TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• The three libertarians (01/06/09)
• Thoughts on the party conventions (09/05/08)
• Why I'm against Hillary (01/07/08)
• Our present epidemic (12/06/07)
• Another reason to hate the Yankees (10/04/07)
• The strange weight-class realignment (09/11/07)
• Internet comment culture (08/26/07)
• Transformers: The next insult (06/11/07)
• Contempt (05/31/07)
• Another blow to my trust in the left (04/25/07)
• The media and Virginia Tech (04/20/07)
• 15 British sailors (04/03/07)
• The mote in New York's eye (03/28/07)
• The problem with parties (02/28/07)
• It's gonna get worse in Iraq (12/20/06)
• Soy and me, one year later (11/30/06)
• My Christmas list (11/08/06)
• Highly paid murderers (02/07/06)
• Who's afraid of Eric Ford? (10/27/05)
• America from the outside (09/10/05)
• Milk (06/25/05)

There are some things that they all agree on. They all agree that the drug war is a failure and that adults should have the right to decide what they do to their own bodies. They all agree that trade is good; they all value low taxes and efficient government spending. They all agree the internet should remain unregulated. Actually, other than that, I can't think of much else. It is difficult to nail down the philosophy of the roughly 300k capital-L Libertarians who vote for that ticket in every election. Like any other political party, their world contains much debate and disagreement. Because disaffected Democrats and Republicans constantly meander in and out of this club, pulling them one way or the other, it's hard for them to put forward a clear, coherent political vision for America. Ron Paul came very close to achieving that, but he had two shortcomings: 1, that he caucuses with the Republicans, and 2, that he is obviously somewhat nuts. Which, unfortunately, is the impression many Libertarians give people. When I last chaired a polling place in 2006, a tall, chubby, hairy Libertarian man stomped into the building, yelled at us for disenfranchising his party, and stormed out again in a huff.

It's more fun to compare the other two groups: those who tack consistently to the political left or right.

I'll call the lefties the Bill Maher Libertarians, though privately I would call them "confused." They are basically Democrats. They believe in free markets... as long as there are no recessions and they don't cause global warming or inhibit fair trade. They believe politicians like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are more socially liberal than they claim to be, and they believe these politicians' (misleading) claims to fiscal conservatism. They think national borders are quaint and that anybody should be able to enter and leave any country as he pleases. They think an Anything Goes culture is good and the inevitable destiny of the world. They recognize the benefits of cultural interaction, therefore they like multiculturalism and immigration. They are mostly anti-religious, think Christians are dumb rednecks, blame all wars on religion, and think religion is ruining America and the world: see Bill Maher's Religulous. They admit that radical Islam is a problem, but they distrust most methods for combating it and think Christianity and Judaism are equally dangerous.

Bill Maher Libertarians consider themselves intellectual and smart, and think that Bush and Republicans are stupid. They are anti-war. They're angry at the Democrats for consistently supporting Bush's "shredding of the Constitution" and warrantless wire-tapping. They're also angry at Democrats for pretending to be against gay marriage. It is for these reasons they don't call themselves Democrats.

The Neal Boortz Libertarians are those who vote Republican, like the radio personality Neal Boortz. They don't trust Republicans, but consider Democrats far worse. They hated the Big Bailout of 2008. They suspect man-made global warming is a hoax to enable big government, and suspect that environmentalism generally is an instrument for social control. They believe in a constitutional, individual right to gun ownership. They are privately against abortion, but horrified by the modern explosion of single-parent households. They have nothing against gays, but don't believe gays have earned status as a minority group with special privileges (or that any group should have special privileges, for that matter).

Neal Boortz Libertarians believe that capitalism and American freedoms are products of a unique American culture, and that out-of-control multiculturalism, relativism and immigration have the potential to permanently distort, perhaps even destroy this culture. Thus, they are for secure borders, controlled immigration and "melting pot" assimilation. For the same reason, they are friendly to religion and the values it traditionally promotes -- even if they themselves are not religious. At the same time, they believe Islamofascism is a real existential threat to Western civilization and that it must be defeated. They may not have supported going to Iraq, but they understand the dire consequences of pulling out at the wrong time.

If you think I just described the Democratic and Republican parties, you may be right. Which is why I avoid self-applying the term Libertarian. But how can I assign myself to one of the major parties with a straight face? My uncle said it best last Summer: "I was a Republican... until they started nationalizing everything." Both parties have lost their principles. No wonder so many people would rather retreat to a third one that few know anything about.

Why does Sarah Palin continue to brag that she said "thanks, but no thanks" on the Bridge To Nowhere, when I can learn in under five minutes searching the web that she actually supported it?

Giuliani's speech was entertaining, smart, and well delivered; and its nastiness and exaggeration demonstrated why he could never and should never be elected president.

Why did we know within hours that Sarah Palin's daughter is pregnant, yet the media refused to report for months on John Edwards' affair? Likewise, the media are right to examine Palin's "Troopergate," and wrong not to investigate Obama's record on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Both parties really like the sound of "Energy Independence," but it's like a modern pop song: it sounds pretty slick the first time you hear it, but the more closely you listen the more you discover how empty and stupid it is.

I can now recite the entire story of McCain's POW years by rote, even though I've never read Faith of My Fathers. It gets tiring listening to his story, because nobody can tell it quite like he can. The way he told it during his acceptance speech, as a horrific transformation from a cocky flyboy to a humbled patriot, was the most gripping I've ever seen McCain, a far cry from his boring Daily Show guest rants.

Fred Thompson is a hell of a speaker, almost as good and convincing as Bill Clinton (and I've seen Bill Clinton speak). Mike Huckabee is a moving speaker, too. He had probably the best line of the night: "I'm not a conservative because I was born rich... I'm conservative because I didn't want to be poor the rest of my life." Sarah Palin is a hard individual not to like, and she is a compelling personality. The weakest speaker at the GOP convention, in fact, was John McCain.

Liberal pundits argue that Palin has no experience, as if being mayor of a small town "doesn't count" and being governor of a state is no longer valid because, "Well, Bush was a governor and look where he got us." I've read arguments that she has no foreign policy cred, but what governor does? And, Palin isn't at the top of McCain's ticket -- as VP she will get "on the job" training, so to speak. She won't have to take the phone call at 3:00AM. It's perfectly reasonable, I think, to assume McCain will live all the way through a term, maybe two, as president.

Obama claims foreign policy expertise on the grounds that he was against going into Iraq in 2003, even though the efforts of David Petraeus, Robert Gates, and our active military have achieved such a turnaround in the past year that Nouri Al-Maliki is setting dates for our departure, meaning we have successfully replaced a monstrous despot with an effective, democratic government. This fact undermines the premise of Obama's candidacy. I know there's an argument that wars of choice are always wrong, but this was not Obama's premise, and for most Americans I've spoken to over the years, there was a sense that Hussein was evil and had to be taken out sooner or later, and the real question on the war came down to results and what happened after Hussein was gone.

It's true that Democrats are allergic to discussing radical Islamic terrorism. But the Republicans have not adequately explained why independent voters should care. They beat their chests and treat Obama like a chicken, but they don't tell us the genuinely frightening stories about what is happening outside of America: they don't talk about the civilian beheadings in the Middle East, or the way radical Muslim groups are using the legal system and Human Rights Tribunals of un-elected bureaucrats to dismantle freedom of speech in Europe and Canada. We've heard nothing about the Danish cartoonists who must live the rest of their lives under police protection because of fatwas. This stuff scares the hell out of me -- and it should scare everybody! It's not "fear-mongering" if it's based on fact, so why not give us, you know, the facts? We're supposed to take Republicans' word for it that the United Nations is evil, anti-Semitic, and hopelessly corrupt, but they never give us the juicy details. It's all there, but McCain and friends are not talking about it.

Neither Obama nor McCain can speak credibly about bread-and-butter matters like energy (where do we get the money to create all these new energy sources?), economics (how do we make the dollar strong again?), entitlements (who is going to pay for all these retiring baby boomers?), health care (they both stated where they stand, but offered no tangible ideas), or immigration (not even mentioned). I suspect this is because most of the things politicians will have to do in the next four years are not what voters want to hear. The government will have to tighten its belt where it hurts -- not just by trimming earmarks, which aren't a large part of the budget. Republicans seem to understand this on some level, and John McCain almost certainly does, which is one reason I'm leaning toward him, but they also understand that if they come out and say these things, they'll be perceived as pessimists and get browbeaten in November. So, instead they spout the same baloney as Obama and the Democrats, but McCain isn't as good an actor as Obama is.

Because of this I'm beginning to understand why so many non-political people look more at the character and personality of presidential candidates than at policies. Though politicians will say any nonsense necessary to get elected, moments come along when they reveal themselves. When Obama spoke of his grandmother as a "typical white person," minor as it was, it changed the way I saw him. What kind of person talks about his grandmother that way? On the other side, McCain recently said that his greatest moral failing was the collapse of his first marriage: as a child of divorce, that says something to me too. Both of these admissions were made by choice. Nobody forced McCain or Obama to say that. But I digress. Back to the conventions...

Both parties failed to make their case. The biggest difference between the parties, which was quite clear, was governing philosophy, an area where the conservatives' notion of "Western style" unobtrusive government was far more powerful to me -- but again, they did not need to convince me, but rather, the people who need to hear something more specific about their lives than vignettes about single parents and volunteers.

Conventions are kind of like previews: there are the ones for comedies and bad action flicks where you see all the good parts, and they're better than the movie... and there are those like the Alien preview where all you see are vague hints and an egg cracking open, and you have no idea what to expect. This year's conventions were like the latter.

Hillary Clinton is such a robot with the added bonus that I disagree with most of her governing philosophies. I don't cotton to this whole motherly-government thing. I don't like this "mandated health insurance" bullshit. I'll credit Ms. Clinton for being tough, driven, and smart, but what else is there to admire?

I've lost my respect for Bill and Hillary. The nail in the coffin was when our former president went on television to beat up on Obama, then went on to do it on the campaign trail. Talk about trading on the dignity and prestige of the office -- Bill has prostituted it. It was below a president to do that; at least Gerald Ford waited until after he was dead a la Tupac. Then, of course, there's the way Hillary has been using him to advertise herself. After all he's put her through, I don't sympathize with Bill having to fly red-eye around the country campaigning for her gratis. But it shows that Hillary can't stand on her own merits if she can't win without exploiting the star power of her husband. In a few months, Bill has killed the last of the good feelings about him I had leftover from the easy '90s.

Hillary's experience argument is tired and lame; Hillary is foolish to say her lifetime in Washington equips her to do any good. She hasn't even been truly governing for 29 of the 35 years experience she lays claim to. When George W. Bush became president, he appointed many old Washington figures like Cheney and Rumsfeld to run the nation and the world for him because he didn't have the brains to do it himself or the courage to reduce the role of America's government. Lest we forget, the first six years of his administration sucked. It's somewhat better now because he brought in Gen. Petraeus and Robert Gates, and because he's learned how to veto bills other than stem cell research grants (he'd probably sign all the bills he's vetoed if they were sponsored by his own party but otherwise identical).

Hillary's campaign strategy against Obama reminds me of Dubya and Rove's tactics against John Kerry in '04. It's all about fear and character assassination. She says the president must be ready on "Day One" in office, and only she can do this because of her 8 years as first lady. What, will Obama spend his first day in the Oval Office playing Nintendo games? Then Hillary had the audacity to say that of all the candidates, she is "my goodness -- the most innocent!" Call me paranoid, but I suspect that's a reference to Obama's admissions of past drug use. Sorry Hillary, but you can be squeaky clean and do no wrong, and still have no soul; see Captain Ahab.

But criticisms and tear-downs don't stick to Obama. He's too likable, too nice. It also comes off as stupid to smear him for things he openly admits to. When that failed, she ripped off Obama's message. Now Hillary is the "change agent," the real candidate for change. Are you kidding me? I guess Hillary missed elementary school, where one learns that such games don't work on people. But that's the problem with her campaign, with her persona: it feels 100% contrived, committee-written, mechanical (they don't call it a political machine for nothing), next to Obama's organic, free-flowing candidacy. Obama sells himself; Hillary hires professionals to sell her. That makes a world of difference.

Which is why, if nominated, she will lose. It doesn't matter who the GOP nominates. Hillary thinks people hate her because she's a Clinton, because of a curse on her and her husband, but she can't see that it's the kind of person she is, not what she represents and not even the name, that turns others off. I can't stand the sense of entitlement in her campaign, the way her whole life and her service in the Senate seem plotted as a path to the presidency. That's not democracy.

Politics is people over policies. I support Obama at this point even though he has almost no platform and what little agenda he has offered doesn't entice me. Going on policies alone, there is no candidate I would vote for. But it's time to think about what kind of person I want to be the leader of this country. A calculating, power-thirsty, big-government bully like Hillary and all the GOP candidates (except Ron Paul)? A joker like John Edwards? Pass. Obama has demonstrated in Iowa that he can move people, perhaps the number 1 requisite in any leader, especially a president. He's friendly, but strong. I look at him and I think of Jimmy Stewart, even though his tenure in the senate has been no Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Politics is people because we all disagree on paper. Two-thirds of the population wants something different from the other third, and it takes an uncommon personality to convince people to cooperate. Obama possesses this tool; Hillary doesn't. But she doesn't get that.

In the last debate, Hillary was awful: angry, whiny, and obnoxious, exactly like the stereotypes of her. Is this who we want sitting down with Vladimir Putin to discuss Iran's nuclear program? She has wounded herself while attacking Obama, and even if she wins the nomination, the damage has been done. She can't beat any of the Republicans at this point. The more she smears him, the more she will be hated for what she did to him if she succceeds.

If the Republicans had someone like Obama, I'd be open to voting for him, but they don't. Personalities like his are rare, and I like the idea of putting a writer in the White House. Republicans are out of touch with Americans, and so are the Clintons. For both, the focus of this election race is themselves, not the rest of us ants. One can tell from watching Hillary interview and debate that she wishes she could just order us to vote for her; most politicians just want to tell us how they will govern and we'd better shut up and like it. Obama's ideas for the White House will be disliked by many, maybe even me, but at least he has promised to listen to people instead of his ego. Nobody else has tried that, and they won't this year.

I see this headline almost weekly now, it seems. I always notice it; I refuse to accept it as commonplace even though that's the road we're headed down. Guess who put us there?

If your answer was "'24 hour news' or simply 'the media,'" take a gold star. Remember the coverage of the Virginia Tech killer in April? I sure do. I remember how they indulged all his video-game fantasies, printing his pictures and letters on the front page, showing his home video on TV.

Is it just me, or have these killings become way more frequent since then? Now every angry loser with an axe to grind is copying the stereotype and punishing the rest of us for living, before demonstrating that he (and it's always a male) is somehow above it all because he blows his tiny brain out at the end.

These young men have no way to distinguish themselves, no talents and no friends, and they're too lazy and cowardly to experience real action and danger by joining the military. But now the media have enabled them: all you have to do is kill several people, plus yourself, and you get on the front page. Since these idiots know they have no value as human beings, their own oversized heads are an acceptable price to pay for a few days of attention. They don't wait around for a trial, prison, etc., because they have nothing to say. They'd probably kill only themselves, but then nobody would notice... boo hoo.

I wish this would stop. I think that if the media started ignoring these freaks, they'd find something slightly less evil to waste their time with, like working for tow truck companies.

And we pay the New York Yankees. According to the Metro New York newspaper, the city government has paid over $700,000,000 in subsidies for the construction of the new Yankee stadium since the project began. After all, there's not enough money going around in the sport of baseball to pay for such an extravagance. I've never attended a Yankees game and will not unless they're playing a team I can root for, so why do I have to pay for their new stadium?

This morning I awoke to the delightful report in the same newspaper that the Yankees were given $25 million of our taxes for "planning costs" for the stadium. They spent it on partying, duh. Excuse me, but the whole American Revolution was fought over taxation without representation. This doling out of my tax dollars to the Yankees is without the consent of me, the governed.

Meanwhile, Isiah Thomas now joins the club of victims of character assassination, the current national pasttime. Anucha Browne Sanders sued him and his colleagues for millions of dollars for sexual harassment because she lost her job. When she was fired (firing people is an evil capitalist practice done only by greedy CEOs), she was forced to relocate to Buffalo, NY and take a job for half of her previous $260,000/year salary. Boo effin' hoo. Oh, and she claims she was sexually harassed, too.

The battle calls were sounded: time to hawk this into a big sexual harassment spectacle, because jurors will sympathize with that (even with dubious evidence of its truth) even if they don't really care if someone got fired. These people are dripping with cash, anyway, so they must be evil and deserve to be taken for as much as possible whether or not they really did it. Since Isiah Thomas is a basketball legend, he was placed in the center of the whole charade to pet America's erogenous zone for watching the great brought low. Sorry, but I'm a Pistons fan, and I don't believe that B.S. about Isiah Thomas.

After winning the (enormous) settlement, Ms. Sanders, with a huge smile on her face, cheered that she had won a victory for all women and that's what this was really about. Of course! It was never about the money.

The neighborhoods of highest diabetes rates were New York's poorest, like the Bronx and parts of Harlem and Brooklyn. It didn't surprise me. Poor people these days tend to be fatter than rich people, a switch from the old days. (As a side note, this is a particularly American trend.)

It's not their fault. The abysmal health of our nation's poor comes from a number of factors -- and I'm not going to launch a political argument about socialized medicine.

Today, despite (or perhaps because of) public education, the poor are far less educated. Public schools in bad Detroit neighborhoods are another planet from the public schools of rich suburbs. More educated people tend to be versed not only in academics, but in health and wellness. I think it's silly that this is taught in schools rather than the home, but that's how it is right now. As a kid, I was exposed to a solid share of information about how to stay healthy, like avoiding fast food and staying active.

Bigger than that, though, is the food available. Expensive food is usually healthier than cheap food, of course. A salmon filet is more expensive than a cheeseburger. Organic food is more expensive than industrial food. The poor simply can't afford to buy high quality meat and produce. The stuff they can get in supermarkets is high in chemical content, synthetic nutrients and hormones, and low in naturally occurring proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins and so forth. Whole Foods doesn't give a damn -- in New York, they set up shop in only the most affluent quarters (almost one store every 5-10 blocks in midtown). They ignore the boroughs, where the working class lives. After all, those commoners wouldn't appreciate fine food anyway, right? Whole Foods caters to the Starbucks-chugging kids living here on their parents' fortunes who think their lives are like Friends.

Fitness centers and gyms are also hardly available to the poor. I'm lucky to have a big discount at the local gym through my job. Before I had this job, I wouldn't have seriously considered paying for a gym membership. I certainly couldn't afford it in Rome, where I lost weight and became weak and frail over the course of a year lived at subsistence. I consider moderate weight-lifting and aerobic exercise integral to good health. At the gym I've started going to, I never see any working-class people. They can't afford the stiff rates when they have families to feed. Last weekend I went to a branch of this same fitness center in Times Square -- you can probably guess what the people there were like (snobs). America's gyms are loaded with rich, young people for whom life just keeps getting better, and they don't care about the rest of us except for when they insist on paying more taxes in the name of "social justice."

There are those out there who do cater to the poor, though: fast food chains. This was covered nicely in the movie Supersize Me, along with the fact that fast food is among the most unhealthy there is. Fast food joints target the poor in their ads, and with large amounts of meat at unrealistically low prices. Even the paper crowns at Burger King aren't so subtle: "It doesn't matter if you're a poor kid from the inner city -- come here and feel like a king!" Fast food chains put lots of sugar into everything, even the buns in the burgers. Too much sugar over a long time is one cause of diabetes, as is chronic obesity. For a while these restaurants had the trans fat issue, too.

It all comes together into a perfect storm. The poor are fed garbage while access to gyms and healthy foods is kept at a price just over their heads. In a way, the poor are still "starving." And so we have our modern image of the attractive American: the young white person who drinks Starbucks, shops at Whole Foods, eats at new-agey health restaurants like Pax, and finishes the day with a workout alongside similar people at a fancy gym filled with very expensive, high-tech machines on the way to kickboxing lessons. (Above person then goes home to watch Grey's Anatomy and work on his/her first novel.) The modern poor man is no longer a scrawny peasant in the fields, but a fat sales clerk who commutes from a sprawling slum.

This affects everything. It causes rampant health problems that put great strain on America's health system, like diabetes and heart disease. Those will continue to be more prolific. Producing all this junk food harms the environment. People continue to make friends only in the same social class and distrust those above or below them. And so on.

Is there a solution? I'm sure there is, somewhere. I don't believe there's a government solution. Giant chains like Whole Foods can afford to charge less than they do in Manhattan, so I'd like to see them move into lower income areas and see what happens. Somebody could open a line of fitness centers with bare bones stuff, like old-fashioned non-electronic machines, a running track instead of treadmills, and no extra classes offered, for cheap -- I'd join something like that and I know many people who would. I wish fast food would just go away and never return. The invisible hand of the market could make a difference, if the entrepreneurs we Americans love would start doing honest business with the poor instead of exploiting them.

Somebody ought to step up and make a change. We need it.

Everyone in my generation has been exposed to it one time or another. Chatrooms are an early example, for the five seconds of adolescence that they seem to be interesting. Generally, it's the same format: one person, either a columnist, blogger, or the "OP" (original poster of a thread) makes an opening statement. Sometimes it's stated as opinion, but usually as fact, whether or not the statements are backed up by anything. Then, others are allowed to respond. Usually they can say whatever they want as long as they don't use filthy language. What ensues is always -- always -- the exact same cesspool of partisan monkey crap-flinging. A few people chime in how much they agree with and worship the original poster, while others attack him ferociously like grade school bullies. There are kind, rational voices somewhere in the mix, but they're drowned out by the screaming of the rest of the morons.

What baffles the mind is how much people love to state "facts" that are absolutely false. It would be funny if they were obviously kidding, but I don't think they do it in gest -- I consider it mean-spirited lying or brain-washed parrot-hood.

Obviously, many of these people are boys in middle school and high school, and even college. What shocks me isn't their incredible nastiness (I haven't forgotten seventh grade, thank you), but the way most of their behavior stems from a need to fit into a group and achieve self-validation through pitting their side against another.

Yep, we're back at herd mentality. It's the same thing that causes people leaning politically left and right not to talk to each other. It's why childish lunatics in the middle east like killing each others' families.

Anonymity enhances the effect. You are no longer John Doe -- in cyberspace you can be anyone you want, be it "SkyMatrix" or "MrPresident" or God only knows what other retarded thing you wish to be addressed by.

It energizes people to state things as Facts that they have no evidence about whatsoever. This has rendered the internet largely a wasteland of zero useful information. I'm scared, though, that it may be spreading. The internet is becoming a major source of information about the world around us. As the world gets smaller, it gets bigger: we become more able to access everything from within our tiny living space, and we get further and further away from primary sources. We get our news from sources almost as biased, one way or the other, as the anonymous kids filling cyberspace with grammar-less "comments."

I don't like the mental assault of looking at this stuff. When someone states something forcefully, it sounds more real -- on the internet. In person, when people overwhelm you it tends to backfire, because you can read their body language and you think, "Gee, I think this person is full of shit." On the internet, no -- there's no face, it's just words, and when they're strong, they have a strong effect. That's dangerous. I think I have a fairly sturdy mind, and it makes me uncomfortable. If it affects me that way, I shudder to think how it affects weak-minded people who want to be part of a herd. But we've already seen that, haven't we?

On the web there's also the joy of being able to bring others down to your level instantly. Writing a worthwhile column takes time, intelligence, and effort, but one spoiled brat with a keyboard can shred it in a few seconds with a slew of BS. Even better, when all else fails they can pretend to be wise skeptics and say, "Why should I take anybody else in this forum seriously? I don't have to concede any argument or humble myself to anyone here, because it's just the internet and I'm above such things, peace out." Or my favorite, "Everything I just said was a joke, didn't you get it? Chill lol!"

The "online community" is an oxymoron, one of the great jokes of our time. I don't care that it is, but I worry that as time goes by, more people, especially young men, will find its instant gratification more appealing than reality, where one must occasionally act mature to be liked.

I'm upset about the new Transformers movie coming out soon. I'll go see it anyway just to be fair, but the more I learn about it, the more depressed I get. I admit that there's no very good, concrete reason to be so angry about the movie -- it's a personal thing.

It's annoying that they're going CGI, but I wouldn't mind as long as the robots actually looked like they're supposed to look. From what I've seen in the previews, there's little resemblance between the new models and the ones I remember from the show. I was especially pissed that Bumblebee, always a Volkswagon beetle, has been upgraded to a lame Chevrolet muscle car. The sole fact that they did that isn't what enrages me so much, but the obvious reason why: advertising. Gee, I wonder if Chevrolet was one of the movie's sponsors? Could they go about it any more obviously? It reminds me of the movie me and the guys made in college in which a committee sits down to write a script and plans the whole plot based on who their sponsors are. In this case, it demonstrates a staggering level of cynicism and, echoing my last update, contempt for fans.

The only way to recognize the robots is through keynote features: Optimus Prime's red, white, and blue paint job and a couple of particular curves on his helmet; the fact that Bumblebee is yellow. Those may be the only familiar robots. Megatron, one of the most fun villains of the 1980s, is totally unrecognizable. He also no longer transforms into a giant laser cannon (how awesome was that?), but a boring jet plane like the other Decepticons -- after all, if the evil robot who wants to destroy humanity can turn himself into a gun, that gives kids the wrong idea that guns are cool, right? Or maybe it's because Starscream, my favorite character from the show, whose job was to operate Megatron's rifle configuration, is notably absent from the previews (and from the movie as well, it seems).

Does the movie really cut a bunch of the Transformer characters from the show? That's how it looks to me. Maybe they have some pathetic excuse like, "We can't develop so many characters in a two hour movie, that's why it's going to be a trilogy, duh." But you can watch one 20-minute episode of the show and you're already aware of nearly every Transformer, his personality, and how he fits into the whole scheme of things.

None of this is any worse than what Hollywood has been doing for years to every old cartoon and comic book franchise. Every time, some fanboy base goes postal and complains, and this is my turn. Do I deserve to be taken more seriously for it? Probably not. But there's something special to me about Transformers.

It's one of the very first TV shows I remember watching and actually following religiously. Over the years, subsequent TV shows have mostly faded away or aged poorly, but Transformers continues to hold a place in my heart. I bought the DVD set of the first season when it came out a couple years back, and guess what? It was just as good, if not better, than I remembered from when I was a kid! Why? Because the characters were so memorable. Optimus Prime was an inspiring hero, Megatron was a hilarious bad-guy, Starscream was great as the bitter subordinate trying to overthrow Megatron, Cup was charming as the cranky old grandfatherly Autobot...

So, when Hollywood turns it into a corny joke, I have a visceral reaction. They're not just striking at something I love, but at a piece of my childhood that remains unspoiled. It's another reminder that I'm getting older and that times have changed. The TV shows I treasured as a boy are not sacred and can still turn a profit as long as the big entertainment executives can find new ways to twist them into something alien and unfamiliar (because if they paid any respect to the original, it would be anachronistic and boring -- the public wants something FRESH!). It's the same feeling I had when they remade Dawn of the Dead and when I heard they want to remake Evil Dead. At first I just wanted to believe, "They can't do that!" But they can, and they do. It's not that I'm like a Batman or Spiderman fan forever awaiting the perfect, definitive film adaptation -- I'm already happy with what I have with Transformers. The show was great, and that's all I need. I'm just offended that the Hollywood shit-o-tron now has Transformers in its sights.

I recently read a hilarious Chud.com column which hypothesized that filmmakers hold a certain contempt for the moviegoing public. Films like Paparazzi are evidence enough of that. Lately, I get the feeling politicians hold a similar contempt for the voting citizenry.

Year after year they promise the same things, and then proceed to do none of them. They then go on to tell us what the nation's problems are, and what needs to be done about them: "This bill is for your own good, so stop criticizing it!"

Nobody is happy on either side of the political aisle. It's easy to see why. As a registered Democrat who has voted almost entirely Democratic (sometimes I get tricky and vote for third parties), I'm feeling a little buyer's remorse. Not that I would have voted any other way than I did, but I sure wish things were cooler right now.

Both parties have a list of things they tease their constituents with. It's just a carrot and stick.

Democrats always talk about universal health care; occasionally they float the idea of easing up on the drug war; they promise to defend our civil liberties. They controlled Congress and the White House for two years in the 1990s, and in that time we "stayed the course" on the drug war, and the health care idea imploded. In the five months that Democrats have dominated Congress, I haven't seen anybody raise a finger against the Patriot Act or the Military Commissions Act. They promised to curb government corruption and lobbying, but lobbying shows no signs of abating anytime soon. They promised not to waste our time fixating on White House scandals the way Republicans did in the 1990s; every week there's a new guy I don't give a damn about testifying before committees when they should be legislating instead. If they want to impeach Bush, why not just get it the hell over with?

Republicans talk about fixing the tax system, instituting a flat tax, and reforming social security for all the fiscal conservatives out there. For the rest of their base, I guess their stated goal is to stop all abortions forever and "cure" all gay people (this would save the American Family). Republicans controlled Congress and the White House for six years! Which of these things did they do? Not one. For a party having so much political power for such a long time, it's staggering how little they got done domestically. Considering the economy did well during most of the 12 years Republicans controlled Congress, one would think they could muster the political capital to do something interesting or whip out some of their flagship projects. They didn't.

I don't really understand party loyalty anymore. Anyone who is a hard-line defender of either political party is perhaps not reading the newspaper.

Both parties are driving me nuts with the illegal immigration issue. There is so much spin in the air these days that I have no idea what I'm supposed to believe about it. The right says that illegal immigrants are all lazy, drug-smuggling crooks who don't do honest work and have no respect for American sovereignty or law: pretty serious allegations, yeah? The left says illegal immigrants are desperate people who would be sentenced to a life of poverty and misery if forced to leave our womb of prosperity, who "do the jobs Americans don't want," and anybody who wants them out is a bigot. Is there a third option, please? Sorry, but those of us living as far away from the Mexican border as possible don't get any firsthand info, and I, at least, am getting tired of hearing only super-partisan arguments.

New York is flooded with latin-Americans, but I can't tell who is legal or not. What I do know is that my Italian girlfriend has to wait in lines, jump through ten hoola-hoops and play stupid visa games to come to America, while Mexicans just walk across the border and Hey, they're in! And that makes me pretty angry. Congress and Bush have a compromise now to give amnesty to all those people. Most of the people I speak to, even the left-wing ones, don't want that. They want the government to take illegal immigration seriously and do something serious about it -- preferably something to stop the flow of illegal immigrants regardless of what happens to the ones already here.

Instead, it looks like they're passing the buck on that, too. Remember what I said about contempt?

But is that the reality? What do Democrats do when they're in charge? To see it firsthand, try living in New York, where the city council is 48-3 Democratic. With that super-duper majority, New York City is essentially a one-party town with a one-party system (and a moderate Republican mayor).

New York practically runs itself. Businesses of all sizes are always moving in and out to serve everybody here. The city government's job is to manage education, health care, transportation, growth, and law enforcement. The first four, it doesn't do so well. Rather than improve the subway lines we already have, which are run incompetently by folks with cushy city jobs without evaluations or standards of service, the city prefers to build expensive new subway lines for the rich white people in the upper east side of Manhattan.

But they need to do something to validate their own jobs on the city council. Since there isn't anything better to occupy them except for the big stuff that they're too lazy/cowardly to mess with (schools, smart growth, etc.), they ban and regulate. Mayor Bloomberg, who does tackle the hairy issues, seems as such to govern virtually all by himself while the council sits around masturbating each other.

Early this year they banned trans fats and "the N word." They tried (I don't know if they succeeded) to ban people from crossing the street while using cell phones, iPods, or other distracting electronics that could get them hit by a car (a legislative attack on natural selection). This would have made it so that crossing the street while listening to music on your iPod could get you slapped with a $100+ fine. Isn't this fun? It gets better.

This week the city council overrode Mayor Bloomberg's veto of a bill banning metal baseball bats. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? The council argued that metal bats "hit baseballs too fast, which can injure people." Excuse me, but who gives a shit? It's not like there's some serial killer going around with a metal bat hitting baseballs at his victims. I think most of us prefer the satisfying cracking sound of a wooden bat anyway -- but why should metal baseball bats be illegal? That's what a ban is, after all.

Banning things like this damages respect for law. If crossing the street while listening to music or talking on a phone, using "bad words," owning a metal baseball bat, and cooking with trans fats are illegal, then all of us are criminals. Giuliani attributed his successful crime-reduction campaign in the 90s to the "broken window" philosophy that even the smallest crimes, no matter how trite, must be punished because when you muscle down on little crimes like sneaking onto the subway without a ticket, it sends the message that bigger crimes, like armed robbery, will not be tolerated either. How does a broken window strategy work when everything is a crime?

The city council overrode another veto this week in an act much more personally heartbreaking for me. Early this year they passed a bill which regulates the pedicab (bicycle taxi) business in New York. This industry is informal, fun, and environmentally friendly. Pedicabs reduce traffic and replace exhaust-belching taxis on New York's streets -- wait a minute. They compete with the taxi industry? Well, the sissy taxi drivers who felt intimidated by pedicabs taking their customers went to the city council to complain. So the council wrote this bill, which requires pedicab drivers to get licenses and insurance, and limits the number of them (by permits) to the arbitrary number of 325. There are now an estimated 500 pedicab drivers in New York -- so, 175 jobs lost, directly (this will also ultimately raise the cost of riding a pedicab, which will further wound the business as less people ride). This kills the spontaneity and fun of pedicabs. I wrote Mayor Bloomberg asking him to veto this terrible bill, and he did -- so the council overrode his veto almost unanimously.

It all paints an ugly picture for me of the Democratic big-government mentality: regulate, centralize, bureacratize. These are always justified by one motive: protection. Democrats must protect everything: our children, from low self-esteem (impossible); the environment (good); poor and homeless people (good to some extent); special interests (very bad); unions (sometimes good, sometimes bad). The only way for the government to protect people is by taking money or freedom. They want to protect McDonald's patrons from getting fat, so they take away every restaurant's freedom to cook with trans fats. They want to protect people from hearing offensive language, so they ban it. They want to protect taxi drivers from competition, so they force pedicab drivers, against their will, to submit to government control and regulation. If the drivers don't like it, they can tell that to the NYPD -- which has better things to do, believe it or not.

Creating new laws and licensing systems, which centralizes control of our lives in the government, is appealing to the government because it creates new government paperwork jobs for them, even though it destroys jobs in the private sector. The private sector isn't just big corporate executives; it's also guys who drive pedicabs, mom-and-pop shops, and many things in-between.

The private sector thrives on spontaneity, imagination, innovation, competition, and little guys trying to make an honest living. The government thrives on tax dollars and paperwork. When I left Italy, I was about to lose my job because the foreign language teachers' union -- composed mostly of continental Europeans who don't teach English or teach it poorly because they're not native speakers -- was outraged that smart young people like me were working freelance without contracts (for inhuman pay, by the way) beyond the umbrella of union or government control. They said that, after the smoke cleared in that fiasco, I would have a contract, a visa, and keep my teaching gig, but, well, I wasn't keen on waiting around to see for myself.

The tax and regulate philosophy does much harm. To perpetuate it, the government needs a lot of tax dollars, and since the biggest taxpayers are big corporations, politicians inevitably must look out for them -- usually at the expense of workers and small business. I'm still talking about Democratic politicians. It also creates an entitlement culture -- ironic, considering most left-wing people think of conservatives as being selfish and greedy. Under a small government that doesn't spend all its time protecting everybody, if you are unsafe, uncovered, whatever, it's your responsibility to deal with it. In the opposite scenario, the only reason you are without a safety net is because the government isn't listening to you yet and is wasting its vast tax dollars on others. This makes people angry and resentful; somebody will always feel he isn't getting his fair share. Maybe such a person will even become so bitter that he decides the best way to get the message out is with murder -- in which case, the newsmedia is always listening.

Many people are upset about a lack of government. There's a wisdom to knowing how and how much to apply government power; this wisdom seems to be in short supply these days. I moan because special interests around New York City want to bulldoze, redesign, or otherwise screw with classic city landmarks, including Union Square and Washington Square parks, Coney Island, and Atlantic Yards, for starters. Every day another legendary venue (CBGB, most notably) closes and a condo or hotel is built in its place. The city council and the mayor are eerily quiet about this. They don't intervene to protect places of artistic or historic value from hard and fast market forces, though to me, the need to do so seems so obvious. That makes me bitter. Is it fair for individuals like me to judge when and where we want our government intervention? Maybe not.

But my complaint to this city's politicians comes down to one issue. Whether by action or inaction, don't kill a good thing. I'm just now realizing that Democrats do it with as much relish as Republicans.

For all the explanations that will come forth for why and how this happened, and for all the "making of a killer" pop psychology we will be bombarded with, the shooter on Monday was nothing unique or special. Like all of the other freaks who do things like this, he was paranoid, delusional, and above all, seeking attention.

The attention-seeking element was already obvious in the fact that he had the willpower to slay over two-dozen people and himself -- but if it wasn't clear at that point, his mailing a package advertising what he did to NBC should have left no doubt.

And what did NBC do? They aired his video. They accepted his self-portrait package as if it were a Christmas present.

But it's not only television. Riding the subway this morning, I could see that most newspapers printed the killer's masturbatory photos of himself pretending to be a video-game hero on the front page. He got what he wanted: attention. His (stupid) message was broadcast to the public, loud and clear. He got front-page publicity and even television time.

What message does this send to other would-be killers, and terrorists, too? You give us a body count, and we'll give you our eyes and ears. Kevin Spacey's terrifying words in Seven have become a fact of life. Everybody with a moral to teach, or a manifesto to preach, need only terrorize and murder, and the newsmedia will come running with cameras and microphones to lap up all the blood.

I'll admit that I was curious about the video and the note (which was also sampled liberally in the news). It's human nature. But when I got what I "wanted" this morning I knew right away that it wasn't what I or anybody really wanted. What we wanted was for the media to exhibit courage and restraint, something killers don't do. We wanted them to resist temptation. And they failed.

The last thing killers deserve is attention. They should never be rewarded in any form for resorting to violence. It was true that if we live in fear because of these beasts, they win -- but the media haven't held up their end of this bargain. The vicious and the psychotic have won, and the news machine has handed them victory on a silver plate.

The first major event in the movie is a courageous act by the British commander, played by the great Alec Guinness. The camp's Japanese commanding officer insists that the British officers work alongside the enlisted men. Here, Guinness holds up a copy of the Geneva conventions and reads aloud the article which explicitly forbids this. The Japanese officer bats the book to the ground and threatens to shoot the entire British company on the spot unless Guinness capitulates. Guinness stands his ground. He is then thrown in a hot-box for days, told he can come out when he changes his mind. Guinness never does.

He argues that the most basic tenets of civilization must be maintained even in war. If we choose to drop one little Geneva convention, why not drop them all? Ultimately, the strength of his convictions and his willingness to die for them turn the Japanese commander around.

This sequence, so understated and early in an epic film, electrified me. It was so obvious and right. Would I have the courage to act as the British commander did? I'm not sure, but maybe that's why I never served in the armed forces. If you don't have the guts to uphold your principles under torture and coercion, then you aren't qualified for the job.

Fast-forward fifty years and we have fifteen abducted British sailors in Iran. Like the company in River Kwai, they were ordered by their government to surrender, allowed to be taken hostage. But nobody was told, as far as I can tell, to apologize publicly on Iranian television for trespassing on Iranian waters (which they didn't) and don traditional muslim dress. This cop-out falls on the heads of the sailors, who were obviously coerced. Interestingly, the first to submit was the only woman onboard, and we can imagine what she was threatened with if she didn't do the Iranians' bidding -- perhaps an argument for why women shouldn't serve in the military.

Tony Blair's government is stuck in first gear on saving the sailors, which is equally lame, but can you really blame him for not jumping to rescue them after how quickly they broke? They're an embarrassment to the British navy. How many seconds of arm-twisting did it take for them to say uncle?

All this just adds to Iran's argument that it can do whatever it wants -- which will be magnified big-time if they get nuclear weapons. There's a reason America's policy is "we do not negotiate with terrorists." If you resort to schoolyard bully tactics and thuggery, you don't deserve to have your opinions heard. I fear that this will end in a "prisoner swap," which would set a great precedent (and has been done recently by other countries): if an international criminal is captured, his friends have only to make a few heads roll (literally) and he goes free.

Where does it end? Forcing the female sailor to wear a burqa was not only humiliating, but a violation of the Geneva conventions -- some of our most basic guidelines for the preservation of civilized behavior in war. If we're willing to allow Iran to violate one unpunished, how many more conventions do they get to throw out the window? Where was Alec Guinness to stare his captors in the eye and say no? Or is that just a relic of a bygone era? If so, I'm terrified of the new era that seems to be coming.

When I moved to New York, I was in for a big shock. New Yorkers complain that their city is being "suburbanized" -- big chains and retail from the sprawling suburbs are replacing their once unlimited-choices small business environment. "Real" New Yorkers live in the poor, hidden neighbhorhoods of Brooklyn while Manhattan has somehow been invaded by -- guess who? -- rich, SUV-driving suburban kids living off their parents' credit cards.

So, who's right?

The way I see it, both viewpoints are wrong. It's natural to feel that the people who move into your stomping ground are wealthier because they can afford to relocate there (especially if they're young people on their parents' money). Some of them, like me, have parents who limit that and expect at least some if not all of the moving money to be repaid -- and we certainly don't get free cars. Others do seem to come from families of unlimited wealth, and it's hard for me not to kind of hate those kids. But they come from both the city and the suburbs.

It's easier to blame the decline of your local culture on all those carpetbaggers than on your neighbor, even if the incoming people are coming for exactly those big- or small-town charms you think they are subverting. The retail-ification of the Big Apple disgusts me just as much as the Subway-ification of my hometown. Every day, there's one less unique restaurant in the world and one more chain restaurant in its place. New York feels less like a city sometimes and more like a giant Disneyland-style amusement park that preserves only the charms that attract tourists while allowing the joys of being a resident to fade away into nostalgia. To me, that's an outrage. But it's happening all over.

The problem is not that cities are becoming more suburban or that small-towns are becoming more urban, but that everything in the world is getting homogenized. To me, the old Ann Arbor represented the high watermark of "suburbia" -- the arts and entertainment, restaurants, and young people of a city in a quiet, rural county. The old residential neighborhoods there are filled with trees and parks; the houses have different styles and characters from block to block. Now, the new homes being built around it are hideous, indistinguishable mammoths surrounded by huge grass lawns and sweeping driveways. Within driving distance from those (never walking or biking distance) are giant blocks of retail stores and plazas with big flat parking lots. Is this the future of America? I hope to God not.

But the people responsible for this are everywhere. They're not confined to those migrating from city to country or vice versa. Everybody, to some extent, dips into big retail business, if not the suburban housing market, malls, and wasteful cars. I do it -- sometimes I like to eat a little fast food or chain pizza. But I moderate myself because I feel it's important to do so.

What the city has done for me is let me observe more keenly the dark side of human nature. It's not because city people are evil, but because there are so many people in such close quarters, that there is more of everything. More good-looking people, more nice people, more jerks, more whatever. And what has struck me the most about New York is just how ferociously, bloodcurdlingly selfish American people are. I didn't have this experience in Rome, another big city. There was all the chaos, pollution, and noise of a metropolis, but it's here in the American city that I've seen the ugly character of the average American. It's there in small towns too, if you look, but in cities like New York it's just harder to ignore, partly because the anonymity of a huge city liberates closet assholes who would otherwise keep themselves in check.

In this country, a young woman with a purse on the subway will push another person with three bags of groceries out of her way to steal a seat on the other side of the car -- so she can sit down for 4 stops. This morning, in fact, my subway car was at probably 110% capacity and I was stuck against the doorway. At one stop half a dozen or more people filed out. Not one of them gave me a chance to move out of their way; every single one of them bumped into me. No apologies, no "excuse me." Slow walkers stonewall you on every crowded street and sidewalk, and when you push your way through and say "excuse me" they shout after you with rage as if you just took their purse. They would like to do it in a small town, but they know they can't get away with it because they might see the same people again sooner or later, who will remember that loud-mouthed freak for a few days.

People everywhere in America drive monster SUVs, even in urban environments when the off-road factors will never, ever come into play. Then they whine about the rich carpetbaggers who drive SUVs (who are worse drivers, of course) and make the roads more dangerous, therefore forcing everybody else to buy SUVs. New York drivers, particularly those in Queens, strike me as possibly the worst drivers I've ever seen. Not because they aren't skilled, but because of their unprecedented selfishness. It's not a matter of "if you don't take the right of way, I will" as it is, "the right of way is mine and if you try to take it I'll honk you down." Drivers of the biggest cars routinely intimidate and kill pedestrians. When the traffic light is an old yellow and one driver stops, the guy behind him lays on his horn. But those drivers aren't "townies," they're suburban imports. Right?

Knowing this, I'm not surprised that people complain about chain business and indistinguishable suburbs while also buying those houses as fast as they get built and filling those restaurants to wait-list every weekend...and then blaming it on the out-of-towners. It's the modern American way.

Party politics are as much a convenience as they are a curse. A political party provides a heuristic, a collection of ideologies that we can flock to. When politicians' names are flashed at us, we can get an idea of what they stand for just by knowing what party they belong to. Parties also help the government to function more effectively (perhaps) because they unite politicians under common agendas. In Italy, where there are over a dozen parties, governing the country is notoriously difficult compared to the American two-party system. Our system has a different problem: it's hard for the millions of independent voters to find their niche. All politicians have some hair-brained ideas, and when they get elected on the strength of one issue (or of their personality), they take their election as a mandate to push all of their ideas, no matter how silly some might be. This is true of entire parties, too.

Political party affiliation and loyalty harm individual thought. People who vote or work for a party also usually read all of that party's literature, much of which is preaching to the converted. It's passionate and lively and friendly, so it's also convincing. So even if people entered the party with diverse ideas, over time they begin to agree with everything the party stands for. This is dangerous. It also tends to turn people into ultras, which makes them a turn-off to people from the opposition and from the center (which the majority of Americans occupy).

Everybody has his or her "pet issue," I think. That's the one issue that trumps anything else. Whatever a candidate says, his position on that pet issue will make or break him in the eyes of the individual person. I have two pet issues: drug law reform and the environment. Drug law reform earns more points for me because it's rarer, and also because it's fashionable for politicians to say they'll protect the environment with questionable solutions like corn ethanol, "clean-burning" coal, and nuclear energy. For some people it's health care; for others, it's abortion; for many, it's the war.

The trouble with pet issues is that they can draw us to seriously flawed parties and politicians. There are many pro-choice, pro-gay rights, anti-Patriot Act, pro-immigration, or anti-war Republicans. There are pro-life and pro-war Democrats. But their voices are drowned out in the din of party politics, or they keep their mouths shut to avoid undermining the party's cohesiveness and strength.

What disturbs me is that when people come to a party on one or two pet issues, and read the literature, listen to the pundits and politicians, and so forth, they begin to get a little brainwashed into loving everything the party stands for, even if they disagreed with some of it at first. The ultimate extreme of this is the Italian system in which people vote only for parties, not candidates, and the party gets to place their politicians in office based on the proportion of votes the party received. I'm not a fan of that system. It saves them from our current popularity-contest "which candidate would I rather have a beer with?" situation, but it also misses the search for character and integrity in the people representing you.

Until I moved to New York, I was a very loyal Democrat, born and raised. But the more I read and research, the more I distrust the party. We're brought up to believe that Democrats are the party of the poor, the party for people who care, the anti-corporate party, and so forth. Are they? How many specific bills can you name off the top of your head that Democrats have put through that indisputably fight corporate robber-barons, lift up the poor, or provide free health care for all? With much fanfare they hit a line-drive minimum wage hike through congress, but there's plenty of argument that it does the poor as much harm as good. I'm against gun control, which Democrats typically uphold as a major party value. I'm skeptical of their new universal health care obsession, largely because I have a lot of family working in the health care industry who haven't expressed much enthusiasm for it.

Many Democrats also get their campaign donations from big corporations, including the health insurance industry and pharmaceuticals -- just like Republicans do -- and this keeps them on a tight corporate leash. Those of us like me who vote Democratic largely to protect civil liberties and social tolerance must wait for them to accrue enough "political capital" to do more, because they're stigmatized as the "abortions on demand, terrorists get a free pass" party and they must convince conservative voters that they aren't what left-wing voters are actually voting for. They have to waste a lot of time convincing us that they're not crazy, then they blow it anyway by doing things like banning cell phones and iPods for pedestrians crossing the street, banning the "n word" (both in New York City), and banning incandescent light bulbs in California (flourescents are so much more charming, aren't they?). These are the kind of attacks on individual liberty that I hate about Republicans, but Democrats serve a different flavor of it.

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to do maddeningly bad things. They call themselves a party of principle, small government, and traditionalism -- aren't those good things? Not when that means "floating phone taps," sneaking environment-killing pork projects into bills, and amendments to the constitution to ban flag-burning (which is free speech). It's like the battle has become the nanny-welfare state versus the police-prison state. Since I hate the latter more than the former, I voted Democratic in 2004 and 2006.

I'm often tempted to transfer my hope into third parties. It's romantic and perhaps naive. If a third party won a presidency, just once, I would be thrilled. I think most of the American people would, too, but 98% of us, including me, are too afraid to risk voting that way come election day. I like the Green party because they generally uphold my two pet issues -- one of them is even the party's name! I like the Libertarian party because they appear closer to the founders' vision for American democracy in their principles of small government, bureacracy-slashing, and civil liberty as their titular tenet. But is subscribing to third parties worthwhile? What purpose does it serve? It could send a message to the two big league machin-- ahem, parties -- to watch their votes trickle away into third parties, but I doubt they're listening. They're rich and powerful and willing to hedge their bets on staying the course.

The repeatedly-spun complaint against Barack Obama is that he doesn't have positions on the issues. But I can't say that any major candidate has provided any substantive plans in years. We know who is pro-life and pro-choice, who is pro-Iraq war and against, we know that Democrats want universal health care and Republicans want private social security. Other than that, as I recall, Bush's 2000 election campaign was founded on pictures of him wandering around his ranch in a cowboy hat and being Christian. Kerry's campaign was based on stopping the damage to the nation runaway Republicans in power were doing (that was enough to get my vote, anyway). We're sliding into a time when politicians are chosen only for personality and party. Most of them are indistinguishable from one another. The rank and file little guys who we call "long shot" candidates, like Ron Paul (R) and Dennis Kucinich (D), have more substance and individuality and integrity, but maybe for that very reason they don't have the money or power of a Hillary or a McCain. Nader, too, was and is more compelling than any candidate in the past decade, but the campaign media machines make sure nobody notices.

Imagine if someone had the courage to run a cross-party presidential ticket. One Democrat, one Republican. Imagine a Kerry-McCain ticket in 2004 (Kerry did ask McCain, I believe), or a Powell-Obama ticket in 2008. I could think of a lot more nice permutations, and such a ticket would be an almost assured winner, a tangible commitment to bipartisanism and cooperation. But no politician today has those kind of cajones.

I spend more time than I'd like begging people to vote in elections, including midterm elections. I tell them that if they don't like Republicans or Democrats, third parties could use their vote at least as a symbolic vote. Voting itself is fundamental to our form of government, and if you don't vote, you have no right to complain. But it's hard to convince people of this government's merits when the big parties have dragged its reputation through the mud so ruthlessly and for so long.

When Bush fired Rumsfeld and tapped Gates for his replacement, I was pleased but far from delighted. I told my girlfriend that this is like "switching from McDonald's to Burger King." Gates may be smarter or more competent, but his presence will not change things. That's because Bush is still the boss. Or as he loves to say, the Decider.

No matter what voters, generals, or the entire world outside our borders says, this is all about him, the leader. He's never hidden his obsession with power and never shown any reservations about abusing it. Despite overwhelming evidence that we should scale back our military in Iraq, he's asking Gates to give him more troops. Gates won't say no -- he can't. As a Secretary, his job is to be one of the eyes and arms of the president, just like Condoleeza Rice. That's it. Gates may exercise that role according to his own personal style, but "give me more troops" is not open to interpretation. Can anyone expect Gates, who is on the ground speaking to the generals and soldiers about the reality of Iraq, to put his foot down and say no to the president? The answer to that is, "You're fired."

So, why did Bush fire Rumsfeld, and why did he do it when he did? Because he has defined a clear role for his secretaries: they take the falls for his failures as a leader. It's the oldest trick in the book (you know, the one Machiavelli wrote). Bush didn't fire Rumsfeld before the election because he didn't need a fall-guy. Letting Rumsfeld go gives him license to make all the same mistakes over again, with Gates as a fresh whipping boy. Bush did not replace his secretary in order to change the course: he did so in order to maintain it. That's the depressing reality we're going to wake up to at the new year.

It seems Bush is determined to put the final touches on creating a new Vietnam War. At the moment when things couldn't be worse, he wants to kick in the afterburners and fly us full speed ahead into the side of the mountain. I have to admit I'm impressed at just how astonishingly terrible a president he has been and continues to be. I didn't think it was possible for a president to sustain, uninterrupted, for so long a time, a streak of pigheadedness, greed, arrogance, and idiocy.

But that's easy when he doesn't have accountability. If the nation hates him, he can just pass it off on his secretaries. Far be it from him to think George W. Bush is the one we want fired, or even Dick Cheney. Because Bush doesn't work for that $400,000 salary -- his secretaries do all the work. He merely makes the decisions about the fate of the civilized world, which is, according to him, his specialty. And if it doesn't come out right, that's our fault.

Enough about him: what is the answer to Iraq? I like to think of it this way. The conflicting forces in Iraq are like a couple of boxers who have been pummeling each other in one continuous match for several hundred years. What we've done is jump into the ring and kick each of them in the balls. If we pull back, not much is likely to change for better or worse. If we stay, the Middle East will hate us even more, we'll be more in debt to China, more of our soldiers will die, and so on. But what I think doesn't matter at all. I'm not the Decider; I'm just a voter.

After a year on soy milk, I've started to reflect a little on its effects on my health and whether it's worthwhile to continue on this slightly modified diet. Though I still eat cheeses and other dairy products, and meat, I rarely have a glass of cow's milk anymore. As part of my review, I figured on researching some public knowledge about soy vs. dairy on the internet. To my dismay, opinions aren't merely a little diverse, but in bloodthirsty opposition. Both sides of the argument believe that the health benefits of their choice are huge and that the alternative will bring death (I'm serious). Particularly painful was one website saying, "Before starting their children on soymilk, parents should ask them if they'd rather grow up to be 6'1 or 5'7."¹ At this point I'm sticking to my guns with soy milk. I will, though, concede that any non-organic soy product is a bad idea to consume -- I've always avoided these.

In the year I spent in Italy eating mostly natural foods and drinking only soy milk, I was sick only on the occasions when I missed at least half a night's sleep for at least three days straight (which I still blame on chronic jet lag). Otherwise my health was pretty good. I lost weight but that may be due to my limited diet, and the weight is back now. My diet was tragically short of the variety nutritionists encourage: seven days a week I ate pretty much the exact same thing for almost the entirety of the year. I never got bored, luckily for me. My skin was also clearer than it had been since I was twelve. I had solid energy on most days and could handle most of the minor challenges of life. The same is true right now.

In August, after my return to America, I lived with my mom for three weeks in Florida. In most respects, I lived the same lifestyle as in Rome. But I'd never told her about my switch to soy milk, so I figured, "Why not try going back?" So I spent three weeks on dairy milk. I'm no researcher and I can't really blame dairy milk on the result, but those three weeks had some surprises for me. My acne was terrible. I found new pimples all over my body daily, but this cleared up again when, after moving to New York, I started back on soy milk. Also during that time, I was constantly fatigued and napping during the day. In the grand scheme of things, none of this may mean anything in real health discussions. But now I'm on soy milk, my skin is clear, my health is good, I haven't been sick in almost a year, and I don't feel like switching to dairy again.

Some have told me, in response to my soy switch, that "Soy milk isn't natural; cow's milk is natural." To this I respond: soy beans are natural, and the process of turning them into milk, which was discovered in Ancient China, uses traditional tools and natural substances -- it's as natural as baking bread. As to cow's milk, is it a natural instinct for you to walk up to a cow and drink straight from her udders? In the extreme case, dairy companies have actually sued soy milk producers to ban them from using the word "milk" to describe their soy beverages.² After all, the word "milk" evokes fond memories of the neighborhood milkman and the "real," traditional America under attack by the high-tech soy establishment. We all have fond memories and traditions related to milk -- such as cookies and milk -- and the dairy industry is defending its right to profit off of them. So much for the 1st Amendment, the rights to which will probably be bought by a corporation someday, too.

But that's today's price for the organic and the earth-friendly: stigma and exclusion. It's not overt or oppressive, but it's in the air, always there -- the notion that natural, organic, non-old-fashioned-American products are for "hippies" or "bleeding hearts." Soy milk opened my eyes to this, but now I can see it all around. From my roommate grumbling that I bought fruity soap instead of a chemical antibiotic soap, to the surplus of internet sites with names like "Milk is Milk" that call for a faithful return to our classic American foods, it's real and I think I know where it's coming from (corporate marketing). The term "new age" which, when I was a kid, referred primarily to Kenny G music, now falls on anything that says "natural" on it, anything European (a label of which I'm skeptical here anyway), anything not from a long-trusted brand. To me, and I think to many people, such phrases conjure up a couple of negative images. One is of an unemployed hippy couple who've just named their newborn son "K'Thok Joy-Star" or something; another is of snobby liberal New Yorkers/Californians rampaging through an 1850s-ish small town complaining to the locals that they don't have the newest Earth-friendly product with a trendy Japanese name. Am I the only one who imagines these things? Maybe it comes from my stepfather's recent verbal response to my search for soy milk down South: "Go back to New York." He was probably half-joking, but I think he touched on something.

In Europe, one can easily find herbalists and natural remedy stores and books; the general public is aware of them and uses them. Whenever I had some minor health complaint in Rome, my Italian friends summoned their natural remedy books or made recommendations from "everybody knows" common sense. Stomach aches and insomnia can be relieved with chamomile tea, so why bother getting some expensive pill for them designed in a lab? Even the pharmacies, which were privately owned instead of chains, carried lots of drugs that were really just the same traditional, natural items with fancier names. Italians age well and live a pretty long time, and although they still need surgeries and hospital trips like the rest of us, on the minor problems of everyday life they save a lot of money.

How about here? Nope. Instead, our streets are lined with huge, expensive vitamin stores and our oversized pharmacies charge back-breaking prices on under-tested designer drugs. Our children are getting hooked on all kinds of scary new, addictive mind medications that they learn to trade with their friends as they grow up. And the pharmaceutical companies get away with it because they have the money to advertise, to perpetuate our culture of chemistry and fake shit. But we all have the power to pull the plug on that ocean of money -- if only we'd use that power.

But we tend to trust things that reach a shelf, especially if we grew up with them. That trust is dangerous, because it allows corporations to hurt us -- and the government helps them to do it. They can call something "organic" when it isn't, and use the USDA "certified organic" label on garbage. Think about it: the USDA is a federal agency subject to the White House -- or, Mr. Bush. Would you trust him to tell you the quality of your meat? But when we see only the well-practiced face our beloved childhood brands, we forget to consider where the product is coming from. We see a milk carton with cute pictures of cows bouncing around green pastures, and we don't want to believe that they're living in tiny cages being force-fed to each other until their throats are cut and their bonemeal goes into a spinach farm.

But even there lies another tragedy -- those of us who show any compassion for the mistreatment of animals, or the Earth at large, are labeled "bleeding hearts" trying to shock the faceless, desensitized majority. Things are worse than you think -- really! It's easy and attractive to think pragmatically that everything will work itself out, to grant that "yes, some things are bad, but it's slowly getting better" without updating our personal choices. But how do you know things are changing at all unless you yourself are making a tiny contribution? Revered economists and philosophers, in fact, have said that if things are left on their own, if we focus on personal responsibility rather than worrying about everybody else, then everything will work itself out. But that requires a certain awareness and mental energy that most people in our overworked world don't have. And it's that fatigue, that falling-back-on-the-safe-and-familiar, the exasperated, coming-home-from-work, "oh well, I'll just get Brand X again," that the profit-obsessed corporations use to sneak by and do whatever they want. It's the same as the "I like things the old-fashioned way" factor which is universal to human nature that compels us to be loyal to things that in no way ever earned our loyalty. The same instinct that, for months while I considered switching to soy milk a year ago, kept me buying dairy. It's a natural, important instinct that protects us from relativism and radicalism, but sometimes the old needs to die to allow for progress (not in some creepy political or scientific sense of the word, but in the sense of things getting better for everybody).

Progress, though, is the idea pushed by those who shove upon us a barrage of new food and drug technologies. Anything not labeled organic, and some things that are, is by a good bet genetically modified. It's not because They are evil, it's because GMOs are cheaper in the short run, as are most of our unsustainable habits. In the long run, though, the industrial, corporate trends of our food and drugs are going to hurt everybody, including Americans, instead of just people in Third World countries like now.

Not all things natural are good for you, and nature alone can't provide books, computers, surgery, or other privileges of modern life. Human innovation is essential for the high standard of living we enjoy. But in this age, we have to think much more critically about whom we give our money to and what we choose to consume. Because that's the only way we little people can combat the tyranny of corrupt big businesses. Imagine if every dollar you spent -- on this or that candy bar, loaf of bread, milk carton, cough syrup -- was equal to a vote for a politician. In some way, that's kind of what it is.

1. http://www.westonaprice.org/soy/ploy.html
2. http://www.foodrevolution.org/what_about_soy.htm

As positive results come in, I have to suppress the urge to shout with joy about this election. As my close friends know, my interest in politics has jumped in the past one or two years as I've entered the real world beyond the womb of Ann Arbor and college. My positions and opinions have formed and firmed during this time. I've never hidden my hatred of the Republican Congress or Bush's administration. Nearly everything they've done in six years of power has angered me or cost me sleep, from proposals of oil drilling in Alaska, throwing out medical marijuana legislation that most of the public supports, taking away personal freedoms and privacy, and otherwise wasting my tax dollars and time. I can sympathize with the term "fiscal conservative" -- which might describe some of my Republican relatives and friends, and I can see the debate in economic philosophy between big and small government -- but that's not what this Congress has been about, and they've failed on every other matter that counts with me.

On the other end, I've longed for the opportunity to see the Democrats, so much slammed and tarred by the Right for poor defense and irresponsible spending, actually have the chance to prove themselves. The favorite arguments against the party are getting stale and empty, since the Left has been out of legislative power since I was 11 years old. When Clinton was president, I viewed the Republicans as the party that impeached him for getting a blowjob. Six years after Gore lost an election against the guys who I associated only with anger at Democrats, and they achieved their dreams of absolute power, they still haven't convinced me of their merits. At last, now I can see the Democrats truly "in action" and what they can do. As such, I've put together a Christmas list of things I'd like to see happen, which is about as likely to be read as one to Santa. Dear Congressmen, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents:

1. Fix health care: This October, I cut my fingers and had ten stitches sewn into them in Queens, New York. The final bill, after insurance deductions, was $344. Hoping to save time a week after the stitches went in, I went to another hospital in Manhattan to have them out. The doctors there said that to use that hospital, because it was a different location, would incur a new bill with new doctors charging me, for another $400 minimum. To have ten stitches removed. This is an "operation" so simple it can be done at home by the friend of a trusting soul. Surgeons and others who can do things as special and impressive as transplants and open-heart operations deserve to be very rich. It makes sense for such procedures to be hair-raisingly expensive. Routine visits should not be. Wheelchairs, which can be produced on assembly lines, should not cost as much as cars and insurance companies should not have the right to remove them from their coverage. That's appalling. And although I said it makes sense for heavy operations to bring heavy bills, it's still unfair to the poor who work just as hard as the wealthy, and the government ought to make genuine attempts to solve this problem.

2. Bust big pharmaceuticals: I don't want my future kids doped up on the hottest new designer mind-altering drugs any more than any other parent. That doesn't mean some plant that Native Americans smoked or chewed or whatever for the last 2,000 years; it means pills being pushed through a corrupt FDA and onto gullible parents. I almost had antidepressants thrust upon me when I was young and didn't know about their addictive properties, then ended up being officially diagnosed as just a "normal kid," so this issue is very close to me. Get the scumbags out of the FDA and similar government agencies. Encourage herbal and natural medicines which are popular in Europe and benefit low-income people who can't afford the latest in insufficiently tested technology.

3. Fix the atmosphere: Pressure Bush to join the Kyoto treaty and the rest of the civilized world on reducing the shit we're pumping into the atmosphere. This government has been in denial about many environmental issues for dangerously long. While you're at it, set some restrictions on over-fishing our dying oceans, and expand research on alternative energy. When two Republican governors, Schwarzenegger and Pataki, are making environmental progress Bush and Congress refuse to try, the GOP looks backwards and Bush looks like an idiot.

4. Save the American farm: Create more incentives for organic and sustainable agriculture. The Republicans' interpretation of this was to lower organic standards -- the worst thing they could've done. Instead, give subsidies, tax breaks, or other support at your now formidable political disposal to farmers going sustainable. This goes for produce, and meat, and fish industries. Our food right now is horrible. Anyone who's lived in Europe for a period of time can see that.

5. Save education: Create jobs in Math and Science education (and research) so we can keep up in the global economy and technology industries in the future. Our generation consists of too many people -- like me -- who study English and want to be writers or lawyers. That's fine domestically, but on the international scene we'll be left behind by China and India one day if we let it go unchecked.

6. Make stem-cell research happen: Stem-cell research is, to many, the future of medicine. People hypocritically ignore its potential until they or someone in their families develop conditions that could be treated because of it. This should not be linked wrongly to abortion issues anymore, this is about saving life. I'm sick of this even being a debate, and Rush Limbaugh can go to hell -- asshole.

7. Legalize medical marijuana: Many researchers, doctors, and of course, patients, believe marijuana's medical benefits are quite promising and diverse. And best of all, as said medical alternative to fancy pharmaceuticals, it’s cheap! Oops -- that could be why it's still illegal. Have a political backbone and give the sick and dying a break. You may lose big campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies, but in the long run the public will respect you more for it. Interestingly, marijuana may also help treat Alzheimers, Multiple Sclerosis, and Parkinson’s symptoms -- three conditions for which stem-cell research also holds promise. Odd that our federal government has suppressed both options, isn't it?

8. Legalize hemp for industrial use: This ties in with saving the American farm and would benefit many other environmental issues. Hemp can be used to make paper (the tree industry is a huge environment-ruiner), clothing (I don't see much organic cotton), and meatless protein products such as milk alternatives (similar to soy). This means it could be a competitive cash crop. Since it is technically a weed, it requires little or no pesticide or genetic modifications to grow well in most climates. The only "catch" is that hemp's flowers happen to be marijuana, which itself is a multi-billion dollar international industry -- ironically so, considering its illegal status. Hmm…

9. Restore the Constitution: The USA Patriot Act needs to go, now. So do the new bills allowing Bush fascist powers of subjecting anybody he wants to military justice as "terrorist combatants," and the one that lets him declare martial law as he sees fit in a national emergency and press National Guard soldiers into service, all without Congressional approval. These are all embarrassments to our country, and so is all the surveillance and lawmen buying phone records, electricity bills, and other private data that's none of their goddamn business.

Sadly, the election results were bittersweet for me. Apparently, many of the ousted Republicans were moderates, and those replacing them were moderate Democrats. Living abroad contributed to an impression in me that America is one of the most conservative countries in the world. Republicans say the vote was "against the GOP, not for the left," which is probably true, and that depresses me. Gay unions, which I support, were handily defeated, and stem-cell research won its own ballot proposal in Missouri by a hair. Because I come from the left, the past six years have been difficult for me to bear. The government did nothing to appeal to anyone left of the center. I'll be impressed and pleased if the new government grants even one or two of the wishes on my Christmas list before they drop legislation duties to play election politics again.

I don't hate the Republican party. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made a concerted effort in the past year to appease voters on the left side of the spectrum, from environmental initiatives to showing sympathy to social progress. If Republicans were all like Schwarzenegger, I'd be voting for them. My fear is this: I fear that Bush will play nice guy, diplomatically suppress interesting legislation for two years, and the Republicans will watch like hawks for every minuscule Democratic slip-up. When Democrats hit vetoes or establish voting records that could be construed as "liberal," the GOP will punish them for it -- severely -- in 2008 and beyond. I fear that the Left will run Hillary for president in 2008, who no Right-leaning voter would ever vote for, and the GOP will run McCain or Giuliani, who many Left-wingers like. Under the leadership of a charismatic face like McCain's, Republicans could quietly and rapidly re-collect control of everything in '08 or '10. And then: maybe they'll have learned a lesson from this Tuesday and from Schwarzenegger, who smashed his Democratic opponent by learning the lesson early and giving us lefties something to smile about. Or maybe, they'll just go right back to the way they've been for six years -- having learned only not to let a clown like Bush spoil the fun as their front man.

Or, the Republicans could blow the next two years with snarls and partisan bullshit, and run a loser like Gingrich in '08, while the Democrats maintain their momentum, build a worthwhile legislation record, and pick a solid, actually likable presidential candidate to sweep them to ultimate victory. For the Democrats, this should be their New Year's Resolution.

17 April 2006: I received one valid criticism of this piece from a friend of mine. Mostly he said that one shouldn't condemn authors for poor use of the language because they may bring other things to the table -- things that interest those who don't feel they need fine writing. I understand that editors will never hold writers to higher standards because they know how good writing has to be for it to sell, and they've got no real-world reason to ask their authors for more. Also, I think that considering how little most writers make, those few who do earn a decent living deserve to be left alone. Still, I'm leaving up this piece as something to consider.

I don't talk much about writing on this website. It makes me uncomfortable because I haven't managed to sell anything yet, and I've been trying; and I keep praying that one day I can make enough money off writing that I don't need a full-time job or to attend graduate school or have any more bosses. Writing could do that for me, but it's not likely even if I succeed. Very few published writers ever earn enough to live comfortably. Many of our remembered legends who wrote the Classics died penniless or wrote most of their material between shifts at full-time jobs. Some hard-working and talented authors get on swimmingly, like Stephen King. But there's one thing I'd never do for that awesome success and wealth -- and too many rich writers do it -- which is kill the English language for a living.

I may sound like a snob, but please. Clancy, Grisham, Dan Brown, and like authors who earn more than I could ever dream of making, do our language a disservice. I've never read a book of theirs, and probably won't. But after hearing ad infinito how awful they are, I at least had to visit a bookstore and read a page or two of their stuff. I would do this with an unbiased eye; no expectations, simply judging for myself off the way they hang their words together. And God, are people right. The writing is openly bad! One needn't sniff closely to detect the stink.

I say these authors kill my language: they do it with waste. The public prefers long books, and writers pander to that by using many more words than need be used. It's wasteful; it's a crime against the language. The beauty of English lies in many things (teaching it to foreigners, I now recognize some of them), one of which is its power and force in economy. Language clearly spoken or written is a pleasure to the recipient. These authors, though, take an otherwise normal sentence and mutate it, twist it, rearrange it, until it's triple its length. Do that enough times and a book can wax a hundred pages, maybe more.

Think of reading as feeding your mind. When you consume fast food or soda or twinkies, you're consuming something with lots of extra shit your body doesn't need (preservatives, added sugar, antibiotics, whatever is in the "special sauce"). We all know what our bodies do with that: we become fat, tired, etc. When you read something with too many unwarranted words, it fatigues and clutters the mind.

No wonder people watch TV instead of reading -- popular books are just as stupid as television but want more time. Why read The Hunt for Red October at a couple hundred pages when you could watch the movie in a couple hours? I suppose reading the book (which I attempted and dropped 30 pages in) would teach you how submarines work and other technical things you could find in non-fiction books -- but that's what non-fiction is for. (And by the way, good fiction writers usually assume their readers already know those things or can figure them out from the context, instead of dumping the info on us like we're in Grade School.) Good books, on the other hand, don't really translate into movies well unless they're in the hands of brilliant screenwriters and directors. To use King as an example again, his work is almost always terrible on screen.

Why do I complain? Naturally, I'm a little jealous. I'm jealous that I put so much of my blood, sweat and tears into my writing, making sure it's intelligent and doesn't flow the way Boris Karloff walks, and I don't earn anything for it (yet), while these authors (and this is no attack on their character or the subjects/plots of their work) write at a Junior High level and make millions. I'm frustrated that many people I know, including my own father, would rather read that junk than the fiction I find exciting or moving or a pleasure to read. But mostly, I feel cheated. I can't sit down to books recommended me which would otherwise interest me, because I don't have the patience for that kind of writing. I'm always seeking out new authors and books, and trying things everybody says "I just have to read," or that "I would love, it's right up my alley," only to find that the writing is unbearably awkward and stupid. I occasionally give them a shot but in the end they wear me out and I lose interest.

People often say such books are written "clearly" and "directly," but they're describing the plot. In reality, it's the opposite. I dislike "purple prose," but it's the same principle, just a different incarnation. Some of my favorite authors are more work and read more slowly than others (Lovecraft and Melville); some are less work and read quickly (Dick and Wells). But they all write beautifully.

I have strong feelings of insecurity about the length of my books and stories, which are always short by popular standards. People who read my work critically argue that it's not deep or descriptive enough, and perhaps that it's more screenplay than fiction. But the solution doesn't lie in using steroids on my sentences. I just wish the millions of people raving about The DaVinci Code could wake up to that.

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reflection lately, and I've come to a disturbing realization: I rub a lot of people the wrong way. Call me paranoid, but I keep getting this crazy notion that people avoid me, dislike me, or try to keep me out of their social spheres. I'll try to explain.

I guess it all started when I was in elementary school. I was the class clown for all six years, even though most of my classmates didn't think I was funny (nor did my teachers). I was also picked on a lot, mostly in Kindergarten and 5th Grade, the head and tail end of the experience.

In Middle School I didn't really have any buddies. I had one friend but we fought all time. In High School, I developed a close-knit group of friends who are still by far my closest and best friends today. I tried pretty hard throughout High School to "fit in" and wear trendy clothes (but never the infamous Abercrombie) and talk to popular kids and connect myself up to the network of the "cool" people. It didn't work. However, my successful Cross Country career and numerous poetry readings won me a general respect and established me as something of a personality at my school. But I still never became close to anyone from there outside of the one or two handfuls of individuals who still comprise my primary circle of friends.

After High School, my friends and I spent a summer with a group of girls and other guys who were mostly a year younger than us. We thought they were really cool and that we'd all be close for years after. But somehow, all that fell through. The girls have since called me sexist, a self-righteous snob, and a host of other terrible things which don't describe me at all. I never see or hear from them. How did that happen? Maybe they realized, like we did, that we're completely different kinds of people from them, and figured there was just no point in bothering. It's a cynical attitude that I don't subscribe to, but I think many people do and that could be part of my problem -- because I'm a different kind of person from most people.

In college I worked at a museum for 2.5 years, but in my last half-year I noticed a distinct shift in attitude about me. I was never given shifts anymore, and when I signed up for some under my new cashier position there, I was yelled at by coworkers and my bosses for taking "too many shifts" and told I had to give most of them to other people. In another instance, a museum manager held a recording for a kids' audio program, and asked for volunteers to do the voices. I of course emailed him personally about it the instant he put the notice up. He never emailed me back, and over a month later he posted news saying that he'd found all the people he needed for the recording.

Every Halloween at the museum we did a scary storytelling activity in the Planetarium, which I dominated for two years. I scared the children too much, though -- so they stopped doing it even though it was quite popular.

I noticed near the end that I was becoming some kind of loose cannon or museum bad-boy. I sent out emails joking about the issue of teaching Evolution on tours (which shouldn't even be a debate -- it's just a theory that happens to form the basis of most of modern science), and was hugely reprimanded for offending many coworkers. Later, I sent another email inviting people to a museum party that was, I admit, slightly "loaded." But nonetheless, it shouldn't have been a big deal. My boss quietly fired me -- she never told me! I sent many emails to her that she never replied to after I was removed from the employee email list, and then I went to her office several times and she told me I wasn't fired and that she'd email me when she had shifts to give me. But eventually, she did fire me (I went to the employee mail room and found that my mailbox had been given to a new docent -- that's how she told me).

I increasingly felt that the museum population felt like I didn't belong there, that I was not museum staff material, I had too many strong opinions, talked to the kids in too high-vocabulary and intelligent a manner, made too many wisecracks that oversensitive employees couldn't handle -- people who flock to relativist, coddling institutions where they can hide out and pretend that everybody thinks like them and it's all okay. Am I wrong? I don't know, and probably never will. I haven't heard from or seen one of my old coworkers in ages. It's a shame, because I liked them immensely and my boss, until she fired me for absolutely no legitimate offense, was bar-none my favorite boss ever.

And now, we come to Italy. In my TEFL course, I tried to make new friends and be as outgoing as possible, but right away I noticed people talking about all the stuff they did "last night" with most of the class, to which I was not invited. Where had I gone wrong? When had I, as I've so often been accused, retreated from the school's social scene and evaded talking to my classmates outside of class? One girl, in a refreshing moment of honesty, told me she was never sure if I actually gave a shit about her or anybody, because of the ambiguity of my communication with people. I assured her that I cared and wanted to be friends. I haven't heard from her in 6 weeks now.

I've been living in Rome for 3 months, and I see my fellow Americans less and less. As stated in my News, I almost had a job at TEFL which was pulled out from under me with no help from the school. Since then, I sent them a nice, non-barbed email just asking for any help or advice they could offer, because I was desperate and still had no job. The school never replied. My fellow program alums who live in Rome never call me about hanging out; I call and send messages to them frequently, but they never answer or reply. Is it really just a coincidence?

I've considered that perhaps it's because I don't fit into any particular group or culture. I don't fit in with the "normal" culture: I don't wear expensive name-brand clothes, except I guess Levi's. I don't fit into any counterculture: I don't wear makeup or piercings or peace signs or read beat poetry/fiction. I don't listen to new bands, or indie rock or the "hip" indie rock that popular people steal from the counterculture. I don't smoke cigarettes and I rarely drink more than 4 beers on even my wildest nights. I cut my own hair but not in any "crazy" or "random" way, I just buzz it. I mostly wear mono-color coats and shirts, and flannel if I want to really express myself. I don't watch TV, not even the shows that other people who "don't watch TV" follow, like The O.C. and Desperate Housewives. I don't watch sports; I like Horror more than I like Comedy, although I'm always told I'm a "funny guy" -- I was once a class clown, after all. I don't read Dan Brown or other books that people who don't read enjoy -- but I do read quite a lot of other things. I guess I don't have that much to relate to with most people, and this is exacerbated by the fact that I'm a pretty unexciting bloke.

I don't know, maybe I really am just paranoid. Maybe I don't have any social skills. Or maybe, just maybe, there's something about me, some quality, that brackets me apart from the mainstream venues of human civilization. I don't know how much I'd mind -- my old friends are more than enough to keep me happy -- but it's becoming ever clearer that we'll probably all live very far apart, and I don't want to be alone wherever I end up. And in spite of my numerous social and political frustrations, I really do like people. If I didn't, I wouldn't be as cool with my current teaching job.

It's about time this post came. Having lived in Italy for 2 months, my perspective about my homeland has changed drastically. One hears a lot about European anti-American attitudes and Americans being shunned or shoved around here. It's complicated, and while I'm not the authority on the matter, I think I've earned the right to a few opinions on it.

One thing I've noticed here in Italy is a major cultural difference when it comes to what people find attractive. People here base attraction more on personal style and character. They are more forgiving of slight imperfections in physical appearance. It's okay for a man to be under 6' tall, it's okay if he doesn't shave every day or even every week. It's acceptable to cut your own hair and wear cheap clothes -- although they don't wear shorts here in spite of the hot climate. I've noticed a distinct increase in my self-esteem and self-image since coming here.

Proof of the reality is that there's a strong difference between the way Italian women and American tourist women "react" to me. Italian women will check me out, make eyes at me from across a subway train, even come right out and tell me I look good. American women -- not the ones who live here, but tourists -- almost always give me disdainful looks, turn away when I try to catch their eye, and radiate a lot of body language to the effect that they find me unattractive. I experience a sharp drop in my confidence and an almost paralyzed feeling of helplessness at almost every encounter with an American tourist. Note the "almost," as there are occasional exceptions.

Italians live a much more modest and easy lifestyle. They never have many possessions or much money. They retire late but don't work nearly as hard as we do. They drive small cars and motorcycles and the majority in Rome use public transportation. Contrary to stereotypes, Italians don't eat absurd amounts and aren't fat. In fact, there are not many fat people at all in this country, besides foreigners. Life is mainly comprised of working with a 2-4 hour break in the afternoon to relax, sitting around talking, hanging out in piazzas (like the Diag in Ann Arbor, but imagine a lot of young people there at night being social instead of studying alone or drinking at their house), smoking a pack of cigarettes a day (which I don't condone), and having two mid-sized meals with a tiny breakfast. People don't party as hard or drink as heavily; they are less noisy but more talkative and sociable.

Delete the smoking and that lifestyle seems pretty good in my book. People don't care about being rich and don't think they need to be millionaires to raise a family. There isn't the pressure to be a businessman or laywer or doctor; being a doorman or a garbage collector or the guy who serves people their coffee doesn't make you a loser like in America. There isn't the Conspicuous Consumption that dominates American society or the Puritan fascist-repression-and-then-going-completely-crazy-with-drugs-and-sex cultural scourge. This lifestyle is less wasteful and doesn't rob unneeded resources and food from the rest of the world for its own sake.

No wonder they hate Americans. But not all of us. For example, I've been discriminated for being American when seeking apartments over the phone, and had shady people try to take advantage of me because of my nationality. But I've never been socially shunned or rejected because of it, even though I never hide it. I also, to be fair, don't hide my political opinions, which usually coincide with theirs.

The USA is corrupt: its government is poisoned by greed and controlled by multi-nationals and big business such as the cigarette and oil industries who are raping the American people and the world just to put money in their pockets. The government seems adamant on making the country more Puritan and taking away more individual rights (privacy, for example) in response to a European trend toward liberal ideas in politics, particularly when it comes to drug law reform.

The government has been famously cutting budgets to education and scaling back college student loans, while throwing billions of dollars into its War on Marijuana. Consider also methamphetamines, a growing drug crisis in our country: the funds to bust meth labs are being syphoned to bust cannabis users and growers, while statistics show that harder law and enforcement regarding marijuana doesn't affect its popularity or circulation (cocaine, PCP, and meth are all lower priority than cannabis). The government seems to support a policy of dumbing down the country while allowing "hard," socially destructive and addictive drugs to flourish.

Unfortunately, I haven't met a large number of Americans who care, and that's probably one reason why Europeans find us repugnant. Many Americans agree with the current political powers, perhaps because they get sucked in by little details like abortion, or the belief that Republicans are better Christians (which, having read most of the Bible and the Gospels, I find hilarious), or the myth that states' rights equate to more individual rights, or the good old American dream that Republicans will let them get as rich as they want without taxing them, because taxes are inherently wrong and evil and having lots of expensive things makes you fulfilled and happy.

Other Americans are too afraid or apathetic or cynical or use the bystander effect as an excuse not to do anything about it, which is a lot more tragic. After all, it's not as though we fought a war costing 600,000 lives to prove that everybody living here was a citizen with rights and a chance to demand they be recognized, right? If everyone who wanted a change asked for it, the government would have to listen. But they aren't doing it. For it to work, a lot of people are necessary. A large group of people is comprised of individuals who take the time out of their busy schedule to participate in democracy. Because people our age voted at a rate of 1 in 10, George W. Bush is the president. The rest of the world hates him with the exception of terrorists because they know they can use idiots like him as catalysts to start trouble. And so, the rest of the world thinks of us as morons for electing him even though maybe less than half of us wanted him.

Think about this: you'll recall that recently there was a vote regarding the EU which France voted down. The Netherlands also voted against it. Among the Dutch, about two-thirds of the eligible voters voted. Do you think the same percentage of Americans voted in the 2004 election? Now, which country has a more progressive and rational approach to drug laws, and which country has more drug abuse and problems relative to the population?

Okay, enough preaching. We live in interesting and precarious times, and I hope all works out for the best in the near future.

If you search the internet, you'll easily find sites dedicated to how unhealthy something you like is (unless it's broccoli). The use of cow milk, for many reasons, has been a debated subject recently. Animal and plant protein are different and some believe that animal protein leeches calcium from the bones. It is true that we Americans consume too much protein (the Atkins-style diets should be illegal, in my opinion) and we get plenty of high-quality protein (both animal and plant) without the addition of milk.

The mass-produced milk you see in grocery stores may contain large amounts of cow pus and mucus, not to mention antibiotics you don't need, while the organic milk which is probably much healthier is at least twice as expensive. Moreover, mass-produced milk is probably not making the environment or the world's cows very happy, much like fast food beef.

One common argument against milk is that after we are weaned, our bodies stop requiring it and can't do much good with it from then on. We do continue to require vitamins A and D, calcium, and protein, though. We know that some people are allergic to milk and that its acid and mucus content, among other things, may provoke allergies. My allergies are quite bad, and allergies don't exactly help your skin, either.

Since I started on soy milk again, my allergies have been relatively tame, and my skin has been very clear. I'd say those results ain't half bad.

I realize this article may be proselytizing. My male friends universally consider soy milk to taste awful, but didn't beer taste bad at first, too? I think soy milk tastes good; I like the creaminess of milk as much as the next guy, but if giving that up means taking the edge off my allergies and improving my skin, it's a no-brainer.