If any of you are on OiNK, or have a friend who is - send me an invite por favor. I'm gagging to be as cool as everybody else, and I have a vast, high quality MP3 collection. I'm fucking anal when it comes to my music.

jjlarson@hotmail.com

Democratic Dynamics

The dynamics of the Democratic Party have changed over the past 6 years. The most noteworthy shift has been the discrepancy over where the base lies, which factions in the Democratic camp are more vocal and better funded, and how that ends up affecting who the big time candidates are blowing kisses to.

Today the far left wing of the party are the best funded and best organized, and through the use of mass media and the internet exert an enormous amount of control over what the talking points and agenda for the party will be. Long gone are the days where Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a former Democrat Senator from New York, and a man I've always felt was truly brilliant and a credit to the political class) is electable. We now live in the days where the big Presidential candidates skip the DLCC conference, which is the largest group of grassroots political organizers in the country and have always been regularly attended by Democratic candidates, only to attend utter drivel such as YearlyKos. The reasons why are appalling - it has to do with money and which group has more of an ability to affect the campaigns negatively. What the candidates haven't realized is that they snubbed the actual base of the party, who do the dirty work to get candidates elected, only to placate the self-important, delusional people who blog therefore feel they influenced an election.

Take a quick look at our political class - we have no more people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan in Congress. Granted, Senator Moynihan would not be electable these days despite his brilliance, because as a New Yorker he supported restricting abortion, but nevertheless our current political class consists of, in comparison, people who are relative embarrassments. Its a sad time for those of us who take politics very seriously because the net effect is that we lack leadership during one of the most critically dangerous times in our country's history.

FDR is a man who did some extraordinarily controversial things to protect our nation - some of which would have gotten him impeached had he been President today - but without leaders like Churchill and FDR, would we have been better off in the fight to stamp out the Nazis? Without talismans like these two men, I think we would have lost. At this point in time, we desperately need a talisman again! The question is, who will that be? I see no viable candidates.

Hillary and the anti-war left - is the honeymoon over?

Last week, while responding to (e:dcoffee), I suggested in his comments (and in my own journal on previous occasions) that Hillary will almost certainly throw the anti-war crowd under the bus once she gets the nomination. Lo and behold, here is your first taste of a very bitter beer -



What happens when you ask the Queen a question she isn't comfortable responding to? She accuses you of being a plant, accuses you of being ignorant about the legislation you are referring to, then quickly apologizes once she realizes that she indeed just acted bitchy and dressed down an honest voter in public. Its rare to see Hillary step out of the character her campaign has put her in, but there you have it. Towards the end, she did manage to put it back together.

Woe be to those who don't step in line. I actually feel really bad for the guy - although I doubt I agree with him on anything, I think he has a right to put Hillary in an uncomfortable position if in fact she is doing something that people who might vote for her don't like.

It is clear to me that Hillary has been using her husband's "triangulation" strategy to perfection ever since she announced her candidacy. Now that this has happened, and the press is bound to be horrendous, I am predicting a very strong anti-war, "we're getting out of Iraq ASAP once I'm elected" sort of message - which I've been warning you anti-war liberal types, is a complete and utter lie. Do not believe Hillary when she says this - I'm being honest and not Machiavellian about this. If you are anti-war and think Hillary is going to pull all of the troops out, you'll be deeply regretting your choice. Also, do not think for a second that Hillary will take military options off the table against Iran (or anyone else, for that matter), which is what the poor sod that she berated was worried about. Granted, I think literally the only people who are paranoid about us attacking Iran are the netroot kook types that she placated at YearlyKos, but these mixed messages are clearly beginning to make anti-war folks nervous... and to be honest you should be if you are so inclined.

Where the anti-war left get it utterly wrong is when they accuse Hillary of being a war monger. For God's sake, I'm not asking the world of people to be able to discern the difference between being a war monger and refusing to eliminate military options against a dangerous state. Taking part in the latter does not make you the former.

Now, the particularly entertaining part of this read is the comments in the bottom of the blog. Some people accuse the media of being sexist because of how the headlines are phrased (laughably absurd), some actually believe that the guy was a plant (paranoid clintonoid), some accused the questioner of being sexist himself (riiiiiight....), some people are just getting in shots because its easy (Republicans, or possibly Obama supporters). Reading Dem on Dem violence, I have to say, is a very weird experience.

Politics is becoming more of a sport/soap opera every day.

(e:LC) told me that she met a guy out there that is a carbon copy of me, except that he has a Scottish accent. I have to say I think that version of me would be way better! Now I want to learn how to speak with a Scottish accent - think about how utterly confused people would be in a loud bar. I think the potential for big fun to be had is enormous and for my friends I will do almost anything for a laugh.

(e:jason) and I managed to score tickets to the Ice Bowl on January 1. If you live in this city and don't know what I'm talking about - shame! Shaaaaaame. *shakes head* I'm excited about this because its a difficult ticket to have gotten, so this is a good opportunity to repay Dad for all those games he's brought us to over the years. Of course the question is - do you sleep or do you not bother and just head straight to tailgate?

The Sabres start their season tomorrow against the New York Islanders. I'm happy because now those miscellaneous nights where there is nothing to do, yet you don't feel like going out, are now going to be occupied by watching the greatest hockey team in the NHL. I don't want to hear any of that fucking bullshit about the Senators, (e:lizabeth)! The flag is going back up tonight - you'd be surprised how many people know where we live by reference of the flag alone.

I rarely comment about other peoples journals in my own journal, but I was thinking about a few things -

A) (e:jim)'s tech setup is confusing me. Are 4 external hard drives entirely necessary? Fucking hell man!

B) I now believe that a cheese assortment is now some sort of requirement if you want a second date with (e:hodown). Who fucking sends a lady a cheese assortment, anyway? Its not Christmas and its not time to be "getting our Pepperidge Farm on." You say to me, "Josh, c'mon, who doesn't like cheese?" I'd say, "most girls, as a gift after the first date." The fact that I could go on a cheese tangent like this based off of an innocuous photograph and a comment is a testament to her and her journal's greatness.

C) Where did (e:ktmuffin) go?

D) Where did (e:cindy) go? (girl I know you're out there)

Thinking about going to the Halloween party reminds me of one of the first (e:strip) parties I attended, where I was sitting on a couch with (e:terry) then all of the sudden geoffrey/jeffrey ran up to him and jammed his hand up his backside - I laughed so hard. Then (e:hodown) got really, really upset and was desperate for someone to kick him out, but nobody would. Eventually she had enough and if I remember correctly she did the dirty work herself. I refused to do the dirty work on the count that it wasn't my house and other people were closer to the owners than I was. I can't remember if that was the night that she had made sangria, but it seemed like people seemed to be drinking liquor that didn't belong to them... I think that was the night somebody drank (e:matt)'s special stash and I felt really bad for him. People were like, "wow, are you really a Republican?" And I'm like, "WTF am I supposed to look and sound like, Bela fucking Legosi? I VANT TO DRINK YOUR BLOOD!!" Slurpslurpslurp.

Bye for now -

Josh

A handful of you have seen this picture but I'm still laughing at myself, so I thought I'd post it -



This is me about a week and a half ago. I went with my brother to a neighborhood home for a little birthday celebration. Notice the googly eyes? Fear not, I can focus on cleavage through the foggiest of booze-induced haze. I'm a guy, I'm a perv like anyone else... leave the drunk guy alone! I have no idea what I was pointing at, and I don't recall the picture being taken. The problem with all of this is that the party was thrown for, and attended mainly by, employee/employees of one of our local news stations. One of my best friends is the graphics guy there, so in case you ever see a weird picture on TV of a googly-eyed guy pointing at a superimposed news logo, clearly meant to signal some sort of technical difficulty.... at least y'all have some context now. Hurray!

Keep this picture vividly in your head, with my velvety baritone cooing "WHERE'S THE FUCKING WINE?" Now you know what to expect when I talk (e:jason) into attending the Halloween party. I'd like to meet the people that I haven't met.

Ha. Sorry, but he got what he deserved.

I just took a call from a company in Oregon that is interested in having an audit done. Now my goal of possibly going to San Fran for a few days while getting paid to be out there (at least somewhat) may come into shape. If I can talk my boss into letting me go to Portland to work, maybe he'll be okay with sending me home out of SFO or Oakland. I can save the company $250 on my flight, I can see my friend Jonas in San Fran (and any (e:strip)pers if you are interested in meeting up for a drink), I can make a little money... whats not to love? Now, if I can only pin down my boss for five minutes to talk to him about it. Seriously - if I didn't have it in me to work autonomously I'd put my boss on a milk carton!

I hate wanting to do something but not being able to.

Anyway here is me today "keeping it real" (real suburban, anyway) in the parking lot. Daddy needs to shave.

Apple, if you don't already know, lowered the price of their $600 iPhone to $400. For those of you who already own an iPhone, Steve-o is offering you a $100 store credit, so go find out how you can claim what is yours!

I know I haven't done a beer review in a while (shame on me) - but now is the time, ladies and gents, to go seek out an Oktoberfest. Not just any, though - go find one from Munich. These are the authentic Oktoberfests - there are only six brewers allowed to serve beer during Oktoberfest and those are Paulaner (which I'm drinking right now), Spaten, Augustiner, Lowenbrau, Hofbrau and Hacker-Pschorr. Paulaner and Spaten is available at Consumers - although Spaten is only available as a 12-pack this is ok... they serve this stuff in liter mugs in Europe!

Oktoberfest's 200th Anniversary in 2010, or the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. Ugh... I dunno.

Probably the most complicated question I ever get asked is, "what do you do?" This isn't the sort of question that I can blurt out three syllables to give a good answer. Since I was asked to describe my job in a journal entry, here it is!

Corporate Social Responsibility

This is the industry that we are in, although I just refer to what we do as "social compliance." In a nutshell, our industry kicked off when Kathie Lee Gifford got into trouble about 10 years back for being associated with a sweatshop in Honduras, which was manufacturing goods for Wal-Mart. As a result of the media exposure and pressure from labor activists, the industry was launched and now virtually every major retailer in the world either has their own auditing department or hire a company like ours. Companies do this because their reputations can be quantified in dollars, so investing in this sort of endeavor is a way to certify that their products are being ethically sourced. Companies like Nike have their own auditors. Other companies hire us because we are independent and therefore our evaluations have a bit more credibility - we are not affiliated with the company that is being audited nor are we directly affiliated with our clients. This is a very niche type of industry - most of the companies that do independent auditing are small and we all know each other.

The Buffalo area is home to one of the most accredited and well respected independent monitoring firms in the world - the company I work for! My company is the primary, preferred monitoring firm for several large retailers that you all are commonly familiar with, dozens of private manufacturers that are seeking certification to a worldwide independent standard, and most recently several major universities. We are accredited to perform audits on behalf of the Fair Labor Association, Worldwide Retail Apparel Production, SA8000 (the top standard), ISO, C-TPAT (this is a security audit program designed by private industry and the Department of Homeland Security), among others, and not mentioning the individual standards that certain major retailer clients write for themselves (some are weaker than others).

Our company has offices in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mexico, and of course Buffalo. We have auditors in several countries - having locals is incredibly important and we try to do so as much as possible. It cuts down on travel costs, which my boss loves. We have to travel in order to do our job - this brings us to countries in the entire Western Hemisphere, but we mainly work in North/Central America, the Carribean and Asia. Probably the foreign countries we do most of our work in are located in Central America and Asia, but we also do loads of work in the continental United States - personally I've been to 32 states and counting. I've been through the airports in almost every major city in the United States - my favorite airport is the one in Buffalo, since it means I'm home and not somewhere else! My favorite places in the United States are Seattle, Southern California, the desert and Texas.

We are social compliance auditors - we are paid to visit factories and verify whether or not the facility we are visiting is adhering to labor and health and safety laws as applicable in the locality we are in. So yes, we are familiar with the laws in all the states we visit, individual provinces in Canada, or whatever country we are in, as well as an entire criteria of soft issues such as harassment and abuse, forced labor, child labor, discrimination, collective bargaining/freedom of association and the like. We meet with members of management ranging from production managers all the way to the CEO. I explain to them exactly how the audit is going to work and what we need - because this is done as a contractual obligation for these facilities to sell to our clients they give us access to a wide variety of sensitive information. We examine employee files, payroll information, company policies and a laundry list of safety documentation to determine whether or not the facility meets the standard we are auditing to that day. We are interested in knowing if pay records and time records match, if any illegal deductions are being taken out, if inappropriate disciplinary actions are being taken by the employer, if the workers are being paid on time and legally, if workers are working excessive hours and a host of other things that are too many in number to mention in this already long paragraph. What we see and hear dictates where we probe next.

We interview employees at random and in private, with no interference or participation from management - here employees are given the opportunity to tell me what they like and dislike about the company they are working for, and it gives me the opportunity to verify things we may have found during document review or possibly learn about a potential problem to look for. As a rule we dress casually - we find that workers are more at ease when we're wearing jeans. We also do a health and safety inspection of the plant - in the US the facilities are bound by OSHA but in other countries the laws may be weaker, so almost invariably the standards we audit to include some aspects of OSHA as well as other basic health and safety criteria that, in some cases, go above and beyond the written law.

I'm leaving an extraordinary amount of detail out here, but you get the idea. We assemble a ton of data, create a snapshot of the facility and provide to our client reports that indicate how good or how poor the facility was. We do have some latitude in interpreting the standards that we are auditing to, depending on the issue, but for the most part these are very rigid, very strict standards that must be complied with. As a contractual obligation of doing business with The Big Gray Box, for example, you *must* clear an ethical standards audit to sell to them. If they are not satisfied, they cease accepting orders from that particular manufacturer that is giving us trouble. Typically just the threat of such a thing gets these facilities to beg us to revisit them as soon as possible, and yes, they give us what they wouldn't give us before the minute we walk in. I've audited companies as small as 3 floor workers, all the way up to large corporations with $150 million in accounts with our client. These companies give us an enormous amount of respect, and we have to use our authority discreetly. Depending on our judgments these companies could be set to lose millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs so it is to their benefit, although they see us as intruders, to go through with the audit. In the past, unfortunately, because a facility was firing employees a dozen at a time for even mentioning unionization, the facility had to close because they lost business with our client.... and 800 people lost their jobs. You can see that we have to strike a balance at times, but first and foremost our concern is for the worker and we approach our job professionally.

Generally, we are there to assess the facility to determine if the workers are getting what they are legally entitled to, that nothing is being taken away from them without their consent, that they are being treated ethically and with respect, that their basic human rights are being respected, that nobody is being abused or wrongfully treated, that workers aren't being overworked and that the company is providing to its workers everything that they need in order to be productive but most importantly safe. Like I've mentioned, we work off of individual company standards and independent global certifications. As a company policy, we also pass on "best practices" everywhere we go - we occasionally see some really great things that we tuck away and pass on to other companies if we think it would improve their situation.

Believe it or not I'm summarizing. If you have a question about an individual topic, ask away - I'll be as specific as I can. Unlike a lot of latte sipping pseudo-intellectuals that complain about worker mistreatment and lack of rights in Guangdong province, I'm at the front line of workers rights and sandwiched in between the workers, the companies that hire them and the large retailers that buy their products. I have an insiders look and a privileged point of view regarding these issues. We actually are the ones that visit these "sweatshops." I can tell you who deserves their reputation and who doesn't, the worst thing I've seen, the coolest items I've seen being made (my job is sometimes like a daily field trip), what I like about my job/what I hate about my job, the limitations of our industry - you name it I'll try to answer it.

I already wrote a journal entry today (see below) but I couldn't ignore these guys if I wanted to... they are set up directly across the street.



Don't forget about these guys!

UPDATE: (e:felly) asked... so here we are 5 hours later. They got rid of the big sign because it kept blowing over... har har har.

Just remember, its only temporary. Unless you are un or underemployed (you know who you are), tomorrow you get to return to the grind and today is simply an oasis. Keeping this in mind, even though its cloudy outside, enjoy it!

Today I'm grilling corn on the cob! This is something I love to do. Why? Because grilled corn on the cob is effing delicious.

Our grandmother was admitted to a hospital in Jamestown on Wednesday, and nobody back home (including my father) bothered to tell me about it. Well, this isn't entirely accurate - my father called me while I was at work in Toronto, I couldn't check my messages, and when I did and called him back, he never bothered to return my call. I found out she was sick from my brother, who called me just as I pulled up to my office. How rude! In any case, she is okay but has been diagnosed with some sort of heart condition that will require her to be less active and to keep in mind that she needs to take rests when she does do things. She is 79 and up until now she's never been prescribed any kind of medication outside of a mild happy pill (she's a worrier).

So, we drove home on Friday night and I visited her at the hospital while Jason had his fantasy football draft. I brought her some dark chocolate from Fowler's but she was too tired to eat it... they ran some tests and shot that slightly radioactive fluid through her veins to detect clots or other problems. The good news is that she is out of the hospital - I feel better with her being able to sleep in her own bed. She complained about the hospital food - I understand the need for budget restraint but for Christ's sake, can't we feed these sick people something decent if they are holed up in a hospital bed? I saw her food - its borderline prisoner quality.

My general impression, obviously, of seeing my grandmother in a hospital bed was disturbing and I didn't like it at all. This was the same place that my grandfather died, and seeing my other grandparent in a similar situation reminded me of the sad fact that one day my brother, my father and I will still be together but will feel very alone. We had a highly unorthodox situation in our household growing up, but it allowed me to effectively have three parents (my dad, my grandparents) and so she is, for all intents and purposes, my mother.

The positives outside of seeing my grandmother out of the hospital was being able to hang with my hippie father and go to local farmer's market - its Jamestown but Anderson's off of Foote Ave. (if you are ever in J-Town for some reason) blows away the bullshit going down on Bidwell (or anything else around here) every weekend. I got some fabulous sweet peppers and some jalepenos. I don't know what to do with the jalepenos but I wanted them anyway - I am usually confident that I'll find something useful to do with them! Any suggestions for recipes for stuffed sweet peppers, or what to do with the jalepenos, are more than welcome. We also bought some homemade granola and some other things, but of course included in our little farmer's market adventure was the corn on the cob. I wish I could have literally bought the stand - there was so much great looking local produce along with some other local treats. Weg is local but its still ultra corporate - its nice to stuff the cash directly into the farmers' collective hands for once!

I made a recipe for escarole and bean soup with sausage that is in the fall Menu Magazine from Wegman's - it turned out great! It looks just like the picture - I did not take a picture of my soup but if you look in the Menu Magazine, there you have it. We have plenty of leftovers, but I'm sorry to say that its all spoken for! Oh, and while shopping for ingredients for the soup I pulled the :paulomatic trick of asking nicely for two flavors of the gelato - I tried the coffee and the "Tahitian vanilla." I must say - it was good but the gelato at Dolci is far creamier.

Happy birthday to those of you that I missed the wishes for - have a great week, starting with todays fleeting yet enjoyable cloudy oasis!