Here I sit…no…no wait.  perhaps quoting bathroom grafitti isn’t the best way to start a blog post.  Apologizing for not posting in a month also isn’t the best so I won’t do that either.  I do have something to apologize for but apologizing for that would seem so self serving.  I mean granted I’m definitely the centre of the universe (or at least in close proximity) but I don’t want to seem like a blow hard.

IN THE NEWS:

some Nigerian dude tried to down a plane.  This really isn’t interesting to me and so I really don’t have a lot to say about it.  What’s more interesting to me is the reaction of others and the response by nations which have done so much to attempt an increase in the effectiveness of their security at the expense of our rights.  It was the passengers and airline staff that caught this guy near the end of the flight, not the government which has done so much to intercept crazy idiots like this.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was on a terror watch list and from what I understand, it had been reported to the American authorities that he had been “radicalized” before the incident on Northwest Airlines flight 253.  everything was there and available for a paranoid nation to pounce on some one who likely had every intention of killing a bunch of people.  Oddly enough, in a post 9/11 world with hypersensitive and bloated law enforcement agencies running around in every corner of the country, not a single American saw fit to track this guy down and stop him from flying.

I think a part of this is linked in great part to an incredibly unjustified and unmanageable domestic security policy on the part of the United States.  It’s almost a schizophrenic kind of policy really.  in an attempt to make the nation free, people have to give up some general freedoms and bow to the wishes of the state who knows how best we must manage our security.  I dunno…I could make some hay of this one but three paragraphs is enough.  i guess I just don’t think this hypersensitive security stuff works and this is perhaps proof positive of that.

MUH TWUCK!:

My purple beast (No, not that one) and the trailer is being subjected to it’s biannual inspection.  Oddly enough, it seems it will only cost a few thousand dollars.  I was expecting it to a be a tad bit worse but hey, it’s all good.

I’ve been at home enjoying the holiday season by doing a lot of nothing and trying to figure out how much of something I can eat before it makes me sick.

This coming summer, I have a decision to make.  Should I lease a truck for a few months to add on to a second contract that is seasonal or buy another older truck to run the highway and attempt to find more work for it later on?  All in all, I really just want to figure out what will be the least amount of headache.

APOLOGIZE FOR WHAT?!

Earlier on (about two posts back) I posted that I would be funding a $5,000 KIVA lending account to help stimulate economic activity in third world nations.  unfortunately, I will not be able to live up to the commitment and I feel especially bad about that since some one by the name of Gary was inspired to find his own account due to my posting.

I got caught up in my own glee and was just ecstatic about being able to help people in a far off land in such a practical and ethical manner.  I kind of threw other considerations to the wind such as insurance premiums, cost of equipment repairs, unexpected work stoppages and so on.  As a result, I am only going to be able to fund a $1,000 account in the new year but I sincerely hope that over this coming year, I’ll be able to add to that amount in a very significant manner.

So, I do apologize to anyone who read my post regarding a $5,000 commitment to fund a KIVA lending account.  I can only live up to 20% of that obligation and I do honestly feel terrible about that.

UGANDA:

I’ve been hearing a lot about Uganda recently and have been horrified about the content of what I’ve heard.  If you haven’t heard recently, the Ugandan parliament is set to pass a bill that would include the death penalty for homosexuals “convicted” of certain homosexual acts.

Now, this has managed to stir up a lot of angry discussion and I’ve very glad to see religious groups, conservative groups, and others give it a wholesale kind of condemnation.  Sweden is even threatening to remove foreign aid should the bill pass.  Though no one has been convicted of homosexual acts in Uganda, (Anti-homosexual laws are already on the books) this kind of law would make it entirely possible for hate filled people driven by fear and ignorance to take the lives of people for absolutely no good reason what so ever.

what is perhaps most disturbing is that religious groups inside Uganda are pushing the bill like it’s in danger of going out of style…which it already has one would hope.  Showing how dangerous religious ignorance can be, there are even Christian leaders in the nation who fervently believe that Uganda should cut diplomatic relations with other countries that want Uganda to accept homosexuals as regular citizens like every one else.  In other words, if the world isn’t as backward thinking as yourself, ignore it and cut down the number of dissenting voices you will hear.  Ignorance knons no enemy like diverse opinion and intellectual exploration.

Only the most horrid, wicked and vile people could talk of loving homosexuals and propose their potential death at the same time as Ugandan Member of Parliament David Behati does.  He is a rotten human being who has both accepted the responsibility of leadership among his people and cast aside any semblance of responsible intelligent thinking.  He and his ilk are frankly a disgrace.

ARROW TRUCKING (Tulsa, OK):

I realize that this will not affect many people but it hits close to home for those in my chosen field of work.

Imagine working for a company and being given no hint that you’re about to be laid off.  Imagine being hundreds of miles away from home and finding out quite suddenly that you are laid off.  imagine that you find out not via a short meeting, a phone call or even a text message.  Imagine finding out when you make your own phone call to ask why your fuel card doesn’t work as you stand next to a fuel pump with a near empty fuel tank.  No one’s on the other end, just a short recorded message telling you to turn in your truck to get a bus ticket to get back home.

This is how hundreds of drivers found out that their employer, Arrow Trucking out of Tulsa Oklahoma, had laid them off.  It’s a terribly cruel manner of telling people that their jobs are no longer there.

Larger companies that operate on paper thin profit margins can experience huge upsets when the price of fuel changes by only a few cents.  for drivers, this puts them at risk of losing their jobs at any minute should they be working for a company that is unable to absorb increased costs of business in a very competitive field.  That being said, poor management is often the reason for larger firms not being able to absorb said costs.

I’m quite sad to hear of the fate suffered by Arrow Trucking drivers.  I sincerely hope that many of them aren’t caught in an employment gap because of this.  As for Doug Peilsticker, the former owner of the now defunct company, I hope that he is properly called out for letting his company go to shambles after the reputable stewardship it was privileged to under his late father Jim.

On the plus side, I did hear of a number of companies seeking out the laid off drivers as priority hires and others seeking out Arrow Trucking drivers at truck stops offering up sandwiches or even assistance getting home.

MORE MARIJUANAPHOBIC MORONS:

Recently, a study was published that suggested that cannabis use in adolescents may have irreversible long term negative affects.  Linking cannabis use to schizophrenia, depression and anxiety, the authors concluded that cannabis use possibly disrupts the development of the serotonin and norepinephrine systems in growing young folk.

The trick?  They weren’t studying THC or cannabanoids present in cannabis.  They tested the effects of a chemical called WIN55,212-2.  If you’re wondering what it is, it’s something that causes the body to react in ways that are similar to how one would react if one ingested a similar cannabnoid found in cannabis but to a much more notable degree.  It is structured entirely differently than any cannabanoid found in cannabis and comparing it to THC is kind of like comparing apples to oranges concluding that since both are fruits, they must be the same.

I’m awfully tired of this horrid and desperate want within the scientific community to find facts that support an agenda.  Whether it be about drugs or creation science, I really am becoming resentful of scientists who claim to be ethical while engaging in study that is plainly deceptive and often driven by an agenda.

Could people just get over weed already?  Please?

So there it is…about a month worth of blogging or so.  there’s more but my fingers are bleeding.  G’night!

I went to see Inglourious Basterds a while ago and all I can say is that it was one of Tarentino’s best films to date.  Those that can’t appreciate the style of this director may not like the movie but anyone with an affinity for Pulp Fiction should understand where he’s coming from.  But the reason I’m not commenting further is because that’s it…it’s a great movie and I don’t feel compelled to say anything beyond that.  There are however three other movies (two I would call films) that have struck me in one way or another in a much more profound manner.

THE CAPITALISTS:

Michael Moore’s new exceptionally biased flash of idiocy to hit the screen, Capitalism: A Love Story is all about a capitalist who complains endlessly about capitalism.  Not only is Moore hypocritical in this movie, he also fails to own up to his hypocrisy.

That aside, he rails against corporate interests which have ruined his nation and does an incredible job of it too.  He outlines exactly what kind of corporate influence not only works on Washington today, but how it has managed to engineer financial calamity to its own benefit and continues to do so.  The movie lays out in a clear manner, how the little guy is screwed over by the big guy and government.

Moore also reveals a little known concept about “dead peasant” insurance that while not necessarily creating a victim, is pretty darned creepy.  I’ve known about this for some years and frankly, didn’t really care about it but even I have to admit that a company having a life insurance policy out on me without my knowledge is kinda creepy.

Where Moore falters is blaming corporate interests for the failures of government.  Even dead peasant policies wouldn’t exist had government not created a tax break ensuring their existence.  In his stinging indictment of corporate greed and capitalist enterprise, Moore fails to incite the population into taking their government back from the corporations it has been given away to.  In fact, without realizing it, Moore isn’t even railing against capitalism as much as he is very effectively indicting fascism in his own nation.  Moore fails to convey that all the evils he spells out could not have been achieved without the cooperation of government.

Finally, on a number of occasions, Moore appeals to figures from the Catholic Church to explain the sin of capitalism.  I’m not sure if Moore has looked at the Vatican recently, but it’s no Hebrew hovel, that’s for sure.

Moore continues to tell half truths and engage in disingenuous arguments to fatten his own wallet whilst engaging in an entertaining style of story telling.  It’s what I expected.

6/10

THE NAZIS:

I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of the 1942 Wannsee Conference reenacted in the 2001 movie, Conspiracy; but if you haven’t, it’s a very important historical event that set in motion, a series of events that would change the entire world forever.  These events, collectively, are often referred to as the holocaust.

In 1942, fifteen high ranking German officers and bureaucrats sat around a table and in unapologetic, plain spoken language, proceeded to work out the details of a plan to eliminate my ancestral roots from the face of the planet.  It was a meeting held in secret, but treated as simply another important order of business for those in attendance.

In this meeting, the attendees express dissatisfaction with field methods of killing Jews, laughed at how gas turned the bodies pink, went to great pains to determine how to segregate Germans with dominant Jewish blood and aspired to killing tens of thousands per day.

What struck me so incredibly about the movie was not the connection it has to my own background as an ethnic Jew, but rather the sheer humanity of it.  It’s easy to call those who attended the meeting monsters or to think of them as evil phantoms in history; but they were very simply flesh and blood human beings who did terrible things.

In this startling glimpse into the past, it becomes so terribly apparent that what can be done in the name of civility and progress, can so easily be twisted into regression and barbarism.

I could have done without the British accents.

9/10

THE QUEER FOLK:

Milk is an incredible film and I have to admit, I almost teared up at the end.

there are any number of stories out there about the gay struggle for equality and acceptance and one of the most fascinating among them is the story of Harvey Milk.  The employee of an Insurance company who becomes a hippie in his 40′s, he achieves the first election victory of any openly homosexual man in the United States ahead of a massive culture war led by Christian organizations seeking to snuff out homosexuals rights.

What’s incredible about the film is that there is no apology offered for the faults of Harvey Milk and seemingly not attempt to white wash his life.  As some one with a touch of political activism in my own way of life, it’s incredibly gratifying to see some one who is so normally and beautifully flawed to successfully fight such an incredible battle for so many who deserve to be treated as human beings.

From beginning to end, Milk expresses so much feeling and I can’t help but feel an incredible amount of empathy for homosexuals in our frighteningly recent history who were treated so terribly.  I hate seeing inequality and I despise government enforcing antiquated moralistic judgments on people who simply want to live their lives.  Harvey Milk seemed to have a distaste for the same thing and though he was a left wing liberal hippie, I think I would have enjoyed having a chance to meet such an incredible giant of history.

10/10

The title is a Star Trek reference.  Just wanted to make sure y’all knew that.  Weren’t tribbles awesome?  Another thing you may want to know about this entry is that it will contain some potentially exceptionally offensive language and descriptive situations regarding homosexuality.  In short, you’re a terrible parent if you’ve just found this in your kid’s browsing history…because you’re snooping.  Screw off man!

I’ve talked about how trucking has its ups and downs and about how I do enjoy it a great deal.  The common fair criticisms that are directed toward truckers get old and meaningless after a short while and you learn to deal with public misconceptions as a simple fact of life.  There are stereotypes that hold quite true however and homophobia in the trucking industry is one I have seen to be exceptionally well preserved.  Racism is also a powerful element within the trucking industry but it’s a complicated issue that is not motivated by simple hatred of a different skin colour.  It’s a different issue that I may delve into one day on this blog but for today, I’ll post about a particular story I was told by a fellow who’s word I wouldn’t doubt for a moment.  His Hell’s Angels tattoos and what he claims to be scars left by bullet wounds are quite a testimonial to his life’s history.  It’s a rough one.  No one can tell it quite like him though so I’ll simply quote his story from what I can remember of it.

One night when I was down in ________ state, I passed another truck on the interstate and he flashed his brights at me to signal I had room to pull back into the driving lane.  About two or three minutes later, he came up to speed and passed me.  After I flicked my brights to show him he had enough room to come back into the driving lane, he pulled in and flashed his marker lights and tapped on his brakes.  Right after that, he pulled off onto an off ramp.

Being a highway driver, i wasn’t sure what was going on.  Was something wrong with my truck?  Did I cut him off?  What was the deal?  So I followed him off the interstate and he had parked in a small truck stop parking lot.  He was kinda at the back where it wasn’t well lit.  So I pulled up beside his truck and parked.

I pulled my air brakes and right away heard my passenger’s side door latch clicking.  I always lock my passenger’s side door so I leaned over, unlocked the door and sat back and grabbed my hickory stick; the thing we use for clunking our tires when we do a circle check eh?  So he opens the door, steps up on my running board and puts his elbows on my passenger’s seat.  What he said at that point simply took me absolutely off guard.

“Hi Driver.”

“What’s up?  Is there a problem here or something?”

“Well no driver.  I just thought maybe you would like a blow job.”

Well I couldn’t believe it.  I hesitated for a second and after it sunk in what he had said, I took my hickory and whomped him over the head with it.  It was a good crack, like he had blood coming out of his forehead eh?  So after a second, he fell backward into the lot and I got out.  I walked around my truck and his eyes had rolled back into his head.  He was pretty fucked up eh?  So I’m thinkin’ “aw shit.  He’s screwed” and wouldn’t you know it, a cop car comes off the offramp with his cherries flashing.

So It’s a state trooper or whatever eh?  He gets out of his car, walks up the side of the truck and sees buddy there laying on the ground twitching around and me with this hickory in my hand.

“What happened here?” he says

“Well officer.  This guy came onto me and sexually kinda come onto me and I’m not that way so I said no.  I told him to get the hell out of my truck and I guess he slipped and hit his head on the way down.” I told him.

“That’s your story?” He said to me eh?

“Yup.”

So the trooper looks at the guy down on the ground and by this time he’s starting to come around and makin’ kinda loud noises.

“You wanna press charges then?”

“You know what officer?  I’m just driving out here, I’m from Canada and I don’t really wanna go through the trouble.”

So the trooper looks at the guy on the ground and just lays a fuckin’ boot to his head eh?  Just fuckin’ *CRACK* like it looked like it hurt.  Guy starts makin’ more loud noises and the state trooper looks down and says,

“Dirty faggot.  You should get out of here then and keep on your rout.  You don’t want to be late for your delivery down the road.”

And so I fucked off.  Oh man, they’re everywhere down there; fuckin’ homos.  You ever hear on the CB, “Anyone lookin’ for a good buddy?” you don’t give those fuckers a come back.  they’ll fuckin’ hunt you down and insist on doin’ something if you reply.

So it’s a hell of a story and like I mentioned, considering where it came from, I don’t doubt its veracity.  It may be exaggerated in some bits seeing as embellishing a story is as natural among truckers as it is among Klingons recounting their battles against Star Fleet when there was no alliance.

Too nerdy to be a trucker?  Possibly.

Anyway, whether or not the story is true doesn’t really matter.  It’s equally as disturbing either way.  I joke from time to time about how “the gay” has infected my blog or about how I fear being raped in a dark ally by a marauding band of interior decorators but these are just humorous asides.  I have nothing at all against homosexuals and I’m frankly flattered if I get hit on by a fellow.  I’m not afraid of homosexuality but among the trucking profession, homophobia and the worst kind of fear is typically expressed through anger or even violence visited upon those who own up to being what they are.  Essentially, admitting openly to being homosexual and accepting something that takes some courage to admit to yourself to begin with is violently discouraged in the trucking industry.  Not only is it sad, it’s frankly a little shocking to my conscience.

There have been many conversations in which I fall silent or recuse myself from completely because not only will I fail to make any friends, I may quite easily make some enemies.  Whether it’s a professed desire to kill homosexuals, burn East Indians to death locked in mosques or how it is that Canada is being ruined by foreign cultures, there are many disturbing ideals that are carried throughout the trucking industry by many drivers.

I can’t end it there however.  I can’t just leave it at this or you’ll think trucking is a terrible cesspool for the most outrageous ignorance about.  While I may not be able to say this is the exception rather than the rule, I can say that these odd ideals are faced frequently with common sense and individual admissions that perhaps these ideas are not the right ones.  In other words, get drivers together in a group and you’ll hear stories like the one above.  Talk to them individually and you may get something much more reasonable or even entirely different.  In the trucking industry, I have met the most extraordinary people around in some cases and in others, just an average Joe.

The trucking industry is full of people and people are no different in the end really from job to job.  I’m not trying to make truckers out to be ignorant people fuelled by hate because we’re not.  I think it’s important however for the industry to recognize that there are a number of counterproductive prejudices that run deep within the profession that haven’t had a chance to be dealt with by and large.  Why that is, I’m not sure but it’s obvious that they are ever present.

So to end this lengthy post, I’ll leave you with a fond childhood memory that produced many a laugh.  Thanks to Saturday Night Live and creators Robert Smigel and JJ Sedelmaier, you too can enjoy an episode or two of The Ambiguously Gay Duo featuring Gary and Ace.

Ambiguously Gay Duo – It Takes Two To Tango – Watch more Funny Videos

I was all in a huff about something and I still am but in the spirit of posting something to tickle the humour muscles from time to time, please check out this important broadcast explaining why it is that homosexuals should not serve in the American military.  I personally find the basis of this position to be quite compelling.

Tip o’ the hat to The Gay White North.

Yes, a Winnipeg doctor refused treatment for a lesbian couple because they like to uhh…well I don’t actually know exactly what lesbians do because I don’t believe pornography to be overtly realistic.  I guess I have a basic idea?  Anyhow, whatever it is lesbians do, (massive bake offs in their bedrooms?) it offends the sensibilities of one backwards woman in Winnipeg who professes to be a doctor.  She came over from Egypt where she says she never had to even consider this type of thing.  Obviously, lesbians are exclusive to the western world and don’t exist in Egypt.

So here’s the rub.  I don’t care if a doctor refuses to treat some one because of their sexual orientation.  Well actually I care and I think it’s ignorant but I don’t think a doctor should have to face government intervention because they don’t like to treat homosexuals.  Unfortunately, in Canada it’s currently necessary because this doctor works in a public system and not a private one.  If we had competing medical services, this wouldn’t be a big problem.

This numb skull seems to think that because she has some backward ideas about the sensibility of sexual freedom, she should be able to pick and choose who she serves as a medical doctor.  I think she should be able to as well…and I would definitely not pick some one as my family doctor who displays such an incredible level of stupidity.  This is one of the best qualities of medical services in a free market.  Douche bags like this either find themselves shut out of the market or with a significantly reduced chance at possible major success in their field.  It’s hard to take some one seriously when they let sexual orientation influence their medical practise.

Lezzies rock on video and in real life, they’re almost as cool as I am.  That is to say, they’re just like every one else.  Stupid doctors who let religious zealotry influence their medical career are not nearly as cool as the rug munchers and need to be set free…into a wood chipper.

Hat tip to Laura because local news isn’t nearly as cool as her.