About Shoq

“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have found 10,000 ways that will not work."~ Thomas Edison

Call me Shoq

Then call me angry. While I'm generally willing to be one of those fun-loving quipsters who will happily entertain you with snarky glibness, or my world-class talent at making colorful balloon animals that look just like famous pundits, just this one time let me get off a brief rant.

I grew up in an America where sincere people debated real ideas using reliable sources. But I now find myself living in an embittered and embattled country where pundits, talk show hosts, and generally talentless, noisy political flunkies and insincere rhetorical crap mongers continually pander to the gullible using any lie or disinformational sound bite they can get anyone to repeat on Facebook, Twitter, or a down-sized bumper sticker. These hooligans, henchmen and hooey whores will tell you with the utmost faux-conviction that “Fox News is a news organization,” “Iraq is a stable democracy,” “America is a Christian Nation,” and “Obama's birth certificate is a forgery.” Reality to these partisan suckers is like a crucifix to a vampire.

Most of these operatives and talking dreads have been fooled by a cynical conservative philosophy that has aggressively opposed almost every progressive social policy or act that advanced America's power, prestige, or impact on science, education, commerce, or the evolution of modern democracies. Since such forward progress always has a cost, they prefer to advance any and all deceits that push as much of that cost onto the middle class as possible. Some of them are paid to push this selfish agenda, while others just do it because it's an excuse to rail against everyone and everything that lowers their self-esteem.

If this all sounds dark and pessimistic, it's not really supposed to be. It's just my elevator executive overview of the predicament that I think we all face as a culture; a downward spiraling vortex of socio-political dysfunction that seems to be heading straight into the ground of history. I've spent much of my career trying to develop ideas that might shift that trajectory. Pessimists make lousy inventors, and I thrive on creative expression and design of any sort. If I might one day invent a constructive social mechanism to mitigate any of this morass, I'll consider it a some small evidence of having lived a life worth living.

Location

My home is situated roughly 1000 yards from the White House. So close that I could spit on it. In fact, I did that for 8 long years of the Bush administration, when all they did was spit on the nation. Things are a better now. I might even go over there, sit on the front stoop, and wait for Barack to come outside for a smoke. If you want to find out where I am right now, try sending me a tweet at http://twitter.com/shoq

Hobbies & Interests

I am a liberal iconoclast trying to survive in a country I once loved, and can now barely recognize without a handbook on media domination, a tip sheet on the Republican noise machine and a reference manual to Pentecostal homilies about Jesus and his Technicolor Bassboat.

If you listen to the typical Sean Hannity or Glen Beck listener, I'm a worthless, intellectually crippled liberal ideologue that doesn't really work much. I don't invent stuff that creates wealth or any surplus value. Instead, goes their meme, like all progressives, I just live on welfare and any spare change I can make selling old GOP “End the Filibuster” buttons to passersby in the Metro.

In my very rare spare time, I hang out with snobby, east coast progressives who wear smart looking black berets, smoke French cigarettes, and speculate about whether Simone de Beauvoir, Oscar Wilde, or Susan Sontag would have voted for David Cook or Sarah Palin as the next American Idol. Like me, most of them would all rather be living in Hollywood, snarfing veggie cocktail weenies with Sean Penn or Susan Sarandon.

When not openly trying to find passionate animal rights activists in short skirts and six inch heels, like all the other liberals, I live to hug trees, burn Bibles, and nominate Michael Moore, Ward Churchill and Jane Fonda to the Supreme Court. Someday, we hope to finally bring Utopian socialism—or at least unsubsidized health care—to Wal-Mart.

For kicks, I enjoy visiting wingnut websites where I can engage conservatives about activist judges, and especially the Supremes. I find it stimulating to hear all their diverse views about Diana Ross. If the sites are down, I just mine the web, looking for porn sites using stunt doubles with the names of Republican operatives like Cherry Jacobis or Amanduh Carpenter.

Oh yeah, and sometimes I like to annoy my friends by watching American Idol.  I always liked talent shows, and watching anything where people aspire to something, whatever it is. If for no other reason, it kills time between episodes of shoe-hurling at right wing think tank “scholars,” whom I all too often see on Washington Journal, squeezed in between callers without teeth “thanking god for C-Span.”

Favorite Gadgets

Is discussing gadgets a Twitter TOS violation? I'm never sure with these “social” sites and I have to be careful. Back in the day (90s), AOL TOSed me so often, there are now parks and elementary schools named after me in Bangalore.

Occupation

I am developing the world's first index modeling technology. If you enjoy discussing collaborative ontologies across heterogeneous networks, I'm your guy. Oh, and I also have a Republican bobblehead store on eBay. Merely for giggles, I Twitter a lot.

Things Every High School Student Should Read

• The Powell Manifesto — How A Prominent Lawyer's Attack Memo Changed America. If you read nothing else in your life, read these two documents and consider all that has come to pass in the USA since this document first landed like a bomb and changed everything — for the worse.
  • Overview and impact: http://mediatransparency.com/story.php?storyID=21
  • Full text of the memo: http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html

• Two Santa Clauses — or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for ThirtyYears, by Thom Hartmann http://commondreams.org/view/2009/01/26-0

• The Idiots Who Rule America, by Chris Hedges http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081020_the_idiots_who_rule_america/

• The Republican Noise Machine — Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, by David Brocks http://amazon.com/Republican-Noise-Machine-Right-Wing-Democracy/dp/1400048753

Some Favorite Quotes (Some By Me)

I realize I shouldn't quote myself here, but hey, if I don't, who will? And besides, some of them are pretty good, so STFU.

"There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." Albert Schweitzer

“I believe in the Semantic Web. I just don't know what that means.” ~ Shoq

“Conservatism is less a set of ideas than it is a pathological distemper, a militant anger over the fact that the universe is not closed and life is not static.” ~ Bill Moyers

“We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.” ~ Justice Louis Brandeis (1939)

“You have a really great personalities.” ~ Shoq

To paraphrase Ezra Pound, “Great tweets are simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” -Shoq

“Conservatives vote their fears. Liberals vote their dreams.” ~ Unknown

“Nice Pic, who is it?” ~ Shoq

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” ~ H. L. Mencken

"Conservatism tries to protect a past for the few at the expense of a future for the many.~ Shoq

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I don't brake for Republicans.” ~ Shoq

“There's a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.” ~ Dorothy Parker

"Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be douchebags." ~Shoq

"Every time I try to rise above a Republican, I hit my head on the floor." ~ Shoq

"We need a national moratorium on stupid." ~ Shoq

People I'd Like to Meet