There are people who have worked for world peace all their lives. People who may even have put their lives on the line for the cause. People who REALLY deserve, and have EARNED such recognition. People who now may feel that they uselessly toil in anonymity because, well, apparently the peace prize is an atta-boy for someone famous who MIGHT do something someday in the future, IF he can convince the members of his party and the people of his nation to support him. Who would blame any of those people for giving up right now?

I haven’t agreed with Obama all the time – after all, he’s American, and I’m not. He’s said and done things in the interest of his country that weren’t in the best interest of mine. He’s a politician first… and maybe, just maybe he’s becoming a real statesman.

But I do agree with him 100% on one thing: he doesn’t “deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize”.

At least, not yet.

State of Mind: WTF!?

And yes, the D is for Douche.

Both of my regular readers will know that a few days ago I posted about being poor, and how one particular jackass decided that being poor wasn’t really poor and went on the attack against a family on Twitter. Then, after his attempts to call the people “scammers” even though they had never asked for ANYTHING in order for there to be a scam, he deleted his inflammatory comments from his twitter stream because, well, the rest of the time he “educates the world” with that account and he would not want to look bad.  Apparently, in this twatwaffle’s mind, the only ‘poor’ people in the world are people who live in Africa, cardboard boxes and sewers, and he doesn’t understand the difference between poor and utterly destitute. After enlisting some help from some turtles who begged to differ with his point of view and went off to slap him around with a little martial-arts action, I pointed out the numerous ways in which the poor struggle in this high-technology society.

Well, I felt my entry was reasonable and not exceptionally inflammatory, even if my FIQ section was a lot more hostile. The only thing particularly different I did was including the name and link to the aforementioned person who was clearly of the mind that he was right and everyone poor must not be able to bathe, and therefore if you actually have plumbing and a roof over your head you are not actually poor.

As is my usual M.O. after getting something off my chest I moved on, and mostly stopped thinking about it. Until the next day.

That’s when I woke up to the following comment on my blog from “bewdevil@yahoo.com”: Read the rest of this entry »

State of Mind: Aggravated & WTF!?

For now, anyway. I know, it’s a bit… white. On the bright side, you’ll easily be able to find things on your desk while reading this in the dark. *UPDATE* I toned down the white. I was going to go for newsprinty, but for now this will do.

I was playing around with new themes, but then the one I really liked was swiped by my wife (totally out of the blue) when she suddenly decided to turf out her whole Nurtured Mother site and make it a more personal blog. I went back to square one, because I didn’t want to have the same theme as her -  I’m weird that way.

Being angry at stupid people is a bit of a hobby for me, but lately I have encountered so many of them that it’s become a full-time job. I’ve had to be angry for 60-70 hours a week and considering I’m usually only awake for 80-odd hours a week, that means my waking hours time are all occupied with either eating, going to the can, a bit of photography and being angry. I tried combining some of the angry time with taking a shit, but I almost blew out an O-ring as badly as Challenger in 1986.

Who knew being an outraged, know-it-all prick was so time-consuming?

Anyway, I need to tweak this theme a LOT, but I have found something to build on. I was tired of the old look, so the hell with it – ready or not, here it is.

Now I need to go and expose some twatwaffle for douchebaggery. Tune in later.

I’m not even sure how coherent this ends up being – I am having a very bad brain-fog day and it has taken HOURS to write. But, here goes.

Today, I saw a conversation between a family (the father is disabled and they are living in extremely difficult conditions) and numerous others on Twitter – most notably, Demi Moore taking them to task for their criticism of celebrities who flaunt wealth and fame. Effectively, Mrs. Kutcher told them not to be mean but then changed her tune when she realized the circumstances were more complex than the conclusion she immediately jumped to (which is, by default: “Hey, just because we’re celebrities doesn’t mean you can criticize us”).

Of course, being twitter, this unleashed a shitstorm of messages attacking the poor folks with remarkably enlightened messages like “Get a job” and “Stop whining, things are hard for everybody”. Once again, I’m shocked when I realize I have underestimated just exactly how stupid so many people who consider themselves Joe Average can be.

We have this problem in the “First World” – the problem is people do not understand what being poor is in this culture. They see poor as starving children in Africa, or homeless people living in cardboard boxes. They look at television shows like Roseanne and think that’s as poor as you get, and hey – those people laugh and have fun, so it can’t be too bad… In spite of the point of the series being that they were a “working class poor” family, the Conners were rarely portrayed as all that poor. It was just background.

The fact is, being a low-income family in this culture doesn’t always look that much different than being middle-class at times, and that leads to ridiculous prejudice, assumptions and bigotry. Then, there’s the “It could be worse” syndrome that always afflicts those who are better off and choose to lecture…  Read the rest of this entry »

State of Mind: Furious & Disgusted