Published on Sun, 2006-10-08 13:45

Update

Just a quick one: wedding went well. Lots of compliments for my performance which is quite an honor. The families involved are both amazing, and all their contributions were above and beyond. It was a beautiful evening full of laughter, a few tears, and lots and lots of heartfelt love.

NYC in October is possibly my favorite place in the world to be. I'm still looking forward to getting back home and staying put for as many weeks in a row as I can put together, but I'm glad I had this experience to remind me why I love the city and to make me want to come back.

I think we'll just have to be wildly successful and open an office here. It's really the only option.

Published on Thu, 2006-10-05 04:03

The History of Page Porking

An interesting bit of history: back in 1983 there was another Congressional Page sex scandal, in which one GOP lawmaker confessed to relations with a female page in 1980, and also in which Gerry Studds -- a Democrat from Massachusetts, the first "out" Congressman, and posessor of an apt name for this story -- admitted to a relationship with a 17-year-old male back in 1973.

Studds won re-election and the Republican did not. Most of Studds' constituents already knew he was gay, and he basically didn't apologize for what he did:

Studds, however, stood by the facts of the case and refused to apologize for his behavior, and even turned his back and ignored the censure being read to him. He called a press conference with the former page, in which both stated that the young man was legal and consenting. Studds did not break any U.S. laws for that time, in what he and page called a "private relationship."[1] He continued to be reelected until his retirement in 1996

Bill Clinton could have learned quite a lot from this guy.

Now, let's be clear. Being an adult and getting intimate with a 17-year old is ethically dubious. It's almost certainly unethical if there's a workplace power relationship. If you happen to be considering trying something like this, don't.

However, I think the response of Studds shows the power of standing behind your choices. I may find Studds and the 17-year-old iffy, but if the 17-year-old is willing to stand by his man ten years later and say it was all good, that's a strong statement.

This requires you to embrace your actions in the first place, of course, and to have a solid internal moral gyroscope you can live by. But if you've got those things and a clear head, you can potentially break a lot of social rules to little ill effect.

Published on Wed, 2006-10-04 13:03

Long-Range Planning

So the other night I was writing in my paper journal, and I noticed that I was talking about my own life the way I do about work when I have my Project Manager hat on. My first reaction was that this was pathetic, but then I checked that and I remembered that actually this is natural, and I do the same thing when I'm in an "actor" or "activist" mode as well.

So I decided to embrace it, started an open-ended todo list that started with "California drivers license" and "medical insurance" and ended up at the bottom with: wife, land, kids.

Heady, brah. No doubt influenced by my thinking a lot about Frank and Laura's wedding this weekend.

But I'm embracing this exercise and so I start to try and build a timeline around these things, because that's what you do when you're a project manager. If I'm doing it, I gotta do it.

So the upshot is that I figure I should have met and started a relationship with my wife by 2009, after which I've got five years or so to wrangle the land and kids bit. Prior to that there's getting a car and a dog to consider.

All this is assuming I stay on a track to remain in California. This is far from certain, but it seems to be the direction I'm headed for the moment, so I figure why not take it as far as it can go.

Now that I've got a five year plan, all I need is to meet some of those college girls that would ask you about that sort of thing. With 2009 as a milestone, why, my wife could still be in High School. Ho ho ho.

Kidding aside, meeting the women is perhaps the greatest challenge/unknown up here. I'm single again after almost a year of relationshipping. At the moment I'm not quite ready to really get back out there and mix it up, but it's going to have to happen sooner or later.

Published on Tue, 2006-10-03 14:04

Quick Notes:

1) Wow... I went right back into a politics binge, eh? Big week for that. I also posted something on Future Majority about how the NetRoots negative campaign against Kinky Friedman is probably a bad idea.

2) HFS: N. Korea to conduct Nuclear test. This is a bad thing, will have unpredictable results.

3) I've been writing a lot in my paper journal lately. Liking that. I'm still working on a better design for this site, and I should be putting up a page someday in the next couple weeks for the Rebel Unicorn, but right now I've gotta get some serious work done.

Published on Mon, 2006-10-02 21:16

If The Shoe Were On The Other Foot

Theocrat Leader James Dobson is soft on Foley. Matt Drudge blames the "16-year-old beasts" How's that for moral clarity?

Can you imagine what the response would be like if it were a liberal Democrat, maybe Barney Frank, who had this sort of scandal surface?

There would be calls for blood. People would mean it.

Now, it's to the credit of progressives that we've matured beyond enacting or calling for mob justice on Rep. Foley -- and people who point out that this behavior eminates from repression (which we're also past, at least on the Gay thing) have a strong point -- but whenever I feel a twinge of guilt about this, I think about the fact that this guy is a world-class crepazoid, and I think about what kind of heaven-rattling bile Matt Drudge, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly and all their little Leutenants would be spiewing if the shoe were on the other foot.

And then I think: go get 'em.

Published on Mon, 2006-10-02 16:02

OSX Update SSH Keepalive Patch

I recently hit the 10.4.8 update and it unded my SSH patch. Had to re-apply. Annoying: the update overwrote my old /etc/rc. There must be a better way to issue startup directives as root during boot in OSX.

Published on Mon, 2006-10-02 14:04

WorkBlogging

Just FYI, y'all I've started blogging my work.

No real progress on Rebel Unicorn over the weekend (wah-waahh), but more potential takers for the service: maybe shouterdauter.com reports from Alemania? Also, a site with the pirate radio from the house: Keep Westhaven Wild dot com.

The empire expands...

Published on Mon, 2006-10-02 11:40

Hastert In The Crosshairs

Oh man. FBI is investigating. ABC News:

"There's a chance that Foley could be prosecuted under laws he helped pass."

This is almost Greek in its scope. Foley is toast and his seat is probably going to go Democratic. The ballots have already been printed with his name on them.

From a political standpoint, the important thing now is to press the advantage. John Laesch is running against Denny "The Fat Man" Hastert, speaker of the GOP House, who is ultimately accountable for the fact that Foley wasn't disciplined, taken out of touch-range, etc. In a just world Hastert will lose his job.

For fuck's sake, they warned Republican pages, but not Democrats. Nothing I can think of goes further to illustrate the kind of tribal "us vs. them" mindset that prevails amongst the GOP these days. By their reasoning, it's more important to hold on to power than to deal with a potential child-predator in their midst. They'll also warn their own young boys -- gotta look out for our own, given the circumstances -- but if some sons of Democrats get in the way, well, that's just collateral damage.

I met Laesch in Vegas this summer and he's a good guy. Young and hungry. Under a normal establishment political calculus, this race would be seen as a fool's errand, but now we see the power of the 50-state strategy. It's not going to be pretty, but if Laesch runs with this in the next month, he could put Hastert's political future in jeopardy.

Outlandish Josh

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