The Barber Shop Conundrum (did I spell that right?) a political blog

So, I am a bit of a tightwad. For my haircuts I go to a little Vietnamese owned shop that is actually way out of my way..just to spend 7 bucks on a haircut. I work close to the barber shop so it's not that big of a deal. They typically do a decent job on my hair. It's a very straighforward shop, six chairs lined up. No sinks. On any given day, three people cutting hair. Most of the customers want their hair cut by the owner, who has actually been responsible for my worst haircut ever. The owner also has his chair turned toward a television (it's the only chair facing this direction). On the television all the time is Fox News.

I don't really watch too much Fox News because I am a liberal and it's not because I seek news that fits my point of view. I actually gathers my news from a variety of sources throughout my day. Fox News is like the bizarro world of news. And from the time it took to get a haircut on the day after Thanksgiving, I was thoroughly entertained yet again by Fox News' inability to run a story without editorializing.

What I mean (for those who don't understand) is that when the news gives a story, teleprompter reader guy doesn't give his two cents at the end. You know...what he thinks. That's normal news (I'm not talking about the talky shows on Fox or MSNBC..this is where the definite distiction between the two networks can be drawn). I always take issue with either network turning regular news into an opinion show...or even a debate. When facts are on the ready, there should be no room for "well this is what I think". I could give two shits about what you think...just read the fucking news.

First story that went political. Black Friday at Toys R Us. Faux had the CEO on. Newsreader asked a softball anti union set up question about unsafe products in toys. Toys R Us CEO said the issue was not really about safety, but about a union dispute. Wow. He actually turned a factual story about toy safety into an anti union statement. That's a huge leap and I can't believe the Fox guy let him get away with it....wait of course he did, he set the question up on a fucking tee for the Toys R Us CEO to hit that one out of the park. By the way, I am actually shocked that store was packed on Black Friday, but then again..even Office Depot is packed. Toys R Us is so not the same store it was when I was a kid. It used to be a giant cavernous store with rows and rows of toys. Now you have to figure out some wierd fucking layout....but that's not the point of my story.

Item number two was a list of things congress would be voting on in the upcoming weeks. The newsguy-cum-opinion host kept mentioning how "there's seems to be no vote planned for extending Bush tax cuts". There were other things he said weren't on the list. Of course, if we wanted to, we could always get the list of house resolutions ourselves...realistically. This only bothered me because it was still going along with a narrative...the narrative that depending on the day Fox News denies or embraces. 

Third news item..... How the bailout of the auto industry was a bad thing. They had two people comment on the story. (mind you, this is in newstime not during their "opinion" and "one sided debate" programming. )  Someone from conservative think tank CATO institute and some random Fox News Contributor ( all in all only one such contributor might be considered liberal..this wasn't one of them). Both people said they refuse to buy a GM from here on out. (Yeah right). And the contributor actually blasted the Chevy Volt by saying there was no demand for hybrids or electric vehichles. Wow....another total line of bullshit. And it doesn't matter that the money has been paid back...blah blah blah. Cato guy even said that it's not a good thing that the government bought the stock at 40 a share and it re-opened at 33 dollars a share. No, if you look at it that way, it's not good, BUT the company still exists and that, my friend, fucking matters.

My haircut was finishing and I paid. I could not get out of that place fast enough. I can't believe anybody can like the news enough to watch it all day long, let alone fake news (sans comedy). Fox hasn't changed it's basic message ever. It doesn't matter who is in charge, we need to be scared of our own shadows. It's just that when the last guy was president, they liked him a whole lot more, while the rest of the media.....liked him for four years and then soured on him. Now, the media doesn't necessarily love Obama, but they shit on him a lot less than Fox does. The difference is the "lame stream" media does present negative stories about Obama....but those actually have some basis in reality, whereas Fox News doesn't think the mainstream media does enough and instead of just giving a story just throws out everything and hopes a lot of it sticks...and when your audience is Tran the Barber who watches more than 8 hours of your programming a day, it ALL sticks. It is because of that that I think I will no longer enjoy a 7 dollar haircut. Hey, I don't go into ABercrombie and Fitch because one: they pump out some gnarly perfume at the entrance and two: I can hear their music from the middle of the mall...I'm buying clothes not clubbing. What I mean is, if I don't want to put up with the periphary shit going on, I don't need to be a customer.

Why Carly Fiorina would have been a disaster.

This is in response to a conversation I heard yesterday by an engineer at my work. Most of us "proles" used to work at Hewlett Packard. I am one of those rare vets who was a contractor at HP during the fat times before Carly, during Carly, and a little bit afterwards. This clown was talking about how she made HP profitable for shareholders (so that's a good thing).

Even Wikipedia got this story wrong, but as a person who once worked at HP, I have a unique insight into this. HP used to be a pretty large umbrella company that had many businesses that were completely different and almost unrelated to some of their other divisions. I worked for the printer manufacturing, which encompassed large plotters and home imaging devices of the All-In-One variety. The other thing HP used to be known for was making computers (of course), medical equipment and precision tools. This was all under the name Hewlett Packard. They had multiple manufacturing sites in the United States, Ireland, Spain, and Singapore.

I started working there in 1997. Back then, the employees who worked for HP were very well taken care of. They all had matched 401k programs, profit sharing, and got stock in the company. The temps (like me) didn't get much, but we aspired to be HP employees and worked very hard so that when the opportunity came up, we would pounce on this and get hired on and get, what at the time seemed like this dream job that would last forever. Good pay, awesome benefits like health, dental, life plus paid for schooling if one wanted to do that. Also, throughout the year, one could enroll in and get paid for multiple seminars like "Women Of Color". Oh, did I mention the profit sharing? Yes, this was a semi-annual stipend for the company doing well. Each fiscal 1/4, the announcement of the profit sharing would be given via CCTV by the then CEO (of the whole enchilada) Lew Platt. Each message was encouraging, but always mentioned how they could be doing better.

Now, doing better meant stock performance. Stock performance can be directly related to sales, but also in profit vs. overhead (I guess). Maybe it was that second factor that made the stock only perform at the mid century mark on a regular basis. Of course, anytime HP's stock reached over 100 dollars a share, it split. So, it looked sometimes like it was underperforming when in fact, it wasn't. Profits must have been pretty good. Comepetition? IN the 1990's HP was it as far as the printing world. (I don't work there anymore, but they do stack up well against any competitor still). Constant reminders of stock performance were up on the walls on little plastic marquees that were changed when the stock price changed. This was the first job I was ever even aware of the stock performance.

As temps, we also got the good stuff. We did get a vacation compensation check after so many hours. We got regular raises every 6 months AND we got paid holidays (provided we were eligible). Also, we had to pay for it, but we had awesome group rate insurance that HP actually paid for half of. Health, dental, and life. HP did all this and at least at the site I worked at...no unions...electricians were journeymen. Employees were so well compensated that organizing seemed pointless. (So unions can't be blamed for what was to come).

Lew Platt stepped down in the late 90's and when he did, HP decided they were determined to see which company under their umbrella was holding HP stock back (mind you...stock was never really performing badly. I think it dropped to 39 once while I was there pre-Carly).  With that, HP divided into two houses. Agilent, which would handle all of the medical and precision equipment and HP for everything else. Each company would have a CEO. I don't remember who the CEO of Agilent was, but Carly Fiorina became the CEO of HP. (so she wasn't even the CEO of the entire company, a fact even missed by wikipedia which referred to Agilent as a spinoff. In reality, both companies were only seperate to outsiders. It was all still one umbrella company with two divisions...each with a shiny new CEO)

Carly came from AT&T "spinoff" Lucent technologies. During her last year there, she was named "most powerful woman" in the US. You see, what good press can do? You might not even have the resume, but by george you got some magazine telling the world that you are powerful and companies line up to see if it's true.

Powerful? Yes. Greedy? Absolutely. I think Carly had no intention of making HP any better of a place to work...and this is the biggest disconnect big business has. They fail to see the direct correlation between happy employeed and actual success. Success is measured only by how well you play this three card monty game of moving money around. Businesses should not be in business if they have no intention of pleasing consumers. You are not a real business if you say "well we made X amount of money and we only have X amount of employees, therefore our profit margin was crazy good". Not when you have employees who know better..people who know it was good, if not way better, the way it was done before. All you did was do less with more and made it look like the other way around.

As soon as China and the US began doing business with one another (check that..as soon as our companies decided to make China's economy stronger even while exploiting it), every US company found a convenient excuse to get on over there and make even more money then before. Now, with the rich, people like the guy who was running his yapper yesterday seem to make excuses for them. "Well they worked hard so they deserve it" and "people in America are lazy" (This guy actually said this...."Companies can't afford to do business here anymore because they would have to lower everybody's pay to 6 bucks an hour and why would someone want to take that if they can make the same on unemployment"...because unemployment benefits don't last forever...but he's right. Who the fuck wants to work for 6 bucks an hour? That's not laziness? When was the last time anybody here made that much? and when was the last time a job paying that much was full time? His problem is that he has a marketable skill and he worked hard to earn that pedigree, but to say he is any more driven than I am is ridiculous. He is one of the guys who goes to meetings four hours a day and doesn't live hand to mouth like a lot of people).

Anyway, back to Carly. Apparently Carly must have subscribed to the idea that the American worker is lazy and gets paid too much because she took her half of HP and gutted it to lower overhead....when the company was doing awesome before she came along. Do people like this make cuts to their lives to set a good example? Hell no. In fact, half of the top floor of the building I was working in was being transformed into an "executive washroom" for Carly...just in case she decided to visit once or twice a year.

Profit sharing was put on hold. Long term employees were encouraged to retire if they had worker there 10 years of had been 50 years old. The severence package got worse as many employees began to realize that each one would be the best HP was going to offer for their loyalty. Raises were now non-existent. They already were barely covering cost of living increases every year...now this. The demeanor of the employees had grown ever the more gloomy with no end in sight. How could a company that had adopted IBM's business practice of never laying off people (I believe IBM does lay off people NOW) and prospered during this time suddenly need to do this? These people who were loyal to you are suddenly worthless.

What would Carly do to California as Senator? How would her outlook suddenly be different? The answer..it wouldn't. Only now, she can't outsource Californians so she wouldn't be able to make cuts and still be a valid entity. How can someone be so anti-American in her business practices yet claim to be the opposite in politics? How do people reconcile the fact that everybody is mad about unemployment yet here is someone who is personally responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of jobs to another fucking country? That is why Carly would have been bad for California and America. She already proved herself to be horrible to both.

A Few Facts:

I did a quick bit of research in regards to religious demographics in countries thought of as Islamic countries. Some results are shocking and to some, all might be shocking. Ever since the debate over a proposed Islamic community center two blocks from Ground Zero in NYC eanred the name "the mosque at ground zero" we have heard all the stupid arguments against it's being built. Anything from "move it a few blocks away" to "They wouldn't let us build a church in their country" (exactly what "their country" is I have no fucking idea. So, I looked up Christianity by country and here is what I came up with:

Iran 2% Christian(1.3 million); Iraq 3% Christian (800,000); Saudi Arabia 5.5% (1.5 million); Syria 10% (1.8 million); United Arab Emirates 15%; Indonesia 16% and Lebanon is 40% christian. So, apparently, those countries do allow Christian churches to be built. Hell, Saudi Arabia is where the Mecca is and they have more Christians than Turkey does and Turkey is a pretty progressive place (0.2% Christian).

Now this doesn't make an entire argument FOR the mosque, but it gives us some insight into how the rest of the world operates. Sure, those places might be religiously intolerant and if I had my druthers, I would wish that governments were not formed and run by religion at all, my point is, we are not those countries. We are better than that. You can't say " I am for freedom of religion and expression..." and then follow it up with a "but".

Has everybody lost their mothereffing minds?

I have spoken much about our immigration "problems" as of late and this seems to not break that trend. I see things and hear things that honestly, make me weep for humanity. That we could manage to want to say and do things that directly effect in a negative way people who have really done nothing to harm us. Also some of these things effect current American citizens and future American citizens.

Every once in a while, something is done by one person or a small group of people that causes a huge tsunami type or inappropriate reaction to an issue. For instance, in Arizona a rancher was killed on his property. It is then assumed that the perpetrators of this crime we Mexican, then it is later assumed that they were illegal immigrants. Then a law persecuting all of those people who wish to better their lives but didn't do it through legal channels gets passed because of such a strong reaction to a story. In that story, it has still not been determined what the legal status of the perpetrators was, nor is their background entirely known, but people filled in the blanks with all of their fears and preconceived notions. We do that you know. We did turn Humpty Dumpty into an egg shaped man even though nowhere in the nursery rhyme does it even describe how he looks.

Then in Virginia a Catholic nun was killed in a car accident. It did turn out later that the person driving the other car was in the country illegally. Fear of backlash has gripped the Virginia Latino community. I think the bigger issue was not that the guy was illegal, but that he got into an accident. Are we to assume that our traffic issues have increased because of illegal immigration? Oh that's right, it's illegal immigrants who switch lanes fifty times in a quarter mile span and not US citizens. It's illegal immigrants who ride crotch rockets and weave accross the freeway, riding in people's blind spots and then get into cruesome crashes...not US citizens. Only illegals get into their cars after many libations and mow down a kid playing in the street or whatever...not US citizens.

You may not want to hear it, but sometimes we are to blame too. We always blame someone else for our problems instead of seeing a way past the problem or just plain getting over the problem. No, we always want blood and it's someone else's fault I feel this way.

There have been rumblings...well actually full on quakes regarding talk of repealing the 14th ammendment to the US constitution. The 14th ammendment grants citizenship to all those born in the US. It was an ammendment that overturned the Dredd Scott decision that ruled that slaves weren't citizens because they were brought here as ooposed to coming here of their own free will. Now, you can argue your point till the cows come home, but we really need to stop dehumanizing a group of people. Stop treating them like breeding animals. What I mean is....people seem to have it in their minds that not only are ALL illegals criminal drug runners, but they are also just trying to drop babies on this side of the border so they can get to stay here and really don't give a shit about their families. While it may be true that they want to have children here and give them opportunities that they didn't necessarily have, it will never be true that they don't care about their families. After all, they cared enough to have one in our great country. A lot of us wouldn't be citizens were it not for our parents or grandparents or great grandparents coming from somewhere else to live in America. Some of this predated even having the term "illegal immigrant" (because everyone was legal).

A repeal of the 14th ammendment would be a huge step back for this country and quite frankly, I am shocked that anyone has the gall to bring this up as a real issue. It has nothing to do with solving the problem of illegal immigration, which itself is a problem but not an epidemic one that it's made out to be. (like it's more of a problem than it was 20 years ago). It is amazing how some new racist ideas are becoming acceptable these days. I remember when Pat Buchannan used to say some really crazy shit like we need border walls on both the Canadian and US borders to keep out all kinds of people and stuff like preserving our (white) culture. Back then (15 years ago) it was crazy talk. Now, it's not only not looks at as crazy talk, but now it is downright tame compared to the shit that flies out of the pieholes on the right.

It is an argument they have mastered. To remove any humanity from the subject from which they speak and make them sinister. From the lie about the farmer finding copies of the Quran on his property to Phoenix being No. 2 in the world for kidnappings to the most recent non raid of two ranches in Laredo, TX. Often the lies fare better than the truth and even after the truth is known, the right digs in further as if covering their ears and screaming "la la la la la la la la!!!!".

Photos from Joan Jett show on the 4th.

I took some photos. I have a decent SLR camera...the lenses are all right. Anyway, we always have lots of problems taking performance shots because of lighting. I basically had to kind of sneak the camera in and then in the dark assemble the pieces I needed. I only used the ambient lighting here and I think it came out gre at.