My Christmas Struggle

[I apologize in advance for the rambling, hard-to-follow style of this post. This is a stream-of-consciousness thing for me, but it is something I want to share. I would love your feedback as well, to see if I'm totally nuts or if others feel the same way.]

[Also -- I am in no way attacking Christmas in this post. I love Christmas, and what I'm trying to convey is very much of the "it's all about me" nature. This post is about an inner struggle, not the outer matter of Christmas itself.]

Today I went out the door with the firm intention to buy a Christmas tree. When I lived in China in 2007 and 2008, I vowed that when I came back to the states, I would get a nice Christmas tree and carry on that family tradition I'd loved since my earliest memories. I sorely missed a warm, cheerful Christmas when I was in China.

I figured I'd just get a small, artificial tree. After all, the only family in my house is Suzy and myself -- we don't have room or need for a 10 foot Douglas Fir. We also don't have boxes and boxes of ornaments to fill such a beast! So I figured, a 3- or 4-foot artificial tree would be enough to string up some lights and put some cute little Christmas decorations in.

I stood looking at the various possibilities -- 3-foot, 4-foot, 6-foot, 6.5-foot with extra branches, pre-lit, unlit, pre-strung, fiber optic lit, green, green with fake snow coloring, "Vermont" blue, silver, gold... AHHH! I found myself feeling distinctly un-Christmasy.

As I pondered the various sizes and styles and prices, a question kept pounding at the back of my skull: "Why do I want a Christmas tree?" I thought, I'll just get a 3-foot. It'll look nice in the living room on an end table. But why not pay a few dollars more and get a 6-foot? That'd be more grand, and better bang for my buck. It'd look great, too!

But I couldn't make up my mind. This was not simple materialist consumer confusion over too many choices. I couldn't even convince myself that I wanted a tree, much less which one I should buy. It felt more like I was trying to communicate something in buying a tree: Hey, look at me! I'm an American, I'm back from Communist China but I still love Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and crappy pop remixes of Jingle Bells!

I kept asking myself, why do I want a tree? An assortment of answers floated through my mind:

• Because my family always had a Christmas tree.
• Because my family always had a Christmas tree... Except for the last couple of years when a certain family member declared she would no longer participate in Christmas, Thanksgiving, or anything that reminded her of wasted decades of being a "housewife." So I would buy a tree to continue the tradition in spite of that person!
  
• Because it's beautiful and fun to decorate.
• Because some of my happiest childhood memories were from Christmas time.
• Because some of my crappiest childhood memories were from Christmas time, and how my family failed to live up to my idealized visions of the holiday. So I would buy a tree to avenge those failed holidays.

The more I thought about it, the more of a headache I got. Finally I realized two things. First, all those reasons (and others I thought of) represented some form of clinging. Clinging to ideals, clinging to good memories, clinging to a desire to rectify bad memories, clinging to what this December holiday is "supposed" to be. Not one of those reasons for buying a tree would actually benefit anyone other than myself. Second, if I had to work that hard and give myself such a headache (literally) over something that should be joyous and wonderful, is it really all it's cracked up to be?

I'm not trying to attack Christmas, or downplay it, or say I don't love it. I do love Christmas! Though I'm not a Christian of any sort, I think Christmas is a wonderful holiday at its core. It's also a potentially bankrupting holiday for people who can't keep it in perspective -- how many families, relationships, credit ratings, and bank accounts are ruined or thrown into crisis over this wonderful holiday? That aside, I love Christmas. I love the beauty, the warm feelings, the family fun.

You can see this is a bizarre inner conflict for me. I love Christmas, but I can't think of any reason to express it that isn't a negative reason inside myself. And my wife Suzy is rather neutral on the matter -- Christmas is even more commercialized and hollow in China than it is here, so she has no real context for understanding my emotional attachment and ideals for what Christmas is supposed to be.

I came back home with a headache and with no Christmas tree.

Here's how I have resolved my conflict: instead of buying a tree, which will make nobody happy but myself, I'm going to put the money elsewhere. The money I was going to spend on a tree, I've divvied up between these charities:

• charity: water — We take clean, drinkable water for granted here in the USA. But in many communities around the world, people will spend hours each day just to carry water home... And that water may very well be dirty and disease-infested. Even if the water is safe, those hours spent fetching it are hours that aren't spent in a classroom or at a job. Those are hours that could be better spent. charity: water helps those people build wells for their communities, and equips them with the tools and knowledge to make clean water a reality. Helping others help themselves, that's one less obstacle to a healthy life and a better future.
• The International Temples Project — Without inner peace, outer peace can never be possible. I don't want to turn everyone in the world into a Buddhist, but I would love to see more people learn from Buddha's teachings and his compassionate example. The ITP aims to build a Kadampa Buddhist temple in every major city in the world. At the very least, helping to spread teachings on compassion, meditation, and inner peace can only bring about positive benefits for us all.

I'm not trying to pat myself on the back or to make anyone else feel guilty. My intention is simply to share my inner struggle and to share the solution that worked for me. Maybe I'll even inspire a few other people to give to charities they love, and we can thus take some small steps together towards improving this world we live in.

As we go into this holiday season together, I wish you many blessings and boundless joy. Spread the love! Merry Christmas, my friends!

Obama's "First Thing" - Still Waiting!

"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am President, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank."
- Barack Obama Campaign Promise - October 27, 2007

So hey, Obama, here we are two years later. You've been president for almost a full year. When are you going to do this "first thing" of yours? If this was a promise I could "take to the bank" then why are you even considering an additional 40,000 troops for Afghanistan?

I (mistakenly) voted for Obama on the basis of promises like these. And all my family and friends out there who voted for Obama and so vocally support him even now -- why are you letting him off the hook about this? 2009 is almost over, yet Guantanamo is still open and Obama is hemming and hawing about sending more troops to a war he promised to end.

You don't have to agree with me on the health care fiasco, but at least don't let Obama off the hook for these huge promises he made -- promises which he has either made a complete 180 on (troops) or put on the back burner (Guantanamo), despite the fact that those are the supposed reasons I should've been proud to vote for him.

Wake up, dammit. Where is the backlash on these unkept promises? Whether you agree with our presence in Afghanistan or not, doesn't a bullshit promise of this magnitude show that Obama either a) is incompetent, or b) can't be trusted?

What Obama's Done For Me So Far

Here's what Obama's done for me so far:

• Created dozens of fake jobs in non-existent districts of my state. A fine use of our tax dollars! And that $18 million upgrade to Recovery.gov? Yeah, that didn't include any measures to verify this data and prevent this kind of fiasco. Huh.
• Negotiated a secret copyright treaty that you and I, as mere peasant "citizens," are not allowed to read. Of course, we are 100% accountable for all the horrible things we do that break this law -- such as downloading illegal MP3s of Taylor Swift's latest hits -- and yet we are 100% not supposed to see the bullshit laws we're supposed to abide by. Makes sense!
• Spent $600 taxpayer dollars per person for a vaccine against the scam flu. Err, I mean, swine flu. This ignores the fact that swine flu is hardly on the radar compared to all the other, much more likely ways you can die.
• "Saved or created" jobs by replacing US Postal workers with machines. Yes, one of the most visible agencies of the US government is setting a fine example for our recovering economy. Instead of creating jobs for actual humans, let's buy a bunch of expensive machines that our customer base (mostly elderly people) will not be able to figure out! Yay!
• Goofed around with phony healthcare reform, rather than eliminating outrageous pork like this, which should make every American sick to their stomach. This is how your government "reduces spending," my friends: they give billions, including $800,000 in stimulus funds, to an airport that has just 20 passengers a day.
• Made me part-owner of GM, a failing company that cannot innovate and play by the rules of capitalism. I cannot wait to get my check from Obama when GM's stock goes back up. Oh wait, you mean I get all of the liability but none of the gain? Hmm...

It's not all bad, though... Obama also:

• Signed executive orders to close Guantanamo Bay. Of course, he ordered it to be closed "within a year" and with less than 2 months to go, it's not looking good. Obama gets half a brownie point for that one.
• Gave a surprisingly sane response to Iran. He did exactly what he should have: criticized violence and repression, without getting mired down in the details of the Iranian election. That's smart because an American president should speak out against violence and repression, but shouldn't stick the country's nose in stuff that's none of our business.

How does that stack up for you? Doesn't look like the good is outweighing the bad so far...

Thanks for the Fake Jobs, Obama!

I was just looking at the Recovery.gov summary for New Mexico to see how many jobs have been "saved or created" in my state. It's especially interesting to look at the congressional districts to see where the stimulus money has gone, and where jobs have been saved/created.

Some highlights:

Congressional District	Jobs Saved/Created	Stimulus Funds Spent
35th	15.8	$8,960,709
40th	Zero	$7,960,241
22nd	25	$61,225
13th	5	$3,299,038
3rd	3,672.4	$854,011,415
2nd	719.2	$464,592,559
1st	776.8	$290,611,994
00th(?!)	2.7	$731,370

There's other districts I didn't include here, but WOW! Look at all those jobs "saved or created." Looks like the stimulus is working, eh?

Oh, but... Err... Slight problem. Those districts listed in the Recovery.gov data? There's a small catch... Most of those districts don't exist! Recovery.gov lists 13 congressional districts in New Mexico, but New Mexico only has THREE districts! And folks, the "00th" district ain't one of those three.

Questions? I've got LOTS of 'em:

• Where did all this fake congressional district data come from?
• Why is nobody at the White House or Recovery.gov validating the data that's coming in? If I can look on friggin' Wikipedia and find out how many congressional districts New Mexico has, certainly the feds should be able to figure that out, too.
• How do you create "15.8" jobs? What is 0.8 jobs? I feel bad for the poor schmuck in district 00 -- not only does he live in a place that doesn't exist, but he only got seven tenths of a job!
• How was $7.96 million spent in the fake 40th district, with zero jobs saved/created?
• The money listed for all those non-existent districts... Where did it go?

It gets better: New Mexico Watchdog points out that the certification for the expenditure of stimulus funds (which is linked to on the state summary page) comes from Benigno R. Fitial, Governor of the Commonwealth of North Mariana islands. I had no idea that my landlocked desert state actually belonged to the North Mariana Islands!

It's not just New Mexico, either. There's fake jobs data for Minnesota, Arizona, and others. Even the most charitable view of the Obama administration in this case can conclude they are, at best, incompentent... And at worst, out-and-out deceptive.

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics has been collecting accepted and standardized employment data since the 1940s.

When President Obama was selling his $787 billion stimulus to the American people, he promised unemployment would never rise above 7.8% and that by 2010 the U.S. economy would employ 138.6 million jobs. The unemployment rate now is 10.2%, and with only 130.8 million jobs in the U.S. economy, President Obama is 7.8 million jobs short of what he promised the American people. That makes President Obama’s stimulus an objective failure.
~ Morning Bell: The Fake Jobs of Obama's Failed Stimulus

Pre-order Star Trek Only $10!

My cow-orker (he orks cows) just found this on Walmart.com: the new Star Trek movie for pre-order, only $10 -- and FREE SHIPPING. I had a serious nerdgasm when I saw that.

(Amazon also has it for $10, but you have to do the usual $25 or more to get free shipping, I believe. Not as good a deal as Walmart, if all you want is Star Trek.)

Hmm... Wait till it comes out, and play $30+ like a schmuck? Or pay $10 now and get it on our doorstep at work without any effort? Gee, hard decision there...

Yes We Chan!

Yes We Chan!, originally uploaded by Thomas Hochmann.

Obama's Transparency: Policy Laundering and Secret Treaties

Hey folks, here's what your transparent Obama administration has done for you lately: they've collaborated on an international copyright treaty called ACTA. Not a big deal in itself, except for the fact that the Obama administration has refused to disclose what the treaty says, citing "national security."

Seriously? NATIONAL security, for copyright laws? You mean issues like illegally downloaded MP3s of Britney Spears are at the heart of protecting the republic? National security... Puh-lease! More like JOB security for "intellectual property" lawyers, and politicians who get "campaign contributions" from big media conglomerates.

What does this verboten copyright treaty include? More of the good stuff we, the people, have demanded from our elected representatives:

• More policing of the internet.
• More requirements for internet service providers to babysit everything you do, resulting in unnecessary overhead costs that will be passed on directly to you, the beloved consumer.
• More tools to censor free speech by claiming it "infringes" on something.
• More ways to cut off your internet access, without due process.
• More restrictions on breaking copy-protected technology, even if it's to make content accessible to people with disabilities.

Didn't you vote on the referendum for all that? No? Hmm.

If you are a lowly member of the public, the text is secret. The names of persons who attend the meetings are secret. The titles of the documents are secret. If you represent a big firm or law firm -- pretty much any big firm it seems, the U.S. government will show you documents after you sign a non-disclosure agreement - curbing your right to speak out on the contents of the documents you see...

The entire U.S. tech sector has been publicly silent, as the Obama administration has co-oped them into trading silence for access to the secret documents.
-- James Love, "ACTA: A Patriot Act for the Internet", The Huffington Post

Let's see what Obama has proclaimed as his commitment to "an unprecedented level of openness in Government"...

• "Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing." Unless, of course, that includes things that give big corporations and the Government the tools they need to slap you around with bullshit lawsuits and internet censorship. That totally gets a pass, I guess.
• "Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government's effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions." You got to contribute your opinion towards shaping this copyright treaty, right? Oh... No, none of us did. Well, at least we've all got the freedom to request access to the text of the treaty, to at least give ourselves a fair shot at complying with the law we didn't have any say in. Oops, that's not true either. Oh well!
• "Government should be collaborative." Absolutely! That's why the various governments and international organizations, including numerous officials who were not elected by you or the citizens of other member states, got to collaborate very closely on this treaty. What? You thought Obama meant you got to take part in the collaboration? Haha, oh you silly citizens. You crack me up!

Yes sir, this is certainly "unprecedented openness", "accountability", and "transparency" -- all courtesy of the guy I mistakenly voted for, Barack Obama. On the plus side, at least we're going to drag Canada down the toilet with us.

And if you live in China or a third-world country, you can be happy that bullshit treaties like this will force what little innovation remains out of the United States and into your soon-to-be-less-restrictive homeland.

Update: Oops, sorry China, my second home. Looks like you and the other misbehaving countries may end up caught up in this mess as well:

The ultimate objective is that large emerging economies, where [intellectual property rights] enforcement could be improved, such as China or Russia, will sign up to the global pact.
-- European Commission, "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Fact Sheet"

Update 2: Big props to Wired for calling out ACTA for the scam it is: policy laundering.

[If] the United States signs and ratifies the treaty, Congress would be obliged to change the DMCA [copyright law] to comply with it, while the administration throws its hands in the air and says, "It wasn’t our idea! It’s that damn treaty!"

That practice is common enough to have a name: policy laundering.

Update 3: Added quote from Huffington Post, above.

Twitter Lists - A Quiet Revolution

I've been playing with the new Lists feature over at Twitter for about a week now, and I gotta say I'm really liking it. Like Twitter itself, Lists is such a simple mechanism and yet it offers such a range of possibilities. I have a couple of things on my wish list for Lists, but I'll get to those in a second.

Lists didn't 100% click for me until last night, when I read this blog post by Sean Bonner (@seanbonner). I read this part, and it went *CLICK!* in my brain:

Once it’s understood that you don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list people will begin to adjust who they are following to those they actually know and interact with moving news and site feeds, or celebs and joke accounts over to lists...

So my prediction is as people get more of a grasp on lists, they will stop following celebs they never actually speak with in favor of adding them to a list of celebs, they will stop following CNN and BBC news feeds in favor of creating a news list, they will stop following bands they like listening to in favor of a music list.

(emphasis mine)

This solves an age-old problem with Twitter: information overload. There are so many cool people to follow, and so many "products" to keep up with, that your Twitter stream can quickly become murky and polluted.

My solution till now has been to limit myself to following 50 people max, with the intention of making those 50 the ones who post the most interesting stuff the most frequently. I would regularly go through my follow list and find people who hadn't updated in days/weeks, or who I could not remember posting anything I was interested in, and unfollow those people. I also forced myself to resist the urge to follow companies and products I like -- though I may want to keep up with what's happening with them, I also don't want that stuff cluttering up the stream of info coming from people I like to actually communicate with.

Thanks to Sean kicking my brain into gear with his blog post, I've now figured out how to use Twitter Lists to suit me. My system goes like this: there's those I will follow (Really Follow™) and those I will "sorta" follow by putting them into lists.

My criteria for Really Following™ someone:

1. Number one priority? Real people. Specifically, real people who I can communicate with, bounce ideas off of, and link to on a regular basis.
2. Next would be celebrities who post often, and who post good stuff I am truly interested in -- like @leolaporte and @wilw. These are celebrities who will actually respond to their followers (hi, @jason!) instead of just spamming a one-way stream of stuff with no interaction (hi, @oprah!).

And lists? Lists will be for two purposes:

1. Making high-quality lists of high-quality people, so I can easily recommend all those people at once. This solves my #FollowFriday problem where I have to post 4 or 5 times just to say WHY I'm recommending the people I am. Now I can tell you that if you want some great inspiration from wonderful people, you should check out my @hochmann/twitter-muses list. Or if you're interested in Buddhism, you can browse my @hochmann/sangha list.
2. Collecting users/services I want easy access to, but who I don't want distracting me from the Real People™ I actually follow. A great example would be my @hochmann/anti-boredom list, which is made up of feeds from fun sites like Digg and Mental Floss.

Doing things this way excites me, because it means I can keep the down-to-earth, interesting people I want in my main Twitter feed. People I care about, the cream of my hyperpersonal news stream crop, will always be there at the top. When I want to drill down into a specific group, that's what Lists are for.

Twitter Trends: Broken Beyond Belief

Ever since the "trending topics" info for Twitter was moved from an obscure search page to front-and-center on everybody's Twitter homepage, I knew trends would be in the toilet. They used to be somewhat interesting and useful, since they weren't as easily accessible by the public. Now that they're right out there for every Joe Blow to see whether he wants to or not, the inevitable spamming and gaming of the system has occurred in full force.

Trends are generally just full of crap -- stuff that only teenagers or the AOL crowd would be into. On occasion, something newsworthy pops up in the trends... But then again, I think most things that are "newsworthy" are just fluff to make the mainstream media feel important. Balloon Boy, anyone? Even I got suckered into that one, sad to say.

Today some serious spam actually made it into the trends. Clearly it was a coordinated spamming effort on two fronts, as shown in this screen shot:

(click to enlarge)

Notice the spam posts, mostly from new accounts (as indicated by their "colored bird" avatars). If you look at the list of trends on the right side, the top two trends are spam from this attack.

The funniest part is that the trend that was number one at first was "Make $ From Home." Because it has a $ in it, clicking on the trend actually returned zero results. So even if people were stupid enough to click that trend, they wouldn't see any of the actual spam or the links. Isn't the point of spam to get people to see whatever you're spamming, and to tempt them to click your link?

So basically, the only people who saw the spam posts were people like me, who went out of the way to modify the search to take out the $ symbol. And I'm betting most people who do that are not going to be dumb enough to click the stupid links. I call megafail on that spam attempt.

The other funny thing is the typo in the second trend: "Google Forune." C'mon, folks. If you're going to do a massive, orchestrated spam attack, at least spell your friggin fake product names right. Might trick a handful more noobs that way.

Anyway, I blog about this for a few reasons:

1. This kind of gaming of the system was inevitable. I'm surprised it took this long, really.
2. It's now clear trends are not just inane, sophomoric nonsense; it's clearly not too hard to make them spammy.
3. This gives me yet another excuse to plug my Greasemonkey script for hiding Twitter trends. If you use Firefox or another Greasemonkey-compatible browser, just install that little script. Once you do, that pesky trends sidebar will be banished for good. I know I haven't missed it over the months, and today just gave me yet another reason to keep using it.

Halloween Pics, Come 'n Get 'em!

Bang., originally uploaded by Thomas Hochmann.

Check out my Halloween pics on Flickr, or this pretty Chinese hippie gets it!