> Secret communique to the white supremicists

White supremicists, I feel your pain. You are right in assuming that there are groups who are systematically harming you and people like you.

• There is a group of people who are responsible for the loss of your job. They took if from you because it benefits them and they will resist giving it back. In fact, they will marshal extraordinary resources to maintain the new status quo.

• There is a group of people who feel they are entitled to special treatment. And they manipulate the system so they can milk it for all it’s worth. Because they take more than their fair share, there is less for you.

• There is a group of people who are using the financial system to take advantage of you, and exploit your resources for their own gain. They are international, powerful and secretive. And their financial power makes it almost impossible to arrest and punish them.

• There is a group of people who are actively working to control the American military. Their influence is vast, they have many tentacles extended into our warmaking machine, and they will not hesitate to use this power against you.

• There is a group of people who are seeking to take over the United States government. They and their armies of minions work at this relentlessly. While you are sleeping, they are plotting, planning, and working towards this goal.

Who are they, white supremecists? Who is doing this to you? Let’s take a look at the facts, and see if the culprits become evident.

• What happened to your job? Millions of jobs have disappeared from the United States because capital is fluid and instantly mobile, but people are not. Extensive deregulation over the last fifteen years has enabled corporations and their supply chains to move to countries where people are very poor and desperate for work. Who is making this happen?

• Who feels like they’re entitled to special treatment? The people who engaged in the grey-area business practices that brought down many companies, and have cost the American people more than a trillion dollars, continued to collect “performance bonuses” even when their recent performance was completely destructive and they had to be paid with taxpayer money.  Who would have the nerve to do this?

• Why is the financial and credit system stacked unmercifully against you? Credit card companies and banks have the power to squeeze you, and you have no power to fight back. They can change the interest rates on money you’ve already borrowed. They can kick you when you’re down, and trap you in an endless debt spiral. Who controls these companies?

• Who is slowly and surely taking over our military? Our recent Vice President steered hundreds of billions of dollars worth of contracts to a company where he had been CEO up until 2000. This company, Halliburton, took advantage of the national hysteria about terrorism, then hoovered up the cash for building projects in Iraq with virtually no oversight. Other companies, like Blackwater (now called Xe), are actually doing warfighting in place of U.S. soldiers—a task for which their employees are paid almost four times as much.  Who is allowing this to happen?

• Who is seeking to take control of the United States government? These conspirators do not live in caves in southeast Asia, they can be found in office buildings on “K” Street in Washington, DC. They are lobbyists, and they seek one goal, bending the will and law of the United States to serve their own interests. They walk in the corridors of power every day, representing the interests of the very powerful. Who benefits from this?

White supremicists, the answer is clear:

The group that is taking advantage of you consists of powerful white males.

You would call them “race traitors.” I would call them traitors to their species, to life, and to the world itself. The good fight awaits, but it’s not a fight against those of other races*. “Those people” are your brothers and sisters in arms, and your interests are almost identical to theirs. It’s the hyper-privileged who deserve your loving attention.

Sic semper tyrannis.**

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* “Race” is itself an arbitrary construct, and not actually “real.” But that’s a subject for another post.

**This means “Thus always to tyrants.” It’s the traditional thing to shout out when you rid yourself of your local thug.

©2009 Christopher St. John.

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To readers: If you have any corrections or criticisms, I’d love to hear them!

> Are layoffs a crime against shareholders?

Where does the most vital and irreplaceable company information reside? In the head of the CEO, or in the heads of the workers? The answer seems obvious—da big man, of course!—but in a time when major American companies are going out of business, it’s worth taking a closer look.

Here’s a real-life business story.

Once upon a time, the head of the West Coast office of a multinational company (“Mr. Big”) needed to cut expenses by laying off some people. Who should go? The Interwebs Department of this office had recently shrunk down to just a few people, so he decided to lay off the manager of this department, (“Mr. Medium.”)
In searching for more layoff targets, Mr. Big came across the programmer who worked in the department, (“Mr. Small”).  Was he a good candidate? Since the programmer’s boss, Mr. Medium, was being laid off, no one could ask him what the programmer did.

Since the work programmers do is largely incomprehensible, it was easy to decide that Mr. Small was doing nothing of value. As is often done, one day Mr. Medium and Mr. Small were called into HR, told they were laid off, and requested to leave the office immediately and never return.

The next day, my department, which depended heavily on the now-vanquished Interwebs department, came to work and discovered that we did not know the passwords to get into our own servers. A large portion of our business depended on those servers interacting with our office systems and working perfectly—with zero downtime.  One bungle would draw serious ire from a client. Two bungles would cause a client to move their business elsewhere.

As you can imagine, there was a flurry of hysterical phone calls and emails that swept through our office. Who could tell us these passwords? It turned out that Mr. Small knew them. The head of my department was forced to call Mr. Small and beg for the information. Mr. Small was extraordinarily decent about it, and immediately told us what we needed to know.

The next day, this frenzy was re-enacted, only this time it wasn’t about passwords, it was “Where are the XYZ files?” Another call to Mr. Small yielded more answers. The next day it was “How did we create this thing? We need to make modifications and now one knows how it works.” Mr. Small knew. Then it was “Who knows how to rejeeb a glurfinator? Who always does that for us?” Why, Mr. Small always handled that. And so on, literally for weeks. Finally, even the generous Mr. Small’s patience ran out, and he stopped helping—for free—the company which had summarily dismissed him.

By that time, we had worked through a dozen existential crises, and were no longer in danger bungling our product, losing a client, and damaging our reputation.

Now imagine this story writ large.

Multiply this incident by a thousand, and you can see what happens when a corporation has major layoffs:

“Who knows our workaround for the metric conversion bolt-rethreading problem?”

“Who knows where the email goes when you accidentally press control/alt/fuckme?”

“Who knows how to repair the open-heart surgery machine?”

Compare this kind of critical company process damage with the pound-for-pound value of the information that resides in the CEO’s head. For a CEO who makes $50 million a year, taking a pay cut of just $1 million a year will pay the salaries of twenty workers.  Cost to the CEO: In real terms, zip. Value to the company? Huge.  (“Who knows how to jiggle the power switch to restart the assembly line after it overloads and does an auto-shutoff?”)

A $10 million dollar CEO pay cut would retain two hundred workers, and all the information that they know—that nobody knows they know. That’s just talking about a single pay cut for a single extraordinarily-well-compensated-employee.  What if the CEO is not satisfied with his new $40 million a year salary and leaves? What does he know? What is it worth? The answer may surprise you.

As opposed to the most valuable information held by workers, which is largely informal, undocumented, and hence irreplaceable, the knowledge in the mind of a CEO is largely documented and known by many other people in the company. Why? Because companies make a point of operating this way. Consider the alternative: A company without extensive redundancy at the top end would risk extinction based on what happens to the individual in the CEO seat. Da big man gets a cold or a better offer and a company worth billions of dollars annually would shut down.

What is the unique thing that a CEO brings to the table? Plans. Dreams. Connections. How many whip-smart, Harvard-educated, highly-connected MBAs are out there who would be happy to work as a CEO for “only” $10 million a year? Let’s go out on a limb and say…a lot.

The conclusions are obvious: By maintaining the inflated salaries of CEOs—and other C-level executives—at the cost of laying off thousands of workers, a company’s productivity and value are damaged.

This means that any Board of Directors that allows layoffs to balance the books when other options are available is damaging the value of every shareholder’s investment.

Does that make them guilty of mismanagement? Without a doubt. Does that make them guilty of a crime? My fellow Americans, investors, and workers, that is for you to decide.

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If you’d like to share your decision with your senator, you can find their contact info here.

Thanks to Anne Speedie for suggesting this topic. Check out her new startup here.

©2009 Christopher St. John.

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To readers: If you have any corrections or criticisms, I’d love to hear them!

>Aren’t you sick of het male drama?

Is there anything more tedious than het male drama? The preening. The fragility. The murderous afternoons played out with a yard full of SWAT teams and three dead kids in the bathtub, their throats cut from ear to ear.

As the recent election has shown, you might still hear that a woman would be a bad choice for President of the United States because she has her finger on The Button, and she might be having PMS when a crisis comes up. What if she’s:

• Filled with barely-restrained rage
• Hypersensitive to slights
• Easily overwhelmed with shame
• Willing to sacrifice other people’s lives in order to avoid feeling humiliated

In other words, what if she’s in the same frame of mind as a het male? Ummm, that would be…pretty…dangerous.

Of course, het male drama isn’t a universal aspect of the het male personality. It’s closely related to machismo. The more machismo, the more drama. It’s a curious thing that machismo is often associated with strength, power or toughness, because the reality is quite different.

Machismo = Fragility

A het male with a heavy dose of machismo is easily upset. Thin and brittle, his composure is easily cracked. Minor provocations are perceived as potentially mortal threats. This leads to drama.

Machismo = Lack of self awareness

Freedom from machismo is a key aspect of gay male culture. Of course, heavily muscled spoofs on machismo are a common sight on the gay male social scene. The key difference is that a Cell Block D Leather Daddy is consciously enacting this role. This kind of spoofing is self-aware and under control, like a piece of theatre, not a desperately flailing, jaw-clenching, highly-dramatic flounder, as is typical of het male machismo.

Machismo = Fear-driven decision making

The most visible element of machismo is the attempt to project the idea of I’m dangerous. This is mostly driven by the fear that you’re dangerous. This is why machismo tends to dial up in the presence of other machismo. Mutual fear drives more and more outré posturing. Oh, the drama.

Machismo = An advertisement of weakness

A het male who is attempting to embody machismo is seeking to display—and in the long run, acquire—power.  Machismo can be very effective in asserting primacy among fourteen-year-old males who have yet to understand how the world works.

People who are somewhat more experienced rapidly begin to notice that machismo is almost never associated with real power. Even thugs who are successful will often take on an ostentatiously non-violent, even effeminate,  personal style. The point of this is to underline the fact that they have real power, hence they have no need for wannabe power.

Hell hath no fury like a man scorned.

Since het males are the primary sources of drama in our world, we’ll be helping ourselves if we stop talking about drama as though it’s the province of het women, gay women, or gay males. We need to acknowledge the real source of drama and make our stance clear as a society: It is with love, understanding, a firm hand, and possibly a Taser that we say that het male drama will no longer be tolerated.

Now get the fuck away from my Barbie dolls.

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©2009 Christopher St. John.

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To readers: If you have any corrections or criticisms, I’d love to hear them!

>1000 personal ads 4U

If you read 1000 personal ads all at once, you begin to notice some patterns. Let’s take a look at them.

“No games.”

This is far and away the most commonly-appearing phrase. Given that people tend to write ads that reflect their recent experience, this certainly suggests something about the experience of writing and posting personal ads. What are these “games” that are so widely played—and detested? Is there a large contingent of malicious game-players out there harassing posters? I asked San Francisco psychotherapist Gayle Paul for some enlightenment, based on her clinical experience.

“There are some people, with antisocial personality characteristics, who deliberately provoke other people through the medium of personal ads,” says Ms. Paul. “But that’s not what no games typically refers to. A lot of what they mean is: Don’t send me a series of emails, and then disappear. Don’t set up a date and then not show up. Don’t get interested in anyone else while you’re talking with me. Basically, what it comes down to is: Don’t disappoint me. Don’t hurt me.”

In other words, don’t be like those people I meet in real life.

“I love old movies and long walks on the beach.”

This is the second most commonly-appearing element in my sample. Given the huge percentage of people professing these affections, one would expect that revival movie theatres would be packed to the gills, and that a trip to the beach would reveal a vast swarm of moony-eyed daters strolling hand in hand.  In fact, art house theatres struggle by, and a trip to the beach on an ordinary day turns up a few people with their dogs and tennis balls covered with slobber.

If people are not talking about their actual behavior, what does this phrase mean? I have a hunch that it’s about people sketching out a kind of fantasy future, seeing themselves ‘in love’ based on an unconscious confabulation of television ads put out by diamond merchants, vacation resorts, and perfume salesmen—interlarded with a few images from romantic movies. The real message here is probably more along the lines of: I’m ready for love. Are you? Please acknowledge my love code by murmuring something about salt water and Doris Day.

“I’m comfortable in jeans or a slinky black dress.”

Guys have their own analogs for this claim, involving sartorial items other than dresses. On the face of it, this appears to be a statement like: I have many moods. At different times, I feel like doing different things. Since this is so obvious as to be borderline tautological, I asked psychotherapist Gayle Paul for her take on it. “People have a lot of anxiety about whether or not they have enough market value to attract a mate,” says Paul. “These kinds of statements often mean something more like: I have a whole smorgasbord of offerings. If you don’t like this aspect of my personality, I have many others to offer you. How about this one? Or this one? Or maybe this one?”

“Must have good oral hygiene.”

This demand shows up most often in ads by swingers; that is, couples looking for couples.  These kinds of ads are much more pointedly about sex, although some aspects of “dating” are still manifest. For example, these ads often specify a “getting to know you” experience before sex, like dinner and drinks. In other words, a date.

Although the idea of swinging conjures up visions of upper-middle class couples in swanky Connecticut suburbs, the photos that are posted often tell a different story. The couple smiling out at you are decidedly not sculpted sex gods. And interestingly, they are not even trying to be. They are chubby, often with ratty hair, WalMart garb, and perhaps a missing tooth. After you see a lot of these pictures, you begin to notice that the people are often standing in front of cheap paneling in rooms with very low ceilings, and tiny, flimsy doors. That is to say, mobile homes.

You begin to sense that for many of these folks, swinging is not a way add the frisson of naughtiness to their busy and successful lives. It is a way to access the kind of glamour and excitement that they see on television but which is sadly lacking in their own existences.  And it is prized because it is affordable. Belize may be out of reach this year—and every year—but the tang of illicit poon with the McDernans on 3rd Street is available.

If only Tom McDernan would do something about those teeth.

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©2009 Christopher St. John.

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To readers: If you have any corrections or criticisms, I’d love to hear them!

>The Twitter Haiku

One hundred forty

Characters will have to do

Whoops! Almost out of

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©2009 Christopher St. John.

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To readers: If you have any corrections or criticisms, I’d love to hear them!