Site design is still chugging along, but was slowed by some crazy work deadlines that have kept me pretty crazily busy over the last few weeks. I’m trying to keep my posts here sparse since I’ve already migrated a bunch of shit to the new server/database and such and I don’t want to have to port a bunch of content over. It’s coming though. And it’ll be great. Going to work on it a bit this week and hopefully have it running and changed over this weekend.

I’ll have links to some of the iPhone apps I’ve been working on for work available as well. And hopefully I’ll be submitting some of my own in the near future.

KEEP ON TRUCKIN!

Jabberwock

Site redesign is coming along well. I’m aiming for having everything important ported over by this weekend. It’s going to take me a while to get ALL the legacy content in there.

One new thing that’s going to happen is going to be user accounts, which will allow you to do a lot of interesting shit, and which will be required for commenting because the spam shit gets exhausting even with the filters.

I’ll keep you all posted.

Jabberwock

Okay, so something’s fucked up with the site. I’m investigating. I think it’s probably because I haven’t updated WordPress in a while, and we’ve been having some server issues. This is part of why I’m totally redesigning the site from scratch and migrating content to something I’ll have (mostly) built myself.

Thanks to Kasey for bringing this to my attention. Should hopefully be fixed shortly.

Jabberwock

Oops, sorry about the multiple posts — the server was having kind of a fit last night. Apparently it was actually going through when I was hitting “Publish”, but the server kept timing out.

Jabberwock

So, my friend Tom and I have started a podcast. It starts out nearly unlistenable (which is why episode one was “lost in a fire”) but it’s been getting really good of late.

Click here for the second first episode.

Jabberwock

So, gentlemen. And, uh, ladies. Or do I have to call you gentlemen, too, so that you don’t feel excluded from what you like to call the “boys club”?

Anyway, it turns out people aren’t buying enough of our… whatever the hell it is we manufacture. We’re losing money. Like crazy.

I’ve hired some expensive consultants to come in and break down our costs, figure out where we can reduce spending so that we can fix this company and make it prosperous once again. No sacrifice is too small, and none of us will be immune.

[pause for laughter]

Haha, yeah, I know, right? We already know how to cut costs, and it ain’t from our salaries and bonuses that’s for fucking sure. So, we’ll be moving manufacturing to… I don’t know, Mexico? China? The Marianas? Where-the-fuck-ever we can get away with paying people pennies an hour to do jobs we’re currently paying people like seven freaking dollars to do. That should buy us enough time to squeeze out maybe a few more years of ludicrous salaries and bonuses and shit from this sinking ship before they file chapter 11 and we bail.

Agreed? Good! Thought so.

Now, you might be wondering who’s going to be buying our products. There’s already a sharp decline in sales on account of the shit-show economy we’re mired in, and if we start laying off tens of thousands of our own employees, they’re not going to be able to afford to buy much. And, of course, none of those dumb fucks we’ll be paying pennies to manufacture this shit will be able to buy any of it either. I understand your concerns, but, well, for one thing, we don’t employ every goddamn person in this country. People who work in other places can still buy shit! Just as long as we’re among the first of the American businesses to carry out this plan, we’ll be a-okay. We just need to hope that EVERYONE doesn’t start doing this.

Plus, there’s always credit cards.

Besides, who gives two tugs on an old goat’s labia about them? We have money. That’s what we need to preserve, here, in all this. That’s what’s important. And honestly, what incentive do we really have to consider anything but our own prosperity at this point?

Jabberwock

You’ll be seeing a few changes to the site over the next few… uh… weeks? Months?

It’s been sort of long-neglected, for a handful of reasons, which I’ve already gone over in the past but which include: Being just incredibly busy with work and personal projects and trying to squeeze in some time occasionally to relax and hang out with friends; being burned out on politics and religion and kind of crushed by the futility of screaming against certain brick walls until they’re painted in the blood I’ve been coughing up; being generally depressed and lonely (until relatively recently, for some reason, and I think it has to do with feelings of fulfillment from the aforementioned personal projects, or maybe some other psychological thing is going on).

Now that I’m feeling a bit better and realizing once again that I don’t necessarily need to have all my content in the form of giant, well-reasoned essays, I’m going to try to put up at least one update a week.

But that’s beside the point.

The point is, there’s going to be a bit of a repurposing and redesign going on here. The redesign is mostly going to be a visual thing — at least when viewed from the front — but it’s going to simplify the layout a bit. I’m a fan of minimalism, and, well, if you look at that menu over on the left, that’s pretty far from minimalism. Too many categories and too much shit. Behind the scenes, I’m going to be building some interesting new shit. The way Dissections work will change, hopefully resulting in more frequent updates to those.

As for the repurposing, this site’s going to become sort of an aggregator for all the things I’m doing, pulling in content from my other sites and from my Twitter feed and etc, which will result in far, far, FAR more frequent updates. You’ll also get previews and information for things like iPhone apps I’ve just recently started developing, other projects and content I’ve been working on, a photo stream, a better way of serializing novels… and all of this with a simplified, intuitive interface that’s not like this huge list of semi-redundant shit and poorly-thought categorization. This site’s been kind of a beast (which, I guess, lives up to the “Jabberwock” name), which also contributed a little to my avoidance of it, but its rebirth is going to be great.

For right now, I have a few technical decisions I need to make, but you can expect the changes to begin within the next month or so. Especially the visual redesign, which is already underway.

Stay tuned!

Jabberwock

So many conservatives are so quick to condemn “elitism”, which is apparently, from what I’ve gathered, their term for when people actually educate themselves about the world around them so that they can develop a firmer and clearer understanding of something and then try to educate others so that the knowledge and clarity can spread.

Obvious anti-intellectualism and sour grapes aside, isn’t it so much worse, so much more arrogant and condescending and, dare I say, elitist to think that all you need is a small amount of information about something — information usually blindly accepted from a political or religious leader — in order to form and aggressively broadcast what you seem to feel is an expert opinion on it, as though your job learning is somehow completed that easily?

“I’m not a doctor, but Glenn Beck once described gallbladder surgery, which makes me even more of an expert than any doctor. That’s all I need to know is what I already know!”

“I’ve never studied economics, but I’ve learned all I need to know from maybe a dozen phrases repeated ad nauseum on FOX News. I heard all that and thought, ‘welp, I’m done learning! That’s all I need to hear!’ So now, I can tell you EXACTLY how to fix this recession. Because my understanding of the issue is definitive. What’s that? You’ve actually read economics textbooks? Taken some classes? Didn’t just refuse to keep learning once you got a single piece of information about the subject? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, YOU ELITIST. I’M the expert here!”

Jabberwock

Religious folk like to claim that lack of God begets a lack of morals, and to a certain extent they’re right. Only, it’s not secularism that causes the problems but rather instilling people with notions of magical punishments for their actions, hammering into them the import of doing good not for the sake of being a good person, of not doing harm to others because they understand harm, but for the sake of saving themselves from some fantastic damnation. And once that veil is pulled away, what’s the point? Once religion, once God is exposed as a fraud, then suddenly the impetus to do good out of fear is eliminated as well. And when you confuse morality with a system of religion, this can be really dangerous.

It’s similar to the way we approach other things, too: Like how we build up these mythical tales of marijuana use killing you on your first use, and destroying your life, and being so addictive and horrible that you’ll be ruined within months if you ever even think about smoking a joint. And then people actually end up smoking pot at some point in their lives and realizing it’s not even close to as bad as depicted, and in fact quite pleasant with seemingly few side effects with responsible use. And then it dawns on them that other drugs were depicted this way, too, so maybe it’s safe to give, say, heroin a go. Or crack. Hell, why not some crystal meth?

And that’s what the gateway is: Not some intrinsic property of the drugs themselves, but rather the way we condition ourselves as a species to think about things. We aren’t honest with ourselves because we don’t seem to be able to trust ourselves to be adults. (And it’s cyclical, of course: Treat someone like a child and they’ll become one.) We end up inventing all these little tricks to try to convince ourselves that intensely exaggerated and often outright invented repercussions will result from actions we’re afraid (sometimes with good reason — see: heroin) or uncomfortable to take. And in doing so, in lying to ourselves, we never fully grasp what the actual situations are, what the actual dangers are. All we do is prop up a bunch of facades of boogeymen and train ourselves to believe that if we do something “wrong”, they’re going to come alive at night and eat us.

And some people can only be tricked for so long.

When you find out that Santa Claus isn’t real, for how long do you continue kissing ass with your parents? The whole thing was just a device to get you to behave for an entire year for a single annual reward. There was always the threat of no presents at Christmas, because Santa doesn’t bring gifts to bad girls and boys. Only lumps of coal. And then you’re told it’s bullshit, and not only is the incentive to be artificially pleasant and complacent under almost any circumstance[1] throughout the year removed, but you’re also disillusioned with the system as a whole.

So what happens when you suspect that God isn’t real? The same God you’ve been kept in a state of perpetual childhood to believe in, to suspend your disbelief, to exhibit cognitive dissonance to such an extent as no rational adult in an enlightened, mature society would be capable? The same God who’ll burn you for an eternity — a fucking eternity — for something so much as lying to your parents? God doesn’t give heaven to bad girls and boys. Only lumps of coal. Lit. Up your asshole. Forever. What happens when you begin to suspect that maybe this whole system might not be real?

Some people can only stay children for so long.

[1] And this is what makes the whole Catholic kid-rape scandal particularly insidious is that these children are led to be complacent to appease God — who they’re told is represented by these men — and so they’re afraid to do anything out of fear that they’ll make God angry. Fucking disgusting.

Jabberwock

It’s good to see that the Pope is undeterred by all these “petty rumors” about how he facilitated the systematic sexual abuse of thousands of children. Because that’s what all of this is, right? Petty rumors. It doesn’t matter what documented, incontrovertible evidence says. That kind of shit is for suckers.

So, if raping and covering up the rape of children, in some cases repeatedly, is just a “petty rumor”, then what else can we get away with? I mean, if that’s a petty rumor, then surely shoplifting is nothing more than childish hearsay. Armed robbery? Maybe vindictive gossip. At best. And punching an old former-Hitler-Youth assbag in the balls until he can’t even fantasize about ever sitting down comfortably again without feeling like he’s going to vomit so hard from the lasting pain that his scrotum inverts would be, what, juvenile chatter?

Meanwhile, Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League and regrettably not just a long-since-washed stain in his mother’s panties, claims it would have been “heartless” for the Catholic church to do anything about the pedophilia among its priests. Surely, by logical extension, more heartless than raping children and then exacerbating the emotional and psychological scarring by making them completely helpless to do anything about what happened to them.

My dad — who doesn’t quite yet know I’m an atheist, for reasons I won’t get into here, though I think he suspects — recently told me (before the recent spate of evidence against the Pope and the church in general came forth) “you know, a little church never hurt anyone.” I don’t quite understand cognitive dissonance. I mean, the Inquisition alone — think of how many people were tortured to death by representatives of the Catholic church.

Yet somehow millions still think of this man, this organization, of representations of some kind of loving and benevolent God. Cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing. I can’t imagine knowing all of this and still failing to draw the connection that either this religion does not represent an actually loving God, or that the God of this religion really, really loves child rape.

Jabberwock

Anticipate being alone on Valentine’s Day? Don’t feel left out! Here’s a gift you can give yourself:

Possibly others to come. Sorry about the lack of posting — extremely busy and generally horribly depressed. I’m planning on making an effort to update this more frequently starting pretty soon, and turning it into an aggregator of sorts for some of the projects I’ve been working on.

Stay tuned! And sorry!

Jabberwock

Do me a favor and help my friend John get his new book made. I know I haven’t really been updating regularly here and have thus probably lost a shitload of readers and credibility at this point, but, well, his stuff is really good and it’d be awesome if you could help out. He’s already reached his goal (I intended to put this post up about a week ago but I’ve been crazy fucking busy lately — in mostly a good way, but kind of exhausting as well) but any extra would probably help out a lot. He’s a great guy, and it’s worth it.

You can find the info here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/john-sundman/creation-science

Thanks in advance!

Jabberwock

Boy, I sure am glad I don’t have to pay very slightly more in taxes. Sure does beat either having a relatively sizable portion taken out of my paychecks to cover my share of the insurance coverage my employer has selected for me, or having to pay an even larger sum out of pocket if I have no insurance at all! Now THAT’S what I call CHOICE!

Jabberwock

I find myself here having to apologize once more for infrequent updates. You know I love you guys, but everything’s been so busy and crazy and I think I’ve gotten into another of those lulls where I feel like my rage meter has sort of become all overwhelmed and stopped working properly. I still get really fucking angry about a number of things, but before I can think to write about them it just kind of bursts and sputters out and I can’t bring myself to give a shit about them. There are only so many times you can read about, for instance (among many), people for whatever reason earnestly defending insurance companies before your brain just kind of shits itself and says “fuck it, just play some video games or something for a while, I can’t do this right now”.

This has happened before, and passed, and I feel like this time it will as well, but while it persists my updates here are going to be relatively infrequent, and I’m sorry.

In the meantime, I’ve started a new webcomic that captures at least a portion of that anger. It’s incredibly lazy, and is all basically transcripts of conversations I have (mostly — and all to this point, at least — with my friend Tom who you may have seen in Rocket Man) throughout the day that I basically just copy/paste into the database to be spat out as a sort of pseudo-comic. It takes about three minutes of my time outside of the conversation itself, which would be happening anyway.

You can find it by visiting Human Mammal Dot Com or basically clicking on that link right there. There’s so much content that it’s going to be updated daily simply because if I didn’t I’d get this tremendous backlog of material that would necessitate me eventually putting up like eight posts a day or something just to keep up.

I want to keep providing you guys steady content, but it’s hard when I have to sit there and write out some long essay on top of everything else. So while I muscle through this terrible lull amidst my general existential angst and depressive issues, you can check that out. It’s still in beta and I know there are a bunch of bugs, and I’ll be adding more functionality soon, but it’s there and it wants you to look at it so please do.

MORE TO COME!

-The Mgt.

Jabberwock

I’m going to respond to the following comment on the front page, here:

commodorejohn said: Man, Jabberwock, you’re usually pretty good about being fair, but…damn. Is it that hard to acknowledge that at least some of us just don’t want the government running it? That maybe not everybody who’s opposed to your positions is some sort of capitalist-fetish lunatic who would fellate the corporate world if they could? Is it so hard to understand that some of us would just rather keep our options open than trust the federal government to look after our good health the way they look after our privacy and financial solvency? Christ.

Allow me to put this into perspective for you:

TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE in this country — myself included, along with some friends of mine, one of whom needs prescription meds filled on a regular basis — are LIVING WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE. Which means that we are either GOING WITHOUT HEALTHCARE, or we are BEING BANKRUPTED BY and CHARGED OUT THE ASS for NECESSARY MEDICAL EXPENSES.

Think about the private health insurance business model for a moment: The only way they can make any money is to ensure that their customers get as little coverage as possible. It’s not about actually providing anyone health coverage. The ultimate truth of the matter is that the insurance industry has absolutely NOTHING to do with healthcare — it’s just a middle man that exploits the fact that people need medical care throughout their lives in order to continue living.

Now, if our goal is to allow this particular rent-seeking industry to profit at the expense of human lives, then great — we’re doing an awesome job, and our system should be commended for getting a portion of the population to pay substantial amounts of money for a service where the bulk of what’s being paid goes toward ensuring that the customer doesn’t actually get the service they’re paying for through whatever loopholes are intentionally written into the policy. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! *trumpets* *fanfare* *Romanesque chariots being driven through rose-petal parades*

But if our goal is to actually ensure maximal healthcare availability to everyone, regardless of their income or employment status, then we’re total failures.

So we need to examine our priorities: It’s the insurance industry or it’s our health — we can’t have both, because the former ONLY THRIVES WHEN THEY DENY US THE LATTER. Do we provide healthcare, or do we facilitate the exploitation of human lives by the insurance industry? That’s what this is all about.

And then there’s the issue of workers’ rights. Businesses have a sort of bargaining wild card in that they can control whether or not you have health insurance. During any kind of negotiation for better pay (until they recently raised it, the Minimum Wage actually decreased in value, corrected for inflation, since the mid-1900s) or treatment or whatever else, a business can always threaten to take away employees’ health benefits.

Why should your boss have the power to decide whether you live or die? Whether you can get your cancer screening this month? Whether you can afford dialysis? And why should you be forced to stay at a job that’s unfair or unsafe or uncomfortable or that you otherwise hate just because if you leave, you might either a) not get health insurance at your next job, or b) not be able to get coverage after you lose your current plan because of a pre-existing condition?

And yeah, it’s easy to say “well I have insurance so why should I care?” but in this economy, maybe it’s a good idea to remember that no job is permanent.

So yeah, you might have health coverage right now, but that doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed it for the rest of your life. Under a single-payer healthcare system, you WOULD BE, whether you got laid off tomorrow or you were born with cancer or you just found out you have lupus or whatever else. And under our current system, that’s very much not the case. So why perpetuate it? Really, why?

Why pay deductibles? Why get less pay because your employer’s taking a cut out of it to pay for part of your insurance plan? Why pay for a service whose primary business model is to deny you that service?

Why?

So, yes, it really is “so hard to understand”. Especially when what you’re basically doing is condemning me and millions of others to death should we happen to not remain absolutely healthy until we hit our sixties and Medicare kicks in.

I completely respect your right to your opinions. I just don’t want them to kill me and tens of millions of other Americans is all.

Hope your job lasts forever, by the way. Good luck with that one. And if you do happen to get laid off or fired or too sick to work or your employer decides it has to cut back on your coverage or the myriad other things that can (and do, I’m sorry to say) go wrong, I really do hope that you and your then-uninsured family remain perfectly healthy until you can either find another job that offers health insurance or we can actually pass a plan that would guarantee you (and everyone!) healthcare.

Jabberwock