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Wow do I need a life. I knew this was Danisnotonfire before I saw the source name at the bottom

Reblog to support Becky guys

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Old, I am

Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette is twenty years old. The Offspring debut indie CD is twenty years old. Sixteen Stone by Bush is twenty years old.

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Where there is a will....

There must be a way to make professional beer drinking a viable career choice.

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Emergency Beer Run, Part 1

Like every good adventure this one starts out getting drunk with friends.

For two months I had been planning a five camping trip in Michigan’s north western upper peninsula, the Porcupine Mountains to be exact.  I hadn’t been there since I was a kid.  It is all old growth forest on the edge of Lake Superior, and it is only two hours from the where I went to college right after high school.  This was going to be my extended, Labor Day and Birthday vacation for myself.

Then, as my birthday approached, things started to change.  Five days before I was planning to leave some friends of mine invited me over to their lake house and we drank beer, cooked out, and took a few rides around the lake they are on.  Did I mention we were drinking beer?

Kalamazoo MI, my hometown, has been experiencing a rush of new craft breweries over the past five years.  There are now eight different craft breweries in the metro Kalamazoo area and more keep coming in to the city every year.  Kalamazoo is also home to one of the world’s top twenty breweries in both sales and amount of beer brewed, Bell’s.

So before meeting up with my friends I made a few stops for some specialty brews, in late August a lot of the pumpkin beers start coming out, and loaded up with eight different beers from 7 different brewers.

After we were doing eating, drinking, and going around on the boat we headed in to town and started drinking the good beer around town.  It was that night that it hit me how good craft beer can be and how much it varies from brewer to brewer.  The following day, while nursing a hangover, the idea was firmly in my head to take a beer discovery road trip.

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Coming soon! The story of an epic journey.

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Diet Wars #2, Cooked

I have read a couple of Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s books.  As with every pledge drive on PBS one of the specials was another one of his diet lectures.  Generally speaking I like the way he presents his information and I think there is a lot of science to back up his claims. http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Live-Amazing-Nutrient-Rich-Sustained-ebook/dp/B0047Y175M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410127959&sr=8-1&keywords=eat+to+live

According to Eat to Live, the basic plan for his diet is to become a vegan.  He doesn’t present it like that but that is pretty close to what he is really saying.  Eat very limited amounts of animal proteins and refined carbohydrates and pig out on as much veggies and fresh fruits as you want, especially uncooked.

In his recent talk on PBS the discussion was all about fast foods verses slow foods.  The speed of the food was related to how quickly things are dissolved in your blood stream.  Every slow food he mentioned was a fruit, uncooked vegetable, nut or bean.  Fast foods were meats and processed foods, most of which are the staples of the American Diet.  All of which are cooked foods, nothing raw in this group.

Michael Pollan wrote a book called Cooked. 

http://www.amazon.com/Cooked-Natural-Transformation-Michael-Pollan-ebook/dp/B008EKOIN8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410128057&sr=8-1&keywords=pollan+cooked

I listened to an interview he gave on NPR back when he was promoting this book.  The premise for this book was that modern humans didn’t begin to evolve, especially our brains, until the discovery of cooking.  It seems an amazing thing to consider but there must have been a time before we cooked our food, we are still just about the only species on the planet that cooks its food.

Michael Pollan is arguing that human evolution probably started as we learned to cook our food.  The book has facts to back up its claims.  Mostly the book points to the fact that wild apes vastly prefer cooked nuts and berries to raw and observations in the wild have even lead to the development of theories as to who we would of learned to eat cooked food.  Primates in the wild have been observed to search the remains of forest fires for foods such as roasted nuts and berries.

Where these two people come together is where I think we should be truly studying diet and nutrition.  Both of these men agree that cooking food makes it easier to digest and requires less energy on our parts to digest it, while also giving us the ability to get more useful nutrition out of the food.

On the one had you have board certified dietitian suggesting we eat less processed foods and more raw vegetables.  On the other hand you have a critically acclaimed author of food science suggesting that our success as a species is owed to the fact that we learned how to process foods.

Somewhere in the collected knowledge of these two individuals there is likely to be a transformative truth in the worlds of human nutrition, evolution, and health science.

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To that guy I want to talk to.

Hi. We have worked in the same team at our jobs for over a month now. I think your attractive and I would really like to get to know you better. From what I know of you at work you seem like a nice guy. I don't know much about you and even though I wish you were gay I don't think you are. So I know I can't have the relationship I want with you. But, that's okay. I like you, and it would be great to be your friend if nothing else. We work in a place where I can't really be open about how I feel and the last I opened up to coworker about how I liked them, it ruined the at work friendship we had. I really want to tell you that I like you, truthfully I really want to do more then that. Listen to me. I am in my mid thirties and talking like I'm still in high school. I'm probably even blushing right now. I know I feel nervous around you. Anyway, I know there are a couple of bigots on our team, and there is already a lot of people that talk about my sexuality behind my back at work. So even though I really want to talk to you, tell you, ask you, and get to know you, I'm probably just going to continue to act shy around you and isolate myself, because it is the only way prevent myself from wanting to be closer to you, even if it was only as friends.

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Cooperatives Part 1

There are a few sectors of a free market capitalist economy that seem to do very well as non-profit cooperatives, credit unions being the obvious example. I personally don’t think food cooperatives make all that much sense, although I am a member of my local food co-op, to me it just seems like of all the things to do as a not for profit cooperative a grocery store isn’t that great an idea, but it does give people that want specialty organics and vegan food a venue. Anyway, of all the things to do as non-profit cooperatives it blows me away that healthcare isn’t really one of them. It would seem to be a natural for me. I am not talking about trashing The Affordable Care Act, which isn’t affordable and doesn’t provide care, in favor of something new. We love our health insurance and free laissez faire capitalism in America so I am not going to take that from you. A lot of people don’t like the healthcare that system provides and we want a different option. A preventative health cooperative is exactly what the doctor ordered but I have yet to hear of one existing. A facility that is part workout gym, part registered dietician’s office, part family doctor’s office, and part retail space where all the stuff you need to achieve and maintain a healthy life style is available. Did I mention you would be the owner? Your membership fee and owner share guarantees you access to free or discounted services or merchandise. This sounds too good to be true and yet I can’t really see a good reason for why it wouldn’t work.

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401K investment help at Hogwarts

I am currently working with some friends at work to make a short booklet about understanding how our 401K works and some other common information about investing.  We used screen shots of our online 401K fund options and replaced the word with Harry Potter stuff. 

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The Clandestine Revolution (Michigan United)

There is this thing, even though I spent 5 hours of my life at their annual convention I am still not sure what they are but lets call them a group.  So there is this group in Michigan called Michigan United.  I had expected them to be much the same as Michigan Environmental Council, a lobbyist organization that works to further the goals of its constituent groups that support it, but it is not that.  The best way I can describe it is as an umbrella organization that does naught but give other activists an opportunity to come together.  Even as activists go these folks are homespun and blue collar, at least mostly as I do have to admit that some of the immigrant and undocumented immigrant groups seemed to have their shit together.

What strikes me about this, and why I consider it a clandestine revolution, is that you are not likely to ever hear about Michigan United.  Most of the "victories" that were discussed at their annual convention were either small scope issues or were big issues that Michigan United played an imperceptibly small role in.  (They were clearly trying to claim the recent increase in minimum wage legislation as their victory despite the fact that of all the people that I saw with clip boards taking petition signatures none of them identified themselves as being with Michigan United.)  These folks all want to start a people’s revolution, of sorts, but I didn’t even know this existed until a family member of mine, whom is active in union politics, invited me to it through the U.A.W.

You are also not likely to hear anything about it because the lack of organization makes this group highly ineffectual.  I.E.

A workshop discussion that I attended at this convention could have been brilliant and been the seed for a new movement to piggy back on the recent minimum wage increases Michigan’s legislature enacted.  Four people were on a panel discussing 1% vs. 99% issues.  One guy was there for "historical context" and didn’t really have anything to say besides I know Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s son.  The important part of this group, however, was a guy from D-15, a lady from California, and some other young lady I didn’t catch where she was from.  (D-15 is a low wage workers organization in Detroit that is pushing for a living wage law in Detroit making Detroit’s minimum wage 15$ and give all low wage workers union representation.)  So the young lady mentioned, quite briefly, that there had been successful legislative pushes in Connecticut and Washington D.C. to make paid sick days a universal guarantee inside of their state, or city, labor laws.  The D-15 guy was all about doing things to help the quality of life for low wage workers.  The woman from California was discussing how important creating a narrative is to winning these types of issues. 

To my mind these three people should of immediately shook hands and gone away for a conversation about how to iniate a call for legislative action in Michigan to make paid sick leave a new part of Michigan’s labor laws.  The D-15 guy had a pre-existing group of some size to give the issue notoriety, the young lady had knowledge of previously successful campaigns for that issue, and the other woman had ideas about how to frame stories, the narrative, of the issue to strongly impact legislator and the voting public.

"Problem Solved.  The problem is solved.  We solved the problem so everything is awesome.  Problem solved."  (Yeah I watch Peg + Cat on PBS kids what’s it to you)

None of that happened.  In fact not only did that not happen but late when they asked us to vote on issues that we would like to see more actions take place for, paid sick leave wasn’t even on the list.

When it comes to the Michigan United groups that work on Environmental issues all I can say is, I laugh at you.  Chaining yourself up to a bulldozer and getting arrested doesn’t accomplish anything.  Claiming environmental racism is also a non-starter.  The hazardous waste dump, or dirty coal plant, isn’t next door to the majority black and Hispanic community because those polluters are racist.  Environmental racism exists but it is a side effect of the fact that race is the biggest indicator of a person’s socio-economic status.  In short, minority groups are discriminated against in terms of environmental quality because they are poor, not because they are black or Hispanic or whatever.  In fact in many cases these minority communities are built around the source of the pollution because the pollution source has caused the property values in the area to be affordable to them.  To solve environmental racism you need to solve economic racism, and to do that you need to do something about the disparities that exist between mostly white schools in the affluent suburbs and mostly minority, underperforming, schools in poor urban areas.  Even though I totally disagree with their analysis of the situation I absolutely agree that something needs to be done about it, but I will not be chaining myself to a backhoe anytime soon. 

When it comes to any of the big environmental challenges currently happening in the state of Michigan these people have no ideas and even expressed a level of disdain towards the idea of working with any of the big organized environmental organizations.

Over all this 5 hour pep rally really left me disillusioned over the prospects of a meaningful movement to create an engaged progressive electorate.  There were maybe one hundred people there, for something that is supposed to be a state wide movement, and just as many causes. 

I’ll leave you with this.  Even though it is Michigan United, not one mention was made of Gay and Lesbian efforts in Michigan on marriage equality or anti-discrimination policy.  The only mentions of GLBT issues were made in such a way as to suggest none of those people are part of us.  When I went up to a person, she had talked about her efforts to increase the availability of affordable housing and homeless shelters in Kalamazoo, and told her about how the Kalamazoo Gay and Lesbian Resource Center was working on a 5 year plan to build a trust fund to start a safe house for homeless gay teens in Kalamazoo.  She didn’t know about, didn’t seem to interested in it, and didn’t even know that the city had a gay and lesbian resource center, despite the fact the KGLRC hosts Kalamazoo Pride which is the biggest festival in the city.

Yet another group claiming union, common purpose, that doesn’t invite GLBT community leaders.  We drink the same polluted water, breath the same polluted air, work at the same crappy jobs as everyone else, and we even have the same issues with immigration reform (although in some cases there are very real threats to the health and safety of gay and lesbian immigrants if deported because regional governments in Mexico and other Latin American countries have histories of being very intolerant to their GLBT communities).

Michigan United might be a great platform for some people but not for me.  End of story.

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Is Democracy still a vaild form of government?

Is Democracy still a viable form of government, or is it just impossible in the areas where all the newest democracies exist?

Bush famously said that he wanted to “spread democracy across the world”.  But ten years later Iraq seems to be falling apart.  Afghanistan isn’t much better, politically speaking especially.  Egypt had two government overthrows in less than two years.  The youngest countries in Africa are struggling as democracies and, at least the news reports I hear, it sounds like they are destined to fail.

Let’s sit back for a minute and remember something about The United States own history.  Our first government failed.  It failed big time.  After we won the Revolutionary war the purpose that had brought us together was gone and we had to get down to the business of creating a system of laws that we could live with, that also embodied the principles for which everyone fought and died.  (It is worth noting that even during these formative moments in our nation’s history slavery was a contentious issue that we knew would one day have to be decided one way or another.)

The first government we created had an amazingly weak central government that wasn’t allowed to do much beyond maintain an active military force to defend the colonies.  It failed because it turned out there needed to be a central government that had the power to arbitrate disputes between states while maintaining a basic system in which each colony, state, would have the rights to govern according to these basic rules.

Then we fought a few wars, 1812, Civil War being chief among them. 

The point I am trying to make is that America’s democracy was far from perfect, and probably still is, but 230 plus years of working on it has fixed enough of the kinks to have created a system that we all would agree we would not be better without.

Part of the problem in these countries with relatively new democracies is simply the age we live in.  Social media has made it easy for one person’s tragedy to become one hundred people’s cause.  Technology has given everyone across the world a stronger sense of independence, a louder voice, and a direct way to connect with others of a like mind no matter where they are.

This new found, technology based, individuality creates hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of flash points inside a culture for people to rally behind, to drive discontentment with a system of government…  When this technology based individuality mixes with the celebrated sense of individuality that is the hallmark of democracy the resulting society is too unstable to survive the painstakingly slow process of working through the failures, which are inevitable, in any newly contrived government.  (I’d imagine that the process of building new government and society from scratch is incredibly complicated and it would be easy to totally forget major things.  I.E. Consider how long it took the U.S. to build an electrical grid that brought electricity to everyone.)

So I think the reason why so many of the newest democracies in the world are failing or struggling is mostly a product of social media’s ability to incense a crowd and feed into the expectation of instant gratification.  (Look at how quickly a Facebook movement was able to get Betty White to host Saturday Night Live!)

Building a country that works, takes time.  It is going to be messy.  You need patience.  Why do you think one of markers of success the U.S. measures its country by is, “A better life for the next generation.”  (It took the U.S. 200 years to, for the first time, not feel like that would be true.)

I think democracy is still the best form of government currently in use, but I think modern technology and the cyber-world, which is naturally kind of a democracy, make the business of building a new democracy so difficult to achieve as to be impossible, because democracy isn’t perfect, it is always a work in progress, and you can’t get instant results you have to put in the time to work it out.

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Fixing America #1

This is not a partisan ideology post. This far from it. A lot of people are hollering about the actions of the Federal government. Liberals are pissed at the Supreme Court and Conservatives have been pissed at Obama for the last 6 years. But, here is the truth, "none of you ever had control over the Federal Government, ever, period." The country is too big for the average Americans to really feel like they have control, even at state level you don't really have control. Your control rests primarily I'm the same governing bodies that also are responsible for the majority of decisions that effect your lives the most, city and county level officials. Any body that is really a fan of a sports team, The Cubs let's say, knows that it isn't just about how the Cubs are doing but about the farm teams further up the pipeline are doing, and players that are the fan favorites stick around the longest. The same is true in politics. Every successful bill, act, proposition, resolution, ect... Started as a bottom up endeavor. City leaders heard from average Americans and passed local laws and ordinances, then city ordinance disparities became state issues, state legislation disparities and enforcement issues became Federal issues and ultimately require final clarification from the Supreme Court. So if you don't like what is happening at the state or federal level get active at the local level. Don't just be another voice in the din, and I promise you that in Washington D.C. Your rabble is nothing but a loud overbearing din, become a local leader. Most of your local communities government committees are dramatically understaffed because those positions don't pay and don't get noticed and yet it gets you in the door. Wether it's Dog Catcher, which I've heard it really important in some communities, or Drain Commissioner, which is really important here in Michigan, there is always an open seat in some city or country board that is open and waiting for your input. Then we can stop arguing ideology about the big issues and start working on fixing the real issues. (Like the roving packs or ferrel Chihuahuas in So-Cal, or how East Main at Kings Highway, Riverview and Gull Rd at the viaduct on the east side of Kalamazoo always floods when we get anything more than a light sprinkle.) Leave the rabble, join the solution.

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If any awesome Nerdfighters out there are interested in having a Hanklerfish car decal, like this one, designed by Eric Geusz, Avery Vincent, Timothy Martin, Teresa Ross, and Alex Crouse from the Adult Nerdfights group on Facebook please like, reblog, and tag this post! Please do not remove my caption.

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Pride and Solidarity in the Labor Movement, but not for all

I am gay and a member of a labor union, The United Auto Workers.  June is a very important month for gay people, it is the month of PRIDE.

Say what you will about gay pride, most of you are wrong.  We are not an abomination, it is not a choice (a friend of mine once said that he did not celebrate gay pride because saying he was proud to be gay made it sound like he was acknowledging that it was a choice), and it is becoming only as commercial and superficial as you want it to be.  Mostly gay pride is the gay communitie’s version of black history month and Independence Day all in one.  It is a celebration of how far the GLBT community has come, how far it has to go, AND ALL THE THINGS THAT WE ARE.

There are always different workers unions represented at Chicago’s Pride Parade.  Teacher’s Union, Pilot’s Unions, Nurse’s Unions…..  Where is the U.A.W.?  Do they not have any locals in Chicago, or Detroit, or, my hometown of Kalamazoo?  Of course I know they do.

It would be nice to see my union showing that they stand behind me and all the other GLBT union brothers and sisters.  I can’t be that strange a duck, or my local that strange a local to be one of the few places with large amounts of openly gay and lesbian members.  (I personally know of at least 30 union members in my local alone.)

I

The U.A.W. and other large scale, not that the teacher’s union isn’t a large national labor union, would be a transformative moment in gay rights issues.  Large areas of the country still don’t include sexual orientation and gender identity in discrimination protections.  If you suddenly had the U.A.W., still considered the bulwark of the labor movement, backing and taking up the fight for equal treatment at work from GLBT workers it would be a massive game changer.

Sadly we can’t even get the U.A.W. to put out a float in a parade with the U.A.W. emblem and the phrase, “Union Strong, Showing Solidarity To All Our Members.”