Snarlton's Personality Assessment

I often have a conflicting view on my personality. On one hand, I am a raging extrovert. I can be quite the attention whore.  On the other hand, I find myself using the self checkout machines at the grocery store, because I just don't want to have the slightest bit of human interaction.

It understands that I hate people. And I understand that it hates frozen burritos for some reason.

I am not shy. Hell, I am not even an introvert. It's not that I savor space or quiet, but rather that I am constantly annoyed by other people. Constantly. It's gotten so bad that I've become completely nocturnal so that I no longer eat when they eat, or drive when they drive. I've developed weird OCD habits. I will not shake hands. My psychological quirks are not driven by a fear of germs, but rather a seething hatred of being forced to accept other people's stuff. It's not that I'm afraid I'll catch Ebola-SARS-Pox and die; it's that germs are other people's belongings, and I am tired of other people and their stuff in my space.

I blame society and its constant chipping at our privacy. For someone who doesn't like other people in "their bubble," American life is a constant, never-ending onslaught of intrusion. Advertising is Other People's Stuff. Their ideas, their products, their messages. Every billboard, every tv commercial, every garish brand logo has become an ice-pick to my brain. I feel like clowns are constantly waving neon flags in my face.

I am tired of the constant marketing narrative, the constant message that I need what you're selling...because I don't need what you're selling.  I don't have a kid, yet I sit through Toys'R' Us commercials. I don't have a house, yet I get mail for homeowners' insurance. I don't eat meat, yet I just wasted 2 minutes watching filthy grease dribble off a Wendy's burger.

They send me junk mail. I throw it right in the trash, but the very act of throwing it out forces me to handle it. They force me to touch that mail. They force me to look at the message, force me to see their stupid company's logo, force me to acknowledge they exist. I am being forced to physically drag around the garbage of companies that don't even apply to me. It's like harnessing a fish to a bicycle.

I am a focus group's worst nightmare. I have not met a TV commercial I have not mocked, derided, or abused. I also strictly select products by non-brandedness. I buy non-recognizable brands, preferably hidden on the lowest bottom shelf. It is a negative reaction to every screaming NutriGrain bar ad. 

And now we are entering a whole new era of post Patriot Act surveillance. It's not just that I'm forced to look at dumb billboards and commercials anymore. Now our phones are tapped. Our email can be silently read without a warrant. Our internet history is traced. There are GPS surveillance boxes under some of our cars. Cameras on every intersection. We're forced to let The Authority touch our wangs/wangettes at the airport. We are now compelled by law to let any random goon x-ray us and see us naked.


Is it any wonder I've begun to fetishize minimalism? A house with no neighbors, possessions, and no electronics; no brand logos, no surveillance, no barrage of mental garbage. I spend a lot of time thinking about an empty, windowless concrete house in the desert. It occurred to me that my ideal fantasy house might look like a giant prison to some people, and how ironic that is.

This house, with less windows.

It's not to keep me in; it's to keep them out.

A Christmas Note From Snarlton.

I go through these phases. Most of the time I have a seething rage towards America. But occasionally I watch a documentary on some hell-hole like Liberia, and I think, "Hey. I can't afford health insurance or rent, but at least there aren't roving bands of rapey, heroin-addled teenage cannibals wandering around. I should be grateful."

We have good things. Our roads are fantastic. Clean water. Decent air travel. Wondrous natural parks. We have a food supply chain that works like clockwork. I have a rental house with heat and a toilet. Some would argue that we are drowning in consumer goods, and that is a plus to them. We have freedom of speech. Excellent music, art, and satire. Freedom of sexuality. We are working towards a society without racial boundaries. These are all good things.

Then why am I so fucking miserable?

I think the rest of the world may have been confused at the Occupy explosion this fall. How could the most prosperous country be so damn, fucking angry?

I have a theory; One cannot possibly understand how hellishly terrible America is unless you've lived here your whole life. The discontent here is a slow burn, a lifelong collection of harsh lessons. The bullshit is buried so deep in legalese and fine print that foreigners just can't grasp it.

The discontent comes after dealing with the boss who wants you to fire your staff, then fires you. It comes with the $30,000 bill for a 5 hour wait in a shit-stained emergency room full of junkies. It's the knowledge that there's a hospital within a mile from wherever you stand- and if you ever need to use it, the visit will bankrupt you. It's watching a homeless co-worker belittled and fired... for leaving to get their vomiting child from daycare.

My America is a constant string of bullying bosses, bullying landlords, bullying police. It's a never-ending loop of credit collection, garnished wages, broken cars, broken teeth. It's the feeling that, despite your current comfort, it could all come crashing down with one illness, one job loss, one racist traffic cop with a jumpy trigger finger.

On top of this is a steaming pile of advertising. There is never a point in the day when you aren't goaded into purchasing or shamed for not wanting. They shove vapid, stupid, drugged celebrity 'role models' in your face, and then tell you you're human garbage for not buying their mascara.

The news is fake. We are swimming in biased journalism that requires a post-graduate level of education to fully comprehend. They even run the same stories years later! Half of the news consists of idiots spouting racist opinions about geographical areas they can't even spell; the rest is videos of dancing kittens.

If you are smart, you have the knowledge that everything you see was made by some poor bastard in a poor country. It is the knowledge that almost everything you use was made by near-slaves. The system compels you to participate - to sell the cheap clothes, to pump the cheap gas. The poor bully the poorer. Become the slave owner or fail.

This Occupy thing has been stewing. My whole working adult life has been spent with people on the brink of bankruptcy, a powder keg of relative poverty. Every screaming collections agent shoved us towards our breaking point, inch by inch. Enough. The sane amongst us are challenging the inertia of a massive wheel of bullshit. The brake has been applied. The charade is up, the emperor of capitalism has no clothes, the system is failing. A stripped cog has no use for its machine.

America picks at you. It beats you down, day by day. There needs to be a unique word for that feeling you get in a Las Vegas mall after a few hours. It's a distinctly American spiritual exhaustion, an aching headache from knowing that everything shiny is just polished turds, and you were pick-pocketed looking at it.

Make no mistake; we are not the victims. We are the generation refusing to become turd salesmen and pickpockets.

Hey guys. Snarlton's feeling lazy. All those absinthe vodka tonics I chug to deal with the colossal outrage I feel towards this country take their toll. Please enjoy this guest piece from Correspondent Miss S.

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Aren’t you glad we live in America where the Constitution protects us from this kind of treatment?

My name is John Wilkenson and I’m a husband, a father, and a member of Operation USA, a relief group offering aid to civilians in Iraq, whose mission the Iraqi government has been trying to shut down. 

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people in Baghdad. I was sitting in the communal area of our little tent city with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed Iraqi Officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 relief workers who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent, refusing to leave. The Iraqi Officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent”. 

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of Iraqi Officers used knives to slice open every tent in the commune. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the commune. They then did the same with the communal property of Operation USA. For example, I watched as the Iraqi Officers destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Operation USA’s medical tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Operation USA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the Iraqi Officers sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the desert. … 

When the Iraqi Officers finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the Officers to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an Iraqi officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the Iraqi officer would grab the aid worker’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent volunteer, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor. 

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the Iraqi officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyper-extended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the Iraqi officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist. 

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm. 

I was put on a van with other nonviolent relief workers and taken to a parking garage in downtown Baghdad. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The Iraqi officers watched and did nothing. 

At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in our tent village after the police said not to… 

They booked us into jail. Almost none of us could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and with the help of my family at home I could afford it, except the Iraqi Officers spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set… 

I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell, along with sixteen other Operation USA protesters. My sleeping spot was on the floor next to the toilet.Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Operation USA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The Iraqi Officers chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent relief workers in prison for two full days…”

Maybe the American Embassy should have intervened? Eh, who am I kidding. That shit happened here in the good old U-S-of-A and it was the actual account of a prominent white AMERICAN Occupy LA Protester. Suddenly the LAPD are treating white guys like they’ve treated black communities for so long. But at least they were only filthy hippie campers, right?

You can read his full and actual account here:

http://myoccupylaarrest.blogspot.com/

-Miss S.

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Disclaimer: In case you are either:  a). stupid, or b). are translating the text, this is a piece of satire where all words referring to the Los Angeles Police Department's brutal treatment of American protester Patrick Meighan have been replaced to frame this arrest through the fictional lens of a war zone. Don't ever quote Snarlton on anything. We are assholes, not researchers. (PS. I am always amazed when I see excepts from The Onion in foreign press, or re-posted by Texans).

Commentary by Snarlton:

Miss S. has a point. Sometimes it's necessary to re-frame the habitual line-stepping of The Authority to understand how far down towards a Second-World conflict zone we've slid, a zone where any citizen can be detained on the street and searched, then violently arrested for no reason under the pretext of 'public safety'.  We are entering an era where acts of The Authority, had they been perpetrated by an enemy government, would insight public outrage.

Wake up and welcome to a new era where upstanding US citizens can be snatch-grabbed. The post 9-11 era of crying eagle t-shirts and yellow ribbon SUV magnets is over. The "War on Terror" has come home to roost, and its eyes are on all who will not shut up and obey.

Indefinite Detention: The Baseball Bat to PCLoadLetter

The Senate recently took a giant deuce on the Constitution by passing S. 1867 National Defense Authorization Act, (read the ACLU's analysis here). They also failed to repeal it through the subsequent Udall (D-CO) sponsored amendment, which would have eliminated the indefinite detention of Americans. (Indefinite detention of non-Americans was always cool. We support our troops. Eagles cry and freedom and...stuff).

Basically, they want the government to be able to snatch-grab any "suspected terrorists" and hold them indefinitely without trial. Even American citizens. Yes, even on American soil. 

And it came from Senator John McCain, whose only qualification to lead this country discussed in the 2008 presidential race was: "I spent five-and-a-half years in the Hanoi Hilton during 'Nam."  A guy who spent half a decade being tortured as a prisoner of war now thinks all Americans should be eligible for indefinite military detention. Let that irony stew for a moment.

Hey,  John McCain! I heard you liked gettin'  SnatchGrabbed! Damn, dawg. Better hope you get a trial.

Anonymous, WikiLeaks, LulzSec

I want to discuss something. They are after a certain type of  'enemy combatant' now, and it is likely not you, anyone you know,  or even that cagey guy wearing Armani Exchange knock-offs from Beirut at your local shwarma joint. No, this is about something much more sinister: nerds. Nerds are angry and have started a nerd uprising. They are now hacking Sony (gasp!), and that is unacceptable. 

The US government, quite frankly, has its balls in a sling with the Bradley Manning case. On one hand, the little punk allegedly swiped some embarrassing diplomatic cables, and handed them off to WikiLeaks. If he had acted alone, he would have been tried in a military court, end of story. On the other hand, WikiLeaks has sent out the ingenious little concept of their "Insurance File". This highly encrypted file was sent out internationally, with instructions for the users to store it in case the staff of WikiLeaks were "Disappeared". No one knows what it contains. 

It's either:

a). an 8 bit gif of the Peanut Butter Jelly Time banana

b). Julian Assange's shopping list

c). concrete evidence linking Darth Cheney to 9-11

d). something far worse only the Senate knows about.

If something 'unfortunate' were to happen to Assange, WikiLeaks, or Manning, this file has already been stashed internationally, and will likely be decrypted as revenge. It's like a game of Russian Roulette where there is one live round, and several dancing banana gifs.

The only option they have in this game of cyber-chicken is to hold Manning indefinitely until they can get their hands on Assange. This does not appear to be happening. Worse, there have been escalating threats of copy-cat crimes, freelance "hacktivism" by groups like Anonymous and LulzSec. Each day that they keep Manning in custody, each failed diplomatic attempt to get their hands on Assange, is further angering sympathetic computer geeks (or Cyber-Terrorists, depending on where you get your paycheck).

These are not the pipe-bombers of yore. There will be no IRA inspired car bombings, no improvised explosives. No, this small enclave of unaffiliated nerds now have the power to single-handledly crash the stock market. Expose a senator's bank account. Install back-door access to massive investment firms. Deactivate drones. Ruin large corporations. And they are presumably so good it wouldn't be noticed until it was too late. 

The embarrassment could be enormous, far worse than WikiLeaks. America isn't under attack; senators' personal checking accounts are. Their online stock portfolios. Any private banking records they thought were secure, any personally humiliating diplomacy exchanges, any photos of them with that one transvestite hooker-- all could soon be laid bare. 

You should consider any senators who voted for this bill to be throwing themselves against their skeleton closets. And what better way for the senate to deal with those insufferable nerds than to bust into their dirty houses, yank them away from their World of Warcraft game, and hold them indefinitely in Gitmo without their precious Mountain Dew, or right to a fair trial.

And lo!, they first declared cyber assaults an act of war. Then comes the 'We can snatch-grab any US citizen (like those GeekSquad guys)' bill.

Enemy Combatant: PCLoadLetter!

Have you ever seen an old person trying to deal with email, or install a driver? Like a cat with a laser pointer, they just do not get it. It is beyond their mental capacities. They can't navigate a print driver error on their HP DeskJet, much less understand the insanely inaccessible art of hacking. 

And these idiotic dumbfucks (Carl Levin, John McCain), in their diapered, senile wisdom, decided that the solution to This Internets Thing, was to shred, burn and shit on the Constitution. 

This is not a man who understands SQL. "Fuck it, let's put them all in a gulag."

Kudos to you, guys. Go back to having your interns print off your emails.