It should take me a little less than a week to launch the beta version, at which point we might as well start posting — I can always polish and tweak it as we go along, and it will be structurally sound from the beginning. Rather than using a free theme, I purchased one from DIY Themes, which is probably the best WordPress theme design company out there. This is why I will be able to get it going without putting too many hours into it.

When it’s ready to launch, I’ll notify people on this blog and email everyone who expressed interest in contributing (if I miss you, be sure to let me know) so that we can all get set up as users. In the meanwhile, I’ll set up a Google docs account for the site and set up some user documentation so as to help content contributors better understand how to post to this particular WordPress theme. It isn’t difficult to post, but I think I’ll set it up to automatically crop pictures for teasers, so you may have to use a certain protocol when posting images.

This could be ready to go as early as Friday, but to be on the safe side I’ll say early next week.

My argument with pants on women is largely aesthetic. Not just on the individual level, but as far as society at large is concerned as well. Although fit young women can be quite appealing in a pair of pants, your typical pant-wearing woman – especially here in Seattle – is a slob. In public, there is no social elegance to speak of, but rather a mass of gender-undifferentiated proles, all wearing pretty much the same thing. The women may as well be stunted, wide-hipped and narrow-shouldered men stuffed into denim a few sizes too small.

Just as the American man’s principal weakness regarding the relationship between the sexes is his inattention to the social aspects of manliness, the American woman all too often neglects the sensual elements of femininity. By this I do not mean the obvious physical attributes that distinguish women, but rather the entire package — dress, bearing, tone of voice, choice of words, gait, expression and much more. A brash, loud woman – even a well-built one – stomping around in a pair of jeans, baring her teeth as she laughs (I really can’t stand how American women bare their fangs constantly — it is so far from demure) can be a real turn-off.

In the home, pants are entirely unnecessary. Sweatpants may be the worst offense. The popular image we have of the disgusting American husband sitting on an easy chair in front of the TV, hand in pants and belly sticking out from under the shirt, is more than matched by the wife parked on the sofa like a basking sea-lion in an old T-shirt, sweatpants and flip-flops.

Certainly, it is incumbent on American men to learn to behave in ways that are socially attractive to women (known to some as “Game”), but as part of the deal we should also expect a bit more from women. Women should learn to dress, behave, speak and move more like women. Part of that should include abandoning the default status of pants as female attire. If a woman wants to go herding cattle, prospecting or fly-fishing, by all means she should go to Cabela’s and purchase a sturdy pair of trousers, but what’s the point of purchasing that cheap pair of women’s pants at Eddie Bauer? Why not choose an attractive, feminine skirt?

I think it’s important to recognize that raising small children is indeed a full-time job, and then some. Women who put all their effort into this noble vocation should be praised and highly valued. Furthermore, they should be strongly encouraged to do so in the bounds of marriage, because, to be quite frank, it’s far too much to ask from the majority of women to go it alone.

It’s always a joy to see kids happy, healthy, and energetic, but sometimes it sure feels like they’ll be sending you to an early grave with their relentless exuberance. Whatever the case, I’m very happy to have my kids under my roof for an extended period of time without having to go for days without seeing them, and they seem pretty happy to be with daddy.

However, when they go to mom’s place for a couple of weeks I’ll have a lot more time to sit, think, and produce some new content. But of course I’ll be sad when I don’t hear their little feet pattering into the kitchen for dinner, and I’ll miss reading them stories before bedtime. It’s a complicated thing, being a father.

As a college town, Bellingham has its share of young people, but the night life is far from impressive. The trendiest place appears to be Bob’s Burgers and Brew, which is a fancy hamburger joint where all the local hipster types go to show off. The place is decorated as though it were a dance club, which it is not, but Bellingham people seem as though they might feel too self-conscious at a dance club, so this may be the closest they can come. Personally, I preferred the low-rent Horseshoe Café, which has a country feel and taste as well as a bar in the back, where the local hard drinkers nurse their drinks in darkness and privacy all day long. There was an Irish pub, called “Uisce,” but the place looked far too pretentious for its purpose, so I spent little time there. What’s the point of an Irish pub where the drinks are expensive and the people haughty and distant?

People in Bellingham take the “Seattle Freeze” to a new level. This demonstrates that the cultural tendency toward frostiness extends far past Seattle proper. Newcomers get suspicious looks — if you don’t fit in people appear to be wondering “what the hell is he doing here?” Good question, I think. Ethnically, Bellingham is very white/Northern European. There are some Asians due to the college, but hardly any blacks. One may see Lummi Indians, who have a reservation a short distance from town, from time to time. The people are not remarkable for looks or style, and it is difficult to discern what may be any distinguishing cultural characteristics they possess. I don’t think they can be blamed for this; American mass-culture has so thoroughly saturated the entire country that developing a distinct identity is difficult anywhere one finds a major highway. However, I did notice that the body-piercing parlor was doing a thriving business on a Friday evening.

Overall, Bellingham gives the impression that it would be “a nice place to raise a family,” but older children and adults would have to put up with being bored to tears, or if possible drowning their boredom with material goods or outdoor recreation, which the Bellingham area does at least offer in abundance. If you are looking for a fun town with unique attributes and a thriving cultural scene, Bellingham is not the place to go.

It is beyond me why people can’t figure out why Mexicans are willing to work so much harder than Americans at the same jobs. It is directly related to the difference of cost of living between Mexico and America. What many Americans don’t understand is that a lot of Mexicans want to return home, and those that choose to stay in the US and become citizens can maintain dual nationality courtesy of Mexican law, so they can return at any time without any loss of privileges.

In 2007, the average daily wage in Mexico came out to about $16 US per day. That is $2/hour over a full workday. A Mexican illegal alien making $10/hour in America is making five times what the average Mexican worker does, and plenty of illegals make a lot more than that. A few years ago, an experienced Mexican roofer could earn about $25/hour here in the states.

For Americans, the national average wage in 2007 came out to $40,405.48. That’s about $20/hour. Now imagine there was some magical, wealthy country full of jobs for young American men. Let’s say the unskilled young men were offered $100/hour, and the skilled ones (carpenters, plumbers, etc.) well over $200/hour. These young men would jump at the opportunity to take these jobs, and would put up with substandard conditions, such as communal living in cramped quarters, without a second thought. They wouldn’t mind the idea of living under threat of a forced but free ride home, because they’d know that they could probably get back in if they wanted, and going home isn’t all that bad anyway. And of course they’d work hard to keep their jobs, because after just a year or two on the job they could buy a house back home with cash and return as one of the wealthier men in town. After five years or so making the equivalent of $400,000 per year roofing, a young man would be set for life! Even five years making $200,000 per year washing dishes would be swell — it would be like working for 25 years making the average national wage.

On the other hand, for the young American, $10 an hour in a major city will get him a crappy studio apartment, cheap shoes, a bicycle and a little left over for recreation in dive bars and the like. Even in the country $10 per hour is a downright lousy wage. Maybe enough to rent a trailer and buy a used pickup. What motivation does the young American have to go out in the hot sun, sweating and working in a dangerous occupation, when he’s guaranteed nothing but a miserably low status in his own home?

So whenever you hear someone talking about “jobs Americans won’t do,” just remember the above. It really blows my mind that people can’t figure out why Mexicans are so eager to work as hard as they do in America. I’d suggest that people go to Mexico and see how hard Mexicans scramble for jobs that pay $1.00 per hour, which is roughly the Mexican equivalent to making $10 per hour in the US. Somehow, I doubt they’d be such eager workers at that wage.

Of course, one could make the argument that the Mexican standard of living is lower overall, but it isn’t that much lower, and motivation has a whole lot to do with one’s perspective. Relative to what they could have had before in Mexico, they are getting paid like CEOs for doing manual labor. And American workers are simply losing any leverage they might have had to demand a living wage.

That the ERA lost support may appear perplexing at first glance, but one has to take into account the changes that were occurring in the 1970s. At this point, divorce laws had only recently begun to favor women, and US manufacturing was still fairly healthy. Additionally, affirmative action was just starting to kick in, and women still found themselves in what they considered an unfavorable situation. However, by the 1980s US manufacturing began its long decline, affirmative action became widespread, and the no-fault divorces that were mainly introduced in the 70s started to create windfalls for women across the nation. The American woman’s star was on the rise, and equal outcomes were no longer as attractive as alimony, child support and preferential hiring policies. For a time, men accepted these changes, as they still dominated the workforce and the Cold War economy created plenty of jobs for them. There were a few men, however, who saw the writing on the wall (mainly those who had been dispossessed in divorce), and men’s activism started to emerge as a recognized, if not particularly potent, political movement.

Despite the efforts of those valiant few men, the steady march of women’s activism did not lose steam; on the contrary, it became a juggernaut that mercilessly crushed its opponents throughout the Clinton presidency. When VAWA, the crowning achievement of women’s activism, was passed with the steadfast support of current Vice President Joe Biden, the women’s movement transparently switched from espousing egalitarianism to supporting outright domination.

The status quo that emerged in the 1990s has largely remained. Most ordinary men have been relegated to second-class citizens in their own homes and in the workplace, forced to walk on eggshells lest they get slammed with one or another allegation that could send them into the street overnight. Defeated men have begun to avoid marriage and commitment, and rather than take up traditional roles and responsibilities have been leading lives of carefree dissipation or quiet desperation.

Of course, it is up to men to do what they want with their lives. Given what men have been through over the last few decades, the last thing they need is more abuse, punishment or criticism. A man’s life should be his own, and, with due respect for the rights of others, he should live it as he pleases. But to be truly free, discrimination against men in the workforce in the form of affirmative action and discrimination against men in the family in the form of unfair divorce laws and VAWA should be eliminated. The ERA can do that. Every single provision of VAWA that gives superior rights to women could be gutted with these simple lines:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Supporting the ERA may require a shift in perspective for some men. It may seem radical, but given the circumstances we find ourselves in, it is our best shot at righting some of the wrongs of the past several decades. If men do not demand equality under the law, we will only see a further erosion of our constitutional rights and be driven ever further toward the abyss of slavery.

In the chapter on Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann, Sailer writes:

It was in Indonesia, strangely enough, that his white mother, as a stratagem in her passive-aggressive war on Lolo, her unsatisfactory Asian second husband, painstakingly instilled in little Barry Soetoro the black racialism that pervades all 460 pages of Dreams from My Father. [Half-Blood Prince p.52]

Sailer identifies the correct time and place in which Obama’s obsession with race took root, but he overestimates Stanley Ann’s influence. Fortunately, Sailer includes a short sketch of the background of Indonesia during Obama’s stay:

After the horrific events of 1965-1966 in which a Communist Party uprising led to a bloody crackdown by the army, and the leftist blowhard President Sukarno was pushed out by the rightist General Suharto…

Horrific is a perhaps an understatement for what was going on in Indonesia at the time. Political and racial violence had been raging for nearly twenty years. Ethnic cleansing and racial violence resulted in the exodus of hundreds of thousands of “Indo-Europeans” (in Indonesia this means people of mixed European and Indonesian blood), and untold thousands of Chinese were butchered in the streets and in their homes.

It is telling that Obama’s mother tells her son she “hadn’t heard about the scenes of mass slaughter in Indonesia during the putsch” [Half-Blood Prince p.54]. Given Stanley Ann’s education and intelligence, not to mention interest in Indonesia, she must not have been telling her son the truth. Perhaps she meant to deflect her responsibility for what her son went through in this political climate:

Obama was routinely subjected to racist violence by local lads: “All say he was teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood—primarily because he was so different in appearance.” He was frequently attacked by three Indonesian kids at once, and one time they threw him in a swamp. “Luckily, he could swim.” [Half-Blood Prince p. 54]

Sailer posits that Obama, who clearly has a great deal of ambivalence about his mother, was indoctrinated into Black Nationalism as a part of a passive-aggressive war his mother was waging against her second, Indonesian husband Lolo Soetero. I don’t think Stanley Ann ultimately had that kind of influence on Obama, but the daily ridicule and frequent beatings from Indonesian kids certainly did. The anti-colonialist struggle in Indonesia was largely a racial nationalist effort. Obama, a mixed-race boy of half-European heritage, probably fell into a classification approximating that of the hated Indo-Europeans, who were seen as the mestizo elite that collaborated with Dutch overlords.

Innocent little Obama couldn’t escape racial abuse, and certainly often wished he could look just like the Indonesian kids who taunted him. Over time Obama likely internalized some of the resentment toward Europeans that characterize Indonesia. He probably resented his white mother for taking him there; she may have regretted doing so. Perhaps this explains why he was left with his grandparents in Hawaii. Obama may not have written much about this experience because, as is often the case with children of flawed parents, it is the deepest regrets and most painful memories that are most carefully hidden.

Ultimately, it was the trauma of his experience in Indonesia that left Obama with a deep need for a racial identity despite spending his adolescence in tolerant, multiracial Hawaii. Per America’s racial rules, Obama’s default identity was black, and he embraced it with a passion. Obama’s racialism, rather than being an outgrowth of his mother’s troubled marriage with Lolo Soetero, was forged in the seething cauldron of post-colonial Southeast Asia. One should never underestimate the effect abuse and alienation can have on a little boy.

Generation X is just starting to show its political side, and it does not look much like the boomers’ at all. The two candidates that excited GenXers the most were Ron Paul on the right and Barack Obama on the left. Neocons and boomer liberals like the Clintons are generally disliked, if not outright detested by adults under the age of 45 or so. The surprisingly resilient campaign of Ron Paul was a direct result of younger adults’ disenchantment with the prevailing norms, but Paul was denigrated and rejected as a fringe cadidate by his own party, whereas Obama, who is a bit more of an insider, was shielded to a degree by a political correctness that demanded he be treated respectfully and taken seriously. So Obama has emerged as the first GenX candidate.

The characteristics of the GenX political animal have emerged in the campaign, and they are a far cry from boomer political activism. Except for a few sappy, weird stunts pulled by boomer grandparents with their grandkids, Obama’s campaign pays only lip service to the universalism that so beguiles the boomer psyche. In fact, it has taken on a downright nasty form as the final week approaches, hitting McCain and Palin in their pressure points with one focused blow after another. McCain is portrayed as a psychotic warmonger in cahoots with the same gang of crooks who fooled us into a war with Iraq. Palin, for her part, is cast as that vapid bitch of a prom queen we all hated back in the 1980s.

Generation X grew up in a cold, dark place, under the overwhelming shadow of the massive baby boom. We were spoon-fed platitudes about love, harmony and equality, and then came of age during a time of unprecedented violence, as cities across the nation became gangland war zones. It was a strange, conflicting message we received, as we tried to digest counterculture 1960s utopianism even as apocalyptic paranoia crept into the public’s consciousness. This left us with little sense of purpose and a deep cynicism about the causes our parents enthusiastically supported in their free, idealistic youth. Also, relatively speaking, we have been poorer than the boomers ever were. College costs skyrocketed and wages stagnated as we entered adulthood. Our options were reduced to following the repeated economic surges created by boomer speculation, which has finally, it seems, culminated in the massive financial failure of recent months.

Now GenXers are emerging from the shadow. And it is no coincidence that this is happening as the edifice of boomer greed and selfishness is crumbling before our eyes into ruin. We’ve learned to speak the language of the boomers, and with Obama Generation X has found their achilles’ heel. Deep in the hearts of people of my generation, there is a hope that Obama really will engage in redistribution and punish the old gang that created the mess America finds itself in. It isn’t just right vs. left; think of the attacks that sank Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This is undeclared generational warfare — undeclared because GenXers do not broadcast their intentions and take the center stage like boomers. We’ve always despised boomers’ self-righteous grandstanding. Most GenXers work from hidden places, never grabbing the spotlight, supporting their candidate through merciless surprise attacks on the opponent. McCain doesn’t know how to deal with this, and this is largely because his campaign lacks real support from younger adults. It must be his worst nightmare, kind of like flying a plane and facing not just one formidable opponent, but a swarm of missiles coming from all directions.

This is the new kind of politics we’ll see for some time: hidden intentions, contempt for chivalry, and calculated appeals and attacks rather than genuine universalist sappiness. The goal for the next four years will be the disenfranchisement of the aging boomers, and if Obama is elected and doesn’t follow through on that, he will find his current supporters turning on him with the same hard tactics that beat down his opponents. We are witnessing a paradigm shift in American politics and society as boomers, who will never willingly pass on the reins, are suddenly finding them pried out from their fingers by a determined, pissed-off, and surprisingly strong younger demographic.

The day after the phone conversation, I saw a mobile detention unit pull up in front of my house, out of which stepped a large man in uniform, shod in heavy boots and sporting a shiny silver badge. Although I knew why he was there, I still couldn’t really believe it was happening. Clipboard in hand, industrial strength can of mace and taser gun hanging from either side of his hip, the animal control officer approached my door. Worried about the impending arrest of my cat, I stepped outside to meet him halfway, hoping Nelson would stay out of sight. The officer, who turned out to be a friendly, jovial guy, broke the news I expected to hear, telling me what he had heard about the incident, and why he had to respond. Evidently, Nelson would have to be booked on suspicion of aggravated mangling and simple assault. The alleged mangling had resulted in the hospitalization of Nelson’s enemy, so his veterinary records would be impounded as well.

Fearing he would be incarcerated at the local animal jail, I was reluctant to surrender Nelson, but the officer assured me that he could be booked and released to my custody. So I went to fetch my cat, upon which he was scanned for his digital fingerprint and photographed for a mug shot. The officer stated that he didn’t think the matter would be pursued any further, since the most serious charge – the mangling – was not directly witnessed and there was no evidence that he had actually assaulted my neighbor. I suggested that the mangling may have been the result of raccoon activity in the neighborhood, and he seemed to accept that explanation as a possibility.

After booking Nelson, the officer left to pick up his veterinary records, and I haven’t heard from animal control or my neighbor since. To me, the entire episode simply confirmed the strange nature of our tightly-controlled society. When even disputes between cats are referred to authorities, one wonders where it will stop. Could someone get a visit from an officer for letting dandelions grow in his lawn? How about letting little kids run around naked in the sun? It’s about time society started letting up on the control impulse and just let things be.