The Year I Started A Cult

So in 1992 we worked on cars. A lot. And being kids, and working on cars, and spending a lot of time dealing with electrical gremlins and the Quest for Top Dead Center and determining whether it's the spark or the vapor that keeps an engine from running, you get superstitious. It didn't help that my mother's faith is basically superstitious animism; any important decisions get run through the I-ching. My father, for his part, is a devout atheist who has been known to cross his fingers when things matter.

And in 1992, one of the super-seniors in town bought a GSXR-1000. He had owned it for a couple months before he - and his girl - decided to blitz down main hill road at 85 miles an hour. To no one's surprise, they took it wide.

Right into a '76 VW Bus driven by an old English teacher of mine.

Everybody survived, miraculously. Think the two of them went through the windshield of the bus, which prevented them from plummeting off the 300-foot cliff to their left. Not before denting in the gas tank of that gixxer six inches with their crotches, however. "Crushed pelvis" is, in my opinion, one of the most evocative phrases in medical literature.

So in 1992 we worked on cars. And my buddy… he wanted the fuel filler off that gixxer so bad. So bad he could taste it. And the bike was sitting, wrecked, at Knecht… and it's not like it had any resale value… and it's not like anyone would want a fuel tank doing its best "crushed beer can" impression. So we stole it. Walked right up at midnight and put it in the back of the Subaru.

It took maybe ten minutes with a couple pairs of Wiss

before we had a jaggedy-ass fuel filler and a mangled, gnarled piece of Japanese steel that smelled of blood and Super Unleaded. So what do?

"Sacrifice it to the Demon," I said. Do what now?

It's not like I had a plan. It's not like it was premeditated. It's not like I even knew what that meant. But my buddy was so enthusiastic that I had to come up with a ritual on the spot.

It was a good ritual. It had legs. We would solemnly drive down to the intersection of my street and Club road, where the path led up to the golf course. We would then walk sanctimoniously up the path for the quarter mile or so it took to get to the abandoned water tank. We would then climb up the ladder to the top of the tank, say a few words, and drop the Suzuki carcass in. BAM. Evidence of the crime disposed of, mechanical gremlins that curse all projects appeased, life would go on. And fuckin' A, it was fun.

It was infectious.

Whenever we needed a little luck, we'd "Sacrifice something to the Demon." No one ever asked who or what the Demon was, or why the Demon lived in an abandoned water tank, or what its peculiar taste for dead car parts was about. However, when you put on a new carburetor, the old carburetor (or whatever parts you could scavenge, presuming you needed the old one for a core charge) would go to The Demon. And over the course of a year or two, certain embellishments appeared:

- The odometer must be reset before driving to the path

- Music must not be played and words must not be said

- Wild Turkey must be poured on the ground before approaching the Sanctum Sanctorum, i.e., the Golf Course

- An incantation must be recited: "Oh great and mighty Demon we approach thee with no fear in our hearts and no hatred in our souls, we seek your benefaction in pursuit of mechanical excellence"

- The path must not be deviated from and no words could be said until all participants reached the top of the water tank

- Another incantation must be recited by the officiant - "Oh great and mighty Demon we request a boon from thee" - prior to the donor requesting specific or general benefits ("I humbly request, O Demon, that the rear main seal on the small block we just put in the Hote not leak").

- Wild Turkey must be poured upon the demon prior to the donation and after, and then everyone must drink (at which point, all solemnity was off - we were just a bunch of teenagers sneaking booze on top of an abandoned water tank a hundred yards off the golf course on a Wednesday)

- Silence and solemnity must be observed back to the car

It was only when I started thinking about what sacrifices I'd make to the Demon to make my own monster run that I realized I'd not only conjured a religion from whole cloth, I'd taken it from animism to Catholicism in the space of nine months.

Gotta say, it gave me pause. Gotta say it also gave me some insight into human nature - I was an angry, angry, ANGRY atheist at the time, or so I thought. Yet I needed this ritual. My success depended on it. There was no "demon" before I invented it on a whim, yet I was completely spun up in a fantasy of my own making.

"And Man created God in his own image."

- Ivan Albright

I wish I could say I laughed at myself, set my hobo horde of nuts and bolts aside and went on to lead a spiritually rich yet trapping-free life, but that would be a lie. I went and did my sacrifice. Alone. Just in case.

I asked about a girl, too.

* * *

That was the last time I sacrificed anything to the Demon. Most of us, the core three or four, let it lie. We still drank bourbon, we still believed it unlucky to fix a car without the car drawing blood at least once in the process, and the Kawasaki fuel filler never did make its way onto a car - too difficult. The ricer phenomenon ten years later proved we were on to something.

I did have a friend, though. Not a close friend, but a friend. He liked tagging along. And one night he came to me because he needed a sacrifice, and he needed it bad. He'd brought along another friend that had never participated in our rituals. Could I officiate over one more?

I demurred - I had shit to do and this was getting weird. They pressed, though. They needed some luck. So I split the difference - I explained the important parts of the ritual and that they could carry on without me.

They did. For years.

That particular spot of forest burned down in 2000. They condemned the water tank and tore it down.

I wonder what they thought of all the car parts.

Inherent Vice was his most readable book by far -- have you tried it? -- which gives me hope for the new one. Sort of.

Shoot, I'm not quite sure, though I've been crushing on women since Kindergarten. I could probably chart my school career with lost loves instead of years and it would make sense (i.e. well I went to my first school dance in the year of Sarah); women are probably my greatest motivation.

My crush was probably in Kindergarten with a girl who I would play tag with after school while our mothers chatted. I didn't see her again until high school where we became friends again. Or perhaps it was in the first grade with a girl who I car pooled with and who was probably my first good friend who was a girl. I also didn't see her until high school at which point she was a popular cheerleader and didn't have for me, who was the only one in school who still knew and called her by her full name an not her nickname.

Or maybe it was the first girl to really broke my heart. You see, I had quite the routine by grade 10. I would fancy a girl and over the school year build up the courage to let them know. Then they would avoid me and I would get over it during the summer break. This happened again in grade 10, but this time it really kicked me in the ass. Maybe it was just because her reaction was so contrary to what I thought was her nature, or because she was a closer friend than any of the other girls. You see, she was the first girl whom I ever made cry (well, apart from my sister). I saw her walking in the hall of school and just looked up at her and smiled as kindly as I could as we passed each other on the way to our respective classes and she grabbed a friend and ducked into the nearby bathroom. I later found out that she either cried or laughed in the bathroom, and I'm not sure which I prefer to think of. I tried to make amends somehow before the end of the year and wrote her a note saying something or another. The only thing I remember putting in that note was, "as they say, 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.'" Needless to say, this didn't help.

That whole ordeal, however, was the first to really rattle me. So much so that the 11th grade is just a blur, probably because I can't define it by who I fancied that year. Sometime in that year she did end up coming up and meekly apologizing. She said she didn't know how to handle that kind of attention. Later, when I would get my first girlfriend at the end of grade 12, I would look back and that and empathize with it much more. I had spent my entire life chasing and being rejected by women that when I actually got one I hadn't the faintest idea of what to do in a relationship. I was so paralyzed that I ended up just stopping talking to her, not even breaking up with her, because I was too cowardly to do anything.

I like to think, however, that my wife is the first person I truly loved (and not just to score brownie points with her, though that too). I met her after going through my usual cycle in college and we just sorta clicked. It probably helps that she really did more of the initial work than me: inviting me over to play Halo 3, stealing our first kiss, giving me enough to drink so I wouldn't be sober enough to drive home and would have to stay the night. I dated my wife for four and a half years before we got married, and I loved her more each and every day. It's like something my mother told me, "You don't find your soul mate, you become someone's soul mate." She was only my second chance at a relationship and I made sure to not just let her slip by (by which I mean not to let myself be a lazy coward). I consciously worked on building our relationship and she made it really easy. I like to think that all the work we've put into our now-marriage is an investment that we will see the dividends of throughout our lives together.

I've thought about this for a while, and came up with this:

- because administrations aren't forever.

- because laws aren't universal.

- because the most perfect digital surveillance serves the most imperfect analog humans.

- because what you're doing here and now should never become a weapon against you there and then.

IT'S THIS FUCKING SIMPLE

There was a time when purchasing alcohol was illegal. Drinking it wasn't; unless you were black, of course. Back then we had The Black Chamber and it sure wasn't an NSA but if we had the NSA back then, you can be damn skippy it would have been used against blacks, the same way the DEA is using NSA wiretaps.

So let's suppose my friend Ekaterina, who is a naturopathic doctor in Washington State, knuckled under to demands of her boss to prescribe marijuana in 2010. It's legal now in Washington - no prescription necessary. But do you think the DEA was using NSA wiretaps to monitor people prescribing marijuana in Washington just in case that shit became handy at some point in the future? You're naive if you think otherwise.

Now let's suppose the US and Russia get into a pissing match over, say, anything. Oksana's mother, who lives with her, heads back to St. Petersburg to see family. Only now when she comes home, she's stopped at the gate because according to the DEA, her mother is a known drug trafficker. The TSA strip searches Oksana's mom, all 70 years old of her, then bounces her back to Russia. Oksana is doing what her boss says and isn't in any violation of state law - but the grist mill between state and federal statutes just chewed up her family.

Now let's say my buddy Assam, who is a Ph.D candidate at Georgetown in Islamic History, answers a question of mine about beheading via email. He doesn't endorse it, but he does say "The Koran is unequivocal about the punishment of infidels, as indicated by Surat 47.4." Thanks to Semantic Forest, the words "beheading" "punishment" "infidels" and "Koran" rocket up in A-space to the counterterrorism branch of the CIA, who run Assam's records and discover he's a Moroccan national. Yeah, he's lived in the US for 15 years but doesn't that just make him worse? So now he's investigated by the FBI. Maybe they even set him up for a sting because the FBI really does suck this hard at this. In the meantime, they discover his wife is an Iranian and they're already on the terror watch list. So they sweep her up. They'd leave her two kids with her parents but OH SHIT THEY'RE IRANIANS TOO and despite the fact that they've been practicing medicine in Stockton CA for 30 years, they get vanned, too.

All because I asked HIM a question over email.

* * *

Couldn't happen here, right? Couldn't happen now? Wait for the wind to shift. I had a Pakistani friend who had to stop running at lunch in 2003 because the longshoremen would line up to spit on him as he went by. Why? "He looked Iraqi."

Privacy is tantamount because no matter how warm'n'fuzzy you feel about the Obama administration, its needs are served by committed, hard-core Republican Conservative twats who have been stepping on civil liberties their entire careers. Worse, you're either dealing with the lifers who are too stupid or lackluster to bounce out to SAIC, KBR or any of the other Alphabet Soups that do the heavy lifting, or you're dealing with the Alphabet Soup full of talented, shiftless kids looking for a reason to do something else.

Edward Snowden bounced because he thought the violation of civil liberties was too much. he went to the Guardian. Christopher Boyce bounced because he didn't like the idea of us influencing elections in Australia to end up with a CIA-friendly government. He went to the Soviets by way of a drug-dealer childhood friend who wandered down with him to Mexico City.

This shit is too important to trust to the judgement of bureaucrats. If a vacuuming of data can destroy my life, that vacuuming of data will be performed in accordance with the laws of the United States, including the Fourth Fucking Amendment.

"If you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to worry about." Tell that to the Protestants under Bloody Mary. Or the Catholics under Henry VIII. Or the blacks under Hoover, or my buddy Assam and his wife, who already can't fly anywhere, under this lovely, progressive, Democratic administration run by a scholarly black man.

You should care because if you're on the ins this time, you'll be on the outs next time. Honesty has fuckall to do with it.

I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with the author's choice. The Negroni? I mean, don't get me wrong: I _love_ a good Negroni. And we may well want to pose the pregnant question of what in the world we mean by a "perfect cocktail." But if the criteria of broad appeal is central, then the Negroni is out like a brown shirt in the spring of '45. If I had a shilling for every time someone ordered one based on its color, only to pull a curdling grimace on the first swig and demand a something-tini in its place, well ... I'd have at least a few schillings. Possibly enough to buy me a Negroni.

Campari is a wonderful amaro, but it is an acquired taste on the order of Islay scotch, if not beyond. And in a society of palates trained predominantly to the hooks of the pleasure trap, bitter is the odd man out on the flavor quadrant. Sorry, escarole, and sorry Campari too.

It's not a problem, of course. The celebration of acquired tastes guarantees us delightfully uncluttered avenues. I just don't see the value in pretending such a stinky cheese is going to be a crowd-pleaser.

And speaking of crowd-pleasers, I'm going to have to say bravo to all of you. Every single one of the cocktails proposed makes a better "every wo/mans" cocktail than does the Negroni. The White Spider, the French 75, and (biases declared) the Dark and Stormy are my exemplars.

Against my better judgement, I'll submit the (fresh) margarita for consideration, as it is remarkably popular despite its broad range of flavors offered. As it contains tequila, it may well lose critical volume in terms of appeal. However, anything universally appealing is bound to achieve such only by sacrificing intensity and nuance. Hence, pabulum. So, in short, the quest is broken (which makes it that much more fun to pursue.) And upon that broken quest, I'll pour my margarita.

"TSA = Hero."

But going the complete polar opposite and calling them a "terrorist organization" as this article did is a-o-kay?

He shot terrorists, and ONLY terrorists, with no “collateral damage.”

That makes it easier to pretend this guy is a hero to you? Labeling the people you see as bad "terrorists"? What makes you and the author any better than the government who labels anyone they disagree with a terrorist? Those TSA employees are stills sons, daughters, brother, sisters, fathers and mothers. They are still people working shit jobs they don't enjoy just to get by. Or is this anarchist author so deluded that he thinks everyone who works for the TSA takes some secret vow to be a terrorist and keep American citizens down everyday?

This article was disgusting for me to read. I'm not taking the media's side, or the side of this article. I think both sides are on extreme polar ends and neither are being intellectually honest about what happened. But at least the media isn't pretending some whack job who killed people just doing their jobs is some hero. Those TSA employees are just doing their job, what they have to do is determined by the policy makers.

Pointless death. Now we can just look forward to another security checkpoint even before we get to the TSA screening area!

That was fun:

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

Edit: And just to scratch an itch, I thought I'd throw in a Frank Stella inspired version:

x.

Yes, we are all technically African. In the sense that modern humans evolved in Africa. Our entire evolutionary history as far as you would like to date back (whether that be 200,00 years with the rise of modern humans or 8 millions years with the emergence of hominins) took place in Africa (of course it's all semantic - if you wanted to date our ancestors back to the emergence of monkeys then "we are all Asian" or if you want to date us back to the emergence of the first primates than "we are all northern North American and European" or if you want to date us back to the emergence of the first known life "we are all Australian"!).

Back to humans. That being said, of course the last 100,000 years of our existence has not solely been African. There was an immense bottleneck that took place when modern humans finally left Africa (the result is that >90% of modern human genetic variation is in Africa).

It is a little surprising that this man's genetic results suggest that he is "14% Sub-Saharan African. Razib Khan (Gene Expression blogger) doubts it:

If Craig Cobb, the white supremacist, is ~14% Sub-Saharan African, he’s in the less than 0.1% of white Americans with this sort of pattern.

-

the reality is that European Americans with relatively well documented histories usually do not have a high probability of having African ancestry. And if they do, 14% is a great deal. I have seen this among my friends (or more honestly, 5-10%, which is not far off), but that was due to a cryptic (though somewhat known within the family) non-paternity event.

Different genetic tests could most definitely reveal a different percentage. And I'm not going to vouch for a genetic test done by 23 and Me for a daytime talk show. Especially since it gave results that are statistically impossible and produced the desired result for the highest degree of controversy (what a coincidence!). We know from American history that the disgusting "one drop rule" prevented anyone with any black ancestry from really becoming integrated within "white" society (much less a "white" family) (unlike in Latin America where the racial categories and boundaries were much more fluid and less restricting). White Americans (U.S.) always drew a very firm line in the proverbial sand between "white" and "black" (of course it's far more likely for an "African American" to have a substantial part of their genetic heritage to be "European").

From my perspective 23 and Me tests (like the one taken by Cobb) are really misleading science. It's not necessarily pseudoscience, but they definitely make statements that, from a scientific perspective, are really difficult to say with a high degree of certainty (or any certainty) (and yet they always make very definitive statements after a test).

The reason it is so hard to say anything about genetic backgrounds with a high degree of certainty is because there is no such thing as biological races and therefore the "percentage" of your genome that is descended from a certain culturally constructed group will change based on your classification scheme (i.e., how are you grouping people? sub-Saharan African? Black? African? Tutsi? Bantu? Who gets into what category and why? What makes sub-Saharan African a category worth measuring? What is considered "black"? As I said there is more genetic diversity in Africa than any other continent. If sub-Saharan African is a category of humanity than the only logical further division is with "rest of humanity". In which case the title of articles should read "non-African discovered to be 14% African").

Also, if you go back just 8 generations you have well over 200 ancestors and could have a genome mixed of all of them equally. So if you go back only a short period of time you probably have ancestors on every continent (even though they may be disproportionately concentrated on some continents over others). Calculating any further back than 10-12 generations is essentially pointless. The exponential pace at which your ancestors increase well past this point makes all of humanity your ancestors.

As a result a lot of genetic testing related to "ethnic" and "continental" ancestral heritage is really sensationalized (especially when it comes to saying that someone is a certain percentage "of something"). There are no such thing as "sub-Saharan African" genes (there are certain genes that will arise with a higher frequency in different populations and some genes that may be unique to certain populations - but there is no such things as a "sub-Saharan African" group.

So what does it mean to be "14% sub-Saharan African"? Hm. IMO it means nothing. I guess it means that a lot of websites will run headlines that catch peoples attention and generates controversy.

I wrote something long and lovely and I'm afraid I lost it to a dead link.

I shall pass along the gist:

Hubski has been life- and internet-changing for me. I would never have gone out to meet a bunch internet randos, let alone drive to DC for it, before Hubski came into my life and I begrudgingly was won over by the community and spirit of this place. Hubski has changed the way I see interaction on the internet, and connection with real people. (Before, there was this divide, between "internet" and "real" people.)

Last night was wonderful. Nothing beats in person. But what we do on the net and what we do in person are also very different things: I wouldn't trade this website for being able to hang out with you guys every night (no offense!). I love what we do here as well as all you brilliant, lovely, welcoming, cool people.

I would love to hang out with basically anyone on Hubski, those I met and those I haven't. I think it's very different and raucously fun while maintaining the whole questioning, discussion-based side of Hubski and who Hubski is. Having really met you guys changes things for me, I know what you look like and your expressions and it gives me a depth of information I didn't have before. I guess it really means a lot to me to meet you guys in person.

But, even without meeting you in person, I feel very personally connected to many Hubskiers in a way I've never felt before. My Hubski experience is already so much above the experience I normally have online that, in person or not, you're special to me.

Ahhhhhgghhhhh I sound so emotive

During a very difficult time, I went to a psychologist for a few sessions. He wasn't even formally my psychologist. He was a family member's. I don't remember much of the sessions, except for one thing; in passing, I mentioned that I wanted to start painting. He asked why I wasn't currently painting. I responded that it was probably because of the cost. At that he pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and asked: "How much will it cost?" I didn't take the money, but I did go buy the paints, and I began painting.

Soon after, I found that it was healthy for me to create things. Just create, create, create. The process, the results, the next steps... it is all good for me. I'm not sure it will work for you (perhaps you need to run), but I believe that there is something you can be doing that you will be glad you did.

I like funny poems and I like writing funny poems. I remember during undergrad, we were discussing humor in poems and how in American poetry the professor (who writes funny poems) opined that it seemed like there was less tolerance of humor by critics than their British counterparts critiquing British poetry.

I don't know if it's true, but from what I've seen, it does seem like most people expect that poetry should be at least serious, if not Serious. If the poetry is to be funny, then it should be for children, something like the work of Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss or Edward Gorey.

Why can't a poem like Jennifer L. Knox's excellent Hot Ass Poem from A Gringo Like Me be taken seriously as art? Is the ridiculous not worthy of exploration?

Anyway, most of my favorite poets and poems make me laugh, or laugh and feel like crying into a beer. Poems are like drugs: trying out new ones would be no fun if they all buzz the same. Hell, there are a whole lot of different species of bees.

Ten shares, no comments? Where's the thoughtful web?

Talking points:

· A statement like "taxes on entrepreneurs and investors are already historically low" is too fuzzy to fact-check. Anyone who advertises housecleaning online is an entrepreneuer. Anyone with a 401(k) is an investor.

· The infographic states that "Between 1997 and 2008 ... All [income] growth went to the richest 10%." Was anyone here making more in 2008 than 1997, and yet not in the richest 10%? One example would disprove this absurd claim. The caption is less confident and less clear, claiming merely that "almost all of the income gains have gone to the richest Americans."

· The more disturbing claim in the infographic is that "Between 1997 and 2008 ... Income for the bottom 90% declined." This is apparently illustrated by the thin blue stripe at the bottom of the chart, which actually looks pretty flat during the named range.

The citation gives the source for the data, a spreadsheet with 54 sheets. The eighth sheet, labeled Table A4, appears to contain the data about the bottom 90%.

It looks like that the bottom 90% of household income (adjusted for inflation) has indeed been pretty flat since the early '70s. The value in 1997 was $31,056, and in 2008 it was $30,981, a change of -0.24%, validating the infographic claim. How concerned should we be?

Some thoughts to consider:

1) The people in the bottom 90% in 1997 are not all the same people in the bottom 90% in 2008. Some in the top 10% dropped out, some in the bottom 90% moved up.

2) The population is growing. Kids and immigrants tend to have lower incomes than older, established residents. Even if not a single person's income drops with the arrival of a new worker, the average can drop. It is (mathematically) possible that everyone's income is rising, but the average stays the same because of growth in the low-end population.

3) Divorce rates have increased since the fastest growth of average income before the mid-60s. If one household separates into two, the average household income can drop even if everyone's individual income increases.

The big idea of the article is fatally flawed as well. Consumer spending drives the economy, fine. But the rich guy isn't doing his fair share to stimulate because he only bought three cars and a plane? What we need is an institution to take his money and distribute it to 9,000 families so they can buy 3,000 cars instead of just three.

Mr. Blodget, I have good news for you. We already have that institution, and it is called a bank.

No, that's no good. The problem with the bank is that the millions in wealth "either sits and earns interest or gets invested in companies" ... am I reading this correctly? We want customers to buy cars. Most of them do so on credit, with money from a bank. The bank requires depositors, right? If we want to stimulate consumer activity, putting those millions in the bank seems like a pretty good technique. Or investing in companies. That doesn't count as supporting the creation of jobs because ... ?