Richard Dawkins seems to be a sexist and racist asshole

I've never really liked Richard Dawkins.  At first, my dislike was merely philosophical - I think saying there probably isn't a god is wishy-washy.  The reasons he says there probably isn't a god amount to a repetition of the epistemological uncertainty into which the god of the gaps lives.  Since we can't be certain of anything, we can't be certain god doesn't really exist.

Or anything else!  So he should say, y'know, nothing exists, that it all is probably this and probably that - or we can live with the epistemological uncertainty and speak with conviction.  God does not exist any more that teapots whirling around the sun exist.

Then, when I heard him on some show or another . . . I was overwhelmed by the sense of class.  Here's a dude who is that upper crust British asshole - almost a parody.  He's everything that Monty Python has ever made fun of.  I just assume he has a stupid walk.

He is also a sexist asshole, to get to the thrust of this post.  He tweeted, recently "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse."

Is it?  I'm not sure that getting raped by someone you know is better than being raped by a stranger, myself.  And I also know that date rape often includes threats of violence.  So, it was really just a stupid fucking thing to say, ignorant and nasty.

But here's the thing - why say it at all?  What would prompt a guy to, out of the blue, say something like that?

In short, it's that comic upper class English-ness.  He's an important rich white man.  He speaks with the confidence of being master of the world.  He knows his opinions are the opinions that count.  So he can dismiss anyone he wants who isn't an important rich white man.  Like, say, women.

(He also added, "If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think."  Indeed, he is endorsing nothing, but he was definitely speaking out of turn - arrogantly, hurtfully and he was wrong, to boot.  But that's something arrogant rich white men do, too - they can throw out any rationalization to make themselves feel good about the shitty thing they just did.  No one has the status - and everything about Dawkins screams that he's obsessed with status, that he really, really likes being an important rich white man - to seriously gainsay him.  He can dismiss them, as he did, and does.  Learn to think!  It is you who is clearly the problem!)

A couple years back, he told a woman who dared talk about sexism in the atheist conventions that because she wasn't being beaten up by her husband that she should shut up.  He tells other people that they should think, but he often fails to do it, himself - two wrongs don't make a right.  Beating women - beating anyone - is wrong.  But so is sexual harassment that occurs at atheist conferences.  A person who bothered to think would recognize that . . . but this is Richard Dawkins.  He's an important rich white man!  He's got TITLES!  So women who aren't beating beaten by their husbands need to shut up.

He is also a racist.  He said that Cambridge has produced more Nobel laureates than the whole of the Middle East.  Should we be stunned that a prize created by a northerwestern European is mostly given out to other northwestern Europeans?  But he has the bigotry of a Englishman, including the arrogant belief that they are really the best at everything.

So, he's a pig.  There, I said it.  Fuck that racist, sexist asshole.

Childhood neglect, abuse and asthma

I don't really talk about my childhood abuse and neglect very often . . . well, I guess I talk about it more often than many abused children, but because I wasn't regularly beat up by my parents it's often hard to talk about.

(There was a period where I was beat up pretty regularly - when my mother was married to her second husband, Jerry.  It is weird.  Before and after, my mother didn't really hit me, but when she was with Jerry, she did.  I'm not even talking about with her hand, I'm talking about with a stick, a 1 inch by 2 inch stick, just wailed on me.  But only for those two or three years she was with Jerry.)

It's hard to talk about because the shape of the abuse was neglect (the time with Jerry notwithstanding).  While all abuse is tragic, I think neglect is insidious because it's often very difficult to talk about something's lack.  When you've been hit, you can go, "Holy shit, these adults kicked the tar out of an eight year old with a fucking stick!"  But when they don't do something, it's harder to parse.
In particular, there are a lot of things that happened to me that aren't normal but because no one really talks about (because they are pedestrian) so the abnormal, the terrible, seems normal to me.  I don't even realize that they are a sign of neglect.  Which is why it took me thirty years to figure out that I was neglected in the first place: I thought everyone had similar experiences.

The specific case is this: I have asthma.  I have probably had it since I was a little kid, but I only - right this very day - realized that I have it and have probably always had it.

A chief symptom of asthma is coughing at night.  I remember, as a child, coughing a lot at night, coughing until my sides hurt and my throat was raw.  I remember because coughing sucks and because my mother and grandmother's response to me coughing as to tell me to shut up.

It is only now that I'm looking back and going, "That's fucked up."  You have this kid of single digit years and he's coughing up a storm late into the night, just absolutely miserable, and the response isn't to take him to the emergency room or even to schedule a doctor's appointment - it's to tell this sick kid to shut up.  Hell, they didn't even come into my room to check to see if I was okay - they would just yell, "Shut up!"  They treated it like I was faking it, like it was some sort of ploy to get out of school or chores the next day - that a reasonable kid would put that much effort into not going to school or taking out the trash.  I submit this says more about them than me.

(Which puts a zap on a kid's head, too.  For a long time, I did think I was faking it - or, more precisely, that I had a weak character and found it easier to "pretend" to be sick than to do work, because we learn the meaning of things from our family.  It wasn't until I stood up to dozens of bullies, stared down cops, told the truth even if it meant getting fired that I realized that I don't have a particularly defective character.  I might not be particularly strong, but neither am I particularly weak.  It's something else.  But it was a hard road because I was taught that stuff like asthma was a ploy I used to get out of school and chores.)

The coughing was and continues to be a fairly frequent occurrence, by the way.  It is just this constant thing in my life that I've assumed is pretty normal because, y'know, it was treated it that way.  No one talks very much about their doctor's visits as a child but I had, basically, none unless I had a broken bone or was spurting blood.  I didn't know that was strange.  I figured everyone coughed. (And, to be fair, everyone in my family did, because they smoked like chimneys.)

I want to emphasize here, too, that I had insurance and both of my parents had good jobs.  It wasn't that.  Going to the doctor was quite affordable.  But I can't remember ever going to a doctor unless there was severe structural damage and we never had anything so high falutin' as a family doctor.  Ditto dental - I didn't have my teeth cleaned once, not once, as far back into my childhood as I can remember.

Also looking back, I am angry because this is the sort of thing that really effects a kid's - and adult's - life.  For instance, I have struggled with weight my entire life.  I have generally found exercise to be really hard.  Other kids would be running and I would have to stop to cough.  That is the classic asthma symptom, too, right up there with night coughing.  I thought it was just that I was really out of shape but now I'm wondering how much more difficult all exercise has been because I have trouble breathing and rather than checking it out, when I was a kid and coughing my lungs out, I was told to shut up.

Why I don't like Colton Smith's pathetic excuses

I read this article about why Colton Smith isn't a very good representative of the US Army.  It mostly comes down to the justifiable perception that he's a total douche.  He's a smug, self-important asshole who is a bit of a dirty fighter, who brags about cheating to win in the cage ("if you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough") and is basically a jerk.

What bothers me about him, though, is that he makes excuses for his losses before there's even a fight.  Before his fight with Carlos Diego Ferreira (which he lost in humiliating fashion in 38 seconds . . . his third straight loss, I should add), he said, "On the base, we train soldiers, and I’m a combative instructor right now. But that’s life and death stuff, that’s not sport stuff like mixed martial arts.  Missions come first, soldiers come first, then MMA was a pretty distant second. Now it’s just changed, and the Army has been very supportive of me. I took a personal leave for this fight."

I could be critical of the US military's combatives training as a waste of time.  It is.  US soldiers have guns.  There is almost no unarmed hand-to-hand fighting in combat.  Additionally, it takes years of dedicated training to learn unarmed martial arts thus almost a tiny handful of soldiers ever learn combatives.  One would be hard pressed to find a single situation where military combatives actually saved a soldier's life in combat.  I did some googling and couldn't find a case - and even if you can, it doesn't change the point, it's rare as hell.

Though I did find that the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the dudes in charge of deciding how the US Army is trained, wants to get rid of the current combatives program and replace it with a two week course.  This is an ongoing thing.  Soldiers dig martial arts, so when some soldiers get good at them, they get a few officers behind them, get some funding, create a program and then someone notices once again that unarmed combat has no place on modern battlefields and the program gets scrapped.  Combatives is merely the latest in a long line of martial arts whose usefulness has been overblown to rationalize soldiers acting like tough guys who can kill a person with their commando moves.

OK, ignoring that TRADOC wants to get rid of combatives and there is no indication that it has saved any soldier's life, what Smith is basically doing is making an excuse why it's okay for him to lose.

It's bullshit for a couple of reasons, if you ask me.  The first is that it's just some chickenshit thing to say - he is giving himself an out, an excuse to lose.  Mind you, he is losing.  Three in a row.  But he's saving lives . . . oh, wait, except that there is no proof that Army combatives have done anything of the sort, to the extent that TRADOC wants to cut the program.

Second . . . Colton Smith isn't the first guy in MMA to be in a dangerous job.  I can't think of a single policeman who said, after getting their ass kicked in 38 seconds, the third time in three fights that he's been finished (which might not happen so much if he didn't give himself so many ways out).  Before fighting Ben Askren, Karl Amoussou didn't go, "Well, if Ben whips me, it's because my police work in Paris, fighting gangs, is why will have lost.  That's important work, not like this MMA stuff."  (Note: he did lose, but not as badly as Smith makes a habit of losing.)  Mirko Crocop never used his service with Croatian anti-terrorist special police as a justification as to why he lost.  Tim Kennedy hasn't done it when he was a Green Beret sniper.  Even though those guys could legitimately say they're saving lives, or at least fighting a war.

Most MMA fighters hold a day job, even many in the UFC.  Since the kind of guys who beat up each other in a cage have that mindset all the time, many MMA fighters have jobs that are risky - cops and soldiers have populated MMA's ranks from nearly the beginning.  Smith's excuses are a slight to every person in MMA who has done their job and fought and lost and never made excuses - Smith's excuses are doubly bullshit because he made them before the fight.

After three straight losses, it was normal for a dude to get bounced from the UFC.  Especially at lightweight, which is a shark pit.  Smith was never a very good fighter and he keeps getting his ass kicked so I don't imagine he'll be with the promotion very much longer.  Still, he's a jerk.

Talkin' to a communist - haven't done that in a while!

Friday night, I spoke with a self-described communist.

I have done considerably more than flirt with communism, socialism and anarchism.  I often describe myself as an anarcho-syndicalist, tho' I suspect that is much less true than when I was in college and had these kinds of conversations quite frequently.  See, nowadays, I don't let ideological purity get in the way of the practical nuts and bolts of human society.

My fall-out with communism occurred, for instance, when I noticed that every attempt at a communist government had collapsed into a cult-of-personality military dictatorship and never really left it in a way that could be described as communist.  Mostly, they stay military dictatorships, or become regular capitalist democracies.

So the socialist lacuna between the people's revolution and the withering of the state became troubling for me.  It seemed to me that on one side you had the worker's revolution and on the other side, across a bottomless pit, you had this wonderful utopia but no one knew how to build the bridge attaching the two.  So the primary question became, for me, "How do we fill the chasm or build the bridge?"

I have considered the question, off and on, for years . . . and no solution is forthcoming.  No one seems to know.  The practical nuts and bolts of building a better society don't seem to be very interesting to most people - the utopian fantasy seems to move them.

(Of course, this is just as true of radical capitalism.  Anarcho-capitalist fantasies are splendid but to get there we're just supposed to trust that megacorporations are going to let their power go to fit the ideology of Miltonian economics?  Preposterous.  Just as preposterous as imagining a communist dictatorship will cede its power to some ideal stateless society.  The reality of power and control make this nearly impossible to imagine.)

Which as both a writer and a sausage maker is unsatisfying.  Books are great, but they aren't the creative frenzy that, well, artists sell as the artistic process.  There's a lot of stuff that isn't obsessed dudes at typewriters spilling their heart and soul.  There's a lot of research and then a lot of editing.  The finished product is the result of a lot of hard work.

The same with sausage.  We all love sausage, but to get there requires pushing meat through a grinder.  It's sticky, messy, cold work.  The end results are great, but there are practical issues in sausage making that need to be performed before you sink your teeth into its utopian pleasures.

Finishing a big project is best accomplished with a solid, concrete plan.  If you don't have that plan, you'll end up with a shoddy product (the USSR), nothing at all (any failed revolution the world over) or you'll never start (dreamy eyed middle-class communists).  Without that concrete plan, don't expect most people to get worked up over your ideology.  Don't expect the revolution to happen if you don't know what that even means.

Miami: Day to Day

In addition to the big problems I've talked about, there are innumerable smaller ones that are similar to problems every place has but generally increased in rate of occurrence and intensity.  This will be the last one because I have exorcised my demons with it, I think.  I suspect everyone knows, by now, that I don't particularly like living in Miami.

Traffic is a big problem we have in Miami. Everywhere else I've lived with Adrienne, I have done almost all of the driving.  Adrienne generally preferred in Santa Cruz and Maine to take public transportation to work - she doesn't like to drive.  I do.  So I do most of the driving, sometimes even when it's not good for me.  For years, I drove every mile of every long distance trip we did, even when it made me sick.  When we drove from Maine to California, I did get sick at one point, literally vomiting, because I didn't relinquish the wheel.  (Nowadays, I drive for two hours and Adrienne for one - I generally start and finish, so I definitely do the lion's share, which is cool, but the breaks have totally stopped white line fever and motion sickness.)

Here in Miami, driving makes me so crazy that it makes Adrienne crazy.  Here, she would rather drive in the crazy than listen to me being crazy in Miami traffic.  I want to emphasize, here, that I learned to drive in Las Vegas traffic.  It isn't that I'm unused to dealing with densely packed roads.  It's that Miami traffic is noticeably worse than even other densely populated tourist destinations.

Which isn't to say it isn't crazy for her, either.  It is.  And she's on the road an hour and a half every day!

How is it crazy?  Well, I have never seen so many people so willing to cut people off.  Using your turn signal is generally consented to be a sign of weakness and usually provokes someone into cutting you off.  This insanity means that when a road narrows, no one cedes any ground at all, making Miami's already heavy traffic worse as numerous bottlenecks are created by jerks trying to get to the front of the line.

People in Miami also don't know how to use turn lanes.  They'll turn into them so their trunk is out in traffic.  This is nigh constant.

People in Miami also just . . . stop.  They'll stop their cars anywhere to do whatever business they have to do.

At every major street corner in town, there is a beggar or some dude with fruit, weaving in and out of traffic, trying to get paid.  This slows down the traffic, too, as people have to avoid them or they stop to buy things.

They won't get out of the way of emergency vehicles!

Cyclists are contemptuous of their lives and the lives of others.  About 90% of cyclists in Miami, at any given time, are doing something stupid.  Not illegal, though that, too, but bafflingly stupid - like driving down the wrong side of a busy road at night with neither a helmet nor a light.

Adrienne was involved in a crash that nearly totaled our car.  No one was hurt, but it was clearly unpleasant and dangerous.  Our rear bumper is also a mess because it has been hit at least three times while in parking lots.  Every so often, we'll come out and there will be more paint chipped off because of a low speed parking lot collision.  Of course, no one leaves a note or anything.

Those are fairly specific things.  More generally, Miami drivers are unsafe and selfish.  It is reflected in the danger of the roads.  Miami averages more than twice the average in traffic, bicycle and pedestrian fatalities than the national average - bearing in mind that most Americans are primarily city drivers, too, that Miami is about twice as dangerous as other big American cities.  It is, without doubt, one of the least safe places in America to drive, as reflected in almost every survey of bad traffic.

The city is also very car centered - moreso because even if you live in a place where you can theoretically walk to places, those places are likely to be terrible.

For instance, when we first got to Miami there was the Walgreens of the Damned where the workers were incredibly toxic - flagrantly rude and only grudgingly doing the basic elements of their jobs.  Most other shops nearby weren't any better, either.  We then lived close to an ice cream shop that we went into once because of the bad service.  You know that it's got to be bad if Adrienne and I are avoiding an ice cream place in Miami because of the lousy service.

Where we live, now, we are essentially across the street from a local market.  I've been in there twice, Adrienne has been in there once.  While pretending to be a store, it is really just a place where alcoholics and tweakers can buy beer.  Both times I went into the store to get a bottle of soda.  Both times, that bottle of soda was so old it was flat.  Not so old that it tasted a bit off - the soda was literally without carbonation.

The service is incredibly rude, too.  To buy anything, you have to reach across a freezer unit and counter to put your items in front of the cashier, who will not bag them nor hand them back to you.  Both times I was there, the cashier was incredibly sullen while he did this, like I was interrupting his day because I wanted to buy some pop.

More recently, the joint has expanded into the pawn shop business, to give you an indication of how classy it is.  Bringing together tweakers, beer and pawn shopping!  All the better to buy your meth, I suppose.

I went to another local market, but . . . it turned out to be a few bottles of South American sodas and a counter where people bought wings and fries.  Seriously, it was a weird place that seemed to do a lot of business but didn't really have anything in it if you weren't looking for too sweet sodas and congestive heart failure.

The problems with service don't end there, either.  Here at the house, we can't really get pizza delivered.  There is about a fifty percent chance of any given pizza we order actually arriving.  For a while, we were experimenting with delivery places but stopped due to the high rate of them either not delivering our order at all or there being some kind of serious problem with our order.  There are two places that we will order from because they have the normal kinds of problems, which is like magic in Miami.

I think that the problems with service are a piece with the bad driving.  People in Miami are pretty consistently self-centered assholes.  They drive like assholes and when they get to work, they keep on being assholes.  Regardless, it creates a culture of incompetence and rudeness that is pervasive.  If you look back to the big problems I've mentioned, almost all of them are grounded in people here in Miami either being rude or incompetent.

Unfortunately, this extends to city services, too.  We have a real problem that trash collection doesn't happen reliably.  It is supposed to happen every Tuesday, you can put out your big pieces of junk like ruined furniture or whatever and a truck is supposed to come by to pick it up.  The truck doesn't.  The only time I've seen it come is when I've complained.

Worse, it effects law enforcement - though I think this is made worse because of the culture of corruption that pervades all Miami government.

One of the big problems we have with where we live, now, is noisy neighbors.  They are rude.  People will blare music at all hours of the day so loud that I can hear it over the TV, inside.  It is unacceptable and also against the law.  If you are making noise that can be heard 100 feet from its source, that is prima facie evidence of guilt and punishable with a fine up to $1200.  I checked.

Most of the time when we call to report a noise problem, nothing happens.  I would say we have to average two calls to get someone down to take care of the problem.  Both Adrienne and I have been told that noise complaints can't be filed unless it is after 10pm.  That is untrue.  The 10pm thing refers to businesses, not residences, and is another example of that lazy, incompetent thing - you've got operators convincing people it's pointless to call the cops.  Which is probably why none of our neighbors who are actually close to the loud assholes do anything - how many times do you have to be told by a police operator that there is no violation before you give up?

About a month after I complained to my city council person, most of the noise issues stopped.  I have no idea if they were related, but it's possible that they did something and didn't tell us.  On the other hand, our city council person couldn't sit on the council for a year because she was still working off the sentence from her previous corruption charge - which means that after being convicted of fraud, she somehow managed to get re-elected.  That's very Miami, too.

My face-to-face interactions with Miami's "finest" are limited to one - but it is also telling, I think.

I was down at the airport, trying to pick up Adrienne.  This was at the Miami International Airport, and the cops there are Miami cops.  Anyway, I had stopped at a cutout to text Adrienne and a policeman came along and told me to move.  I was annoyed, but complied, and as I was leaving, the sonofabitch insulted me, calling me stupid.  I flipped him off and drove away.  I parked and was crossing the street to get into the airport because Adrienne's flight was slightly delayed.

The same cop came up to me and started an argument.  I was just walking along and he decided to take time out of his day to cross over and start a fight.  He insulted me, again.  I asked for his name so I could report him.  He was wearing neither a name tag or any identification at all, other his cop vest!  There was no way I could specifically identify the officer!  This stunned me.

He refused to give it to me, insulting me, again.  I responded in kind and we got into a shouting argument in front of MIA.  A crowd formed, including other cops.  I asked the other cops to give me the name of the jerk verbally abusing me.  They looked away and didn't do anything.  Neither did any of them come over to try to control the situation.  They let him keep shouting at me and I kept shouting back, trying to get his name and number so I could report him.

Eventually, I just walked away and he didn't follow me.

I could go in this vein for a while.  The specifics of bad service, dangerous and idiotic traffic and rude people are too numerous to really list, though.  Almost every time Adrienne and I leave, for any reason, something bad happens.  Mostly, its little things - getting cut off in traffic, having to deal with a sullen jerk doing their job badly, stuff like that.  Sometimes, it's something noteworthy, like getting into a screaming fight with a cop or having our car totaled.

Adrienne gets it worse than I do!  She has to drive to work.  For an hour and a half, every day, she has to sit in that fucked up traffic, surrounded by awful, mean-spirited and selfish drivers.  I can't imagine.

I think I've made my point, though.  In addition to the big things that people in Miami fuck up, way too many of them also fuck up the little things.  Which isn't to say that everyone in Miami is a fuck up.  Of course not!  But in any undertaking that involves more than a couple of people, you're probably going to have whatever it is you're doing stymied because of some lazy, rude and incompetent jerk.  My stories about house buying and selling are riddled with these sorts of people, of course, that person who just wouldn't do their job long past the point when doing it would have been easier than not doing it.  (Which is one of the things that stuns me - that so many people continue to fuck up long after they are sparing themselves any effort in doing so!)

The effects have been to limit the extent that Adrienne and I do anything.  For me, considering I work from home, this means an almost perfect isolation, save for Adrienne and my online friends.  Whole months have passed with me talking face-to-face to no one other than my wife.  Adrienne has become very protective of her unstructured time at home, often hostile to the idea of going anywhere after she's within our walls - after spending all day dealing with FIU bureaucracy, her boss who has fully adopted the Miami-eque management style and after a long drive in traffic, I don't blame her.  It can be a trick to get us to leave the house, though, most days.

I think this is going to be the last post, though.  My strength to complain wanes.  I framed a post asking why Miami is this way, but I don't really care enough to write it.  I had intended to write a post about the good things in Miami, but I have lost interest in doing so - and the good things do not even remotely make up for the bad ones, anyway.  There are some pretty buildings.  So what?

When the higher angels of my conscience are in charge, I can see why people like Miami.  If you're terrified of winter, there is none of that, here.  (Though there is none of it most of the South and Southwest, too, I should point out.  The West Coast is also almost entirely winterless.)  There are a lot of things to do.  (But not more than in any other big city.)  Many people have their families here, of course, though I do not and don't know why families don't leave, en masse, for better climes.

But then I think of the objective things.  The muggy, wet summers - with the added bonus of the occasional hurricane and annual tropical storm or two!  Is a little snow really so bad compared to that?

How about corruption?  Except for, like, Chicago, maybe, Miami has more corruption than any other American city.  Go ahead and google "Miami corruption".  It is a matter of public record!

Traffic?  You're more than twice as likely to die in Miami - in a car, on a bike, or on foot - than you are in the rest of the country.  Not to mention that commute times are awful!

Crime?  You're more than twice as likely to be robbed or killed in Miami than the national average, and three times as likely to be beat up!  And when you go to the cops, you'll find a legal system mired in corruption and incompetence - objectively so, publicly so.  Go to your city government about it?  Good luck, they're just as corrupt as the cops.

These are objective things that make me wonder why the people who live here are so adamant about living here.  In much better places, most of the people have been honest about the flaws and willing to leave.  Santa Cruz is a great place to live, but almost no one clutched onto the city with death grips like I've seen in Miami.

People will go, "Well, Miami has a lot of Latinos and they're close to their families."  Er, Santa Cruz is in CALIFORNIA.  You may have heard, but California is mostly Latino - moreso than Florida.  Miami and LA have about the same percentage of Latinos, after all.   So, no, not that.

But for some reason people cling to this rotten barnacle of a town where everything they say they want can be gotten in other, better places - try San Diego.  Try San Francisco.  Try Seattle or Tucson or Austin or New Orleans.  All of these places are exciting, have good weather and are just much, much better places to live!

Thinking that way exhausts me, though.  I don't know why people stay in Miami and, ultimately, I don't care.  Lots of people do things that confuse me and I accept that this is just another one.  I am happy to leave Miami with my soul, marriage and checkbook intact.  I gladly cede Miami to the Miamians.

Chael Sonnen fails another piss test

Chael Sonnen got pulled from UFC 175 because he pissed hot in a random drug test.  It gets funny, here.  Chael's initial opponent, Wanderlei Silva, was pulled from the event because he left town rather than give a piss test - and then Chael publicly mocked Silva's flight, calling him a cheating drug user.  Funny stuff.

It comes from comedy into farce because this isn't the first time Sonnen has failed a drug test.  After Sonnen's first loss to Anderson Silva, Sonnen was popped in a drug test and suspended by the California State Athletic Commission.  The hearings were a riot as Sonnen claimed to have never gone through puberty, you had the quack doctor, crocodile tears, you name it - it was like a soap opera.

The big lie he told, though, was that he told the Nevada State Athletic Commission that he was using testosterone replacement.  He never told them that - or at least he was never able to produce any documents saying he did, and the then director of the NSAC testified that Sonnen has never gotten any medical use exemptions for testosterone replacement.

Around the same time, he got a suspended sentence for real estate fraud - he was taking kickbacks.  The guy is a real charmer.  A real honest character.

In a spiral of weirdness, UFC president Dana White condemned both Sonnen and the NSAC.  Sonnen for breaking the rules but the majority of his hectoring was over the NSAC providing no guidelines for athletes coming off of testosterone replacement that had been approved in previous years.

I'm sure that one baffles the NSAC because there is a standard in place for that kind of thing - you don't apply for a license to fight until you're clean.  Lots of people use lots of drugs that are forbidden in the context of an athletic contest.  Painkillers given to soothe an injury are illegal to use in competition - so you don't apply to fight until that stuff is out of your system.  AND you report your use of it to the commission when the time comes, which Sonnen also failed to do.

Unlike many other athletes who are two time drug cheats, Sonnen will not be fired from the UFC.  Dana White likes the guy too much, and he's a big draw, as well.  Somehow, after losing a title shot to Anderson Silva - again - he managed to talk his way into a championship fight at higher weight class!  Dana White said he was sending a message to the people who said they needed a full training camp to fight Jon Jones, the best mixed martial artist now fighting . . . even though Dan Henderson, who was a legitimate contender, was trying to book the fight.

Chael Sonnen is a real life lesson, though.  The message is clear - if you're a good-looking white Republican man, you can lie, cheat and steal and be rewarded for it.

Miami: Buying a House and Then Selling It

During the first two months post, I hinted at some of the problems we had buying a house.  It took us longer than two months to buy a house - we moved into our current place almost a year after moving out of our place in Santa Cruz.  It took us, more or less, a year to buy a house.

It wasn't that there weren't places, either.  There were.  Prices vary quite a bit from neighborhood to neighborhood in ways we did not initially understand, however.  In one neighborhood, say Homestead, in our price range it was legitimate to look for a house with a yard and such.  In another place, say, Cutler Bay, we could afford a townhouse, in others only a small condo . . . and in some neighborhoods, nothing at all.

This, alone, was enough to send us on a merry chase because . . . well, housing practices in Miami are pretty abusive.  Looking for places in Ohio has highlighted the differences, too, even in the ads.  The Ohio houses we have looked at have, almost uniformly, a large number of good, clear, bright pictures.  Most places in Miami are dim and small, often clearly taken with a not particularly good cell phone.

So a house, in Miami, a house that looked good in the pictures, well, when we got there we would find that mushrooms were growing from the ceiling sagging with mold.  One place had been used by squatters and the remnants of their meth use was scattered around.  In another, there was a swimming pool, bright blue in the pictures, that had become a greenish brown pond full of pollywogs.

The good news is that shortly after leaving South Beach, we got a real estate agent who knows his stuff.  I can't sing Albert's praises high enough.  We were also in a studio down in the Design District, at Buena Vista Flats, which was good for what it was.  There was a small but real kitchen, real stove, real oven, real fridge.  The properly was well maintained by the owner-operator of the facility.  The people were mostly great, too.  It was expensive, but all month-to-month stuff in Miami is.

Armed with a talented real estate agent whom we trusted, the biggest problem - outside the condition of the properties, which ranged from okay to awful - was the agents we had to deal with.  When we would go out to look at houses, we would be lucky to be able to get into half of them.  (Recent comparison with Ohio - we tried to look at 11 places and only saw 10 and the real estate agent was really apologetic about not being able to see all 11.)

When we did see places we were interested in, there were always problems.  It was best when the problems manifested themselves early.  So we looked at one place and made a bid based on the comparative market analysis.  Our bid was twenty percent lower than what was asked because that's what the CMA supported.  Our agent talked to the owner and was, in fact, able to convince the owner that the price we gave was a good price . . . at which point he withdrew the house from the market until prices improved.  At least that was over quickly.

We almost managed to buy a place in Cutler Bay - a townhouse.  The problems here seem almost comical.  The owner had done some work to mask the cosmetic damage done by a leaky roof.  And by leaky roof, I mean that there was a foot wide hole in the wood under the ceramic tiles.  Well, we talked the price down to accommodate for having to replace the roof - it was still a pretty good deal.

Here, though, the bank failed us because with a week left in the finance period, they told us we needed to get some papers from the IRS.  Did I mention we had a week left?  The IRS told us it would take between four to six weeks to get the paperwork.  We were days away from closing when we instead had to back out due to the incompetence of the bank.  They'd had months to tell us about that paperwork!  Months!

So, not only did we fail to get the townhouse - which I think would have been better for us, psychologically, though worse for us financially - we spent a thousand dollars getting it appraised and inspected!  That money was totally gone.

Eventually, after looking at many, many duds, we found the place we're in, now.  It has been a cynosure for our time in Miami, certainly, but getting it was a very Miami experience for us.

In particular, we had issues with the title company.  For reasons unknown to us, the seller insisted on using a title company of their choice - which was a little hinky, and our agent said so, but we were pretty desperate.  We expected a fairly straightforward transaction and it should have been.  We had financing, they had a house (well, technically "detached condominium"), what could the hold up be?

Well, in particular, that damn title company.  Part of their duties were getting the house surveyed.  Our financing would fall through without a survey, due to Miami being in the path of so many hurricanes, the lender wanted to know if the place needed flood insurance.  So, a survey needed to be done to determine if we are in a flood plain.

Still, straightforward.  The title company would call up a licensed contractor and they'd come down and survey the house.  It happens all the time in Miami.

After about a week of this failing to occur, I called the title company.  I was assured that the surveyor would be out in a couple of days.  A couple of days passed and no survey.  So, I called again.

I was told, once again, that the surveyor would be by shortly.  I didn't believe this so I asked for the name of the company doing the work so I could confirm the appointment.  I had to threaten the guy with coming down and camping in their office to get the name and number of the company.

Then, figuring there was a really good shot the guy was shining me on, I waited for a couple of hours - thinking that, having heard my resolve, if he hadn't scheduled a survey that he would jump to do so.  Then I called and . . . there was a very helpful woman who confirmed that there was, in fact, no appointment to conduct the survey.  She said that, perhaps, it hasn't gotten through their system.  She called me a couple of hours later and confirmed that, no, no appointment.

Translation - this asshole just flat out lied, repeatedly, about something we absolutely needed to do to buy the house.  Then, when caught in a lie, didn't do anything about it.  Time was getting short and he was failing to do something both required and simple.

I want to emphasize while all of this was going on, I was crazy due to the psych problems I talked about in my previous post.  I was on the wrong medication.  It was making me a zombie with an emotional range between nothing and awful, heavily tilted to the awful.

While this is my story, it clearly intersects with Adrienne's, and she was having a rough time of adjusting to Miami, too.  She was at a new job, returning to physics education research after her time in applied mathematics, which was causing us considerable stress about the future - she would have to slip in research between her admin duties at FIU and she was getting resistance from her boss.  Additionally, any university is a large bureaucracy - at the time, FIU had 45,000 students and now has something like 57,000 - and bureaucracies in Miami seem to be uniformly troubled with bad service and incompetence.  I'm saying this wasn't easy for her, either.

After the business with being lied about the survey, I broke down, to my considerable shame. I passed this ugly business with the title company to Adrienne because I couldn't handle this authority figure (the title company could sink the house deal, after all) who was flat out lying to me and failing to do the basics of his job.

I like to think that I had softened them up, because Adrienne only had to contact them one additional time to get the survey done.

The problems with the title continued after we had the house.  Part of what the title company did was title insurance.  Well, the title search came up clear, but the title company missed that the previous owners had a thousand dollars in unpaid sanitation fees.  The city contacted us, threatened us with a collection agency and the attendant hit to our credit.  The person handling our case - this one guy, Mike - shined Adrienne on about that, too.  He told us, variously, that it was getting done and that the title company didn't have to do it.

After weeks of his lies, Adrienne finally got through to the lawyer who ran the title agency.  We were assured it was all a misunderstanding - which I consider bullshit manipulation, I fully believe that hiring an asshole like Mike was intended to make it so uncomfortable for us to get the insurance we paid for that we would pay the bill ourselves; I believe the lawyer did this intentionally - and it did get done.

I admit this is all a little hazy, because it was around this time that I was diagnosed as being bipolar and was taking valproic acid and then lithium, so I was all over the place.  I was literally suicidal.  I honestly believe the only reason I didn't kill myself is because in addition to making me suicidal, the drug cocktail I was on also stole all of my energy.  I was too mentally and physically exhausted to go through the effort of killing myself with certainty - because I was too mentally wasted to buy a gun, I did not shoot myself, in other words.

Fortunately, that was the last dealing we had with the title company.  Through copious use of recommendations and having learned what businesses it was safe to patronize, after we got the house we didn't need to interact with Miami nearly so much.  Once we had a house, we had a place to hide and we could settle down into a schedule designed to minimize contact with Miami.  So buying the house was a turning point for us.

If we had to do it again?  I don't think we would.  We would have just gotten an apartment and we would live with that.  Sure, it means our place in Ohio will be financed under MUCH better terms than we have in Miami due to the financial sense of buying this house, which will continue to save us money in the future, but the damage that the house search did - from having us stay in studios for a year and the trouble that caused, psychologically, and the treachery of Miami's housing market, which has continuing physical and mental effects - was not worth it.

To be fair, selling the house has been better - or, I think, we are in a better place.  Instead of living in a studio apartment, we have the house, and we own it.  We have had years to learn how to live in Miami without too much trouble.  Adrienne has a job in Ohio and we are moving, regardless of whether the house sells (which, of course, it will).  We are starting out with an agent we trust, which also helps.  We're just in a better spot, all around.

Still . . . it is Miami.  I'm not going to say we got lucky and found a buyer in a couple of weeks.  That happened because we did our research, we knew the value of the house and sold it for its value.  Additionally, I worked to set the presentation of the house to show it in its best light - I provided clear, well-lit pictures showing how cute the house is and they weren't lies, I packed away a lot of stuff to make it appear more open and to allow the buyers to see things clearly.  I made sure everything smelled nice when I showed it to people, and beforehand I practiced what I would say to sell the house.  Additionally, it really is a very, very good deal, given how land prices are likely to continue to soar in this neighborhood as it continues to gentrify due to the expansion of the Wynwood Arts District and Edgewater.  So we got a buyer quickly, I feel, because we worked for it in ways most Miami sellers at this price point simply do not.  We got the sales contract signed at a reasonable price.  It felt win-win to me.

However, like I said, it's still Miami and the buyers and their agent are Miami people.  The first harbinger of incompetence was the inspection.

While the appraiser showed up in a timely fashion, the inspector didn't arrive until the next to last day of the inspection period.  I thought that was odd, but there isn't that much wrong with the house, so whatever.  (There is ALWAYS something wrong with a house, stuff the current owner doesn't even know about, or stuff they live with and barely notice, that will get caught by the inspector.)  The contract was as-is, so we just figured that if there was nothing seriously wrong with the house (there is not) that they would live with the inspection report.

The last day of the inspection period, though, their agent got into a passive-aggressive email discussion with Albert trying to bully him into getting us to lower the price.  He handled this one his own, mostly, because at no point did she make specific requests of us or give an addendum to him - the buyer's agent just kept suggesting that "something needs to be done" about what the inspector found.  Albert agreed that something should be done and the buyers were welcome to do those things when they closed.

The exchange was just weird and incompetent.  We were willing to entertain either doing a little work to fix some problems or lower the price a bit.  All they needed to do was deliver an addendum in the specified time and we would have negotiated.  Instead of that, there was a passive-aggressive email exchange with our agent that went nowhere, because at no time did they make a legitimate request based on the inspection.

Then, the day after the end of the inspection period, we got this letter "to whom it may concern" - not even naming us! - making a number of demands.  And outrageous ones at that.  Things like $300 for replacing a dryer duct.  Every little thing that the inspector had found wrong, they demanded the absolute top dollar that the inspector put on the report.

Except . . . it was too late.  The contract they signed sells the house as-is.  Since they can withdraw during the inspection period, for any reason, and keep their earnest money (the money you have to put up front to show you're serious about buying and not wasting the seller's time) during that time they have some negotiating power.  Sure, they would have to eat the expense of the appraiser and inspector (around a thousand dollars) but they could have cancelled the contract.  After the inspection period?  Well, read the contact, bab-ee!  It says, clearly, that if there is no cancellation or addendum by the end of the inspection period that the buyers have waived all their rights to complain about inspection issues.

So, our agent forwarded the letter, of course.  I wrote him an email saying that we won't do anything because the inspection period is passed and we really hated the hectoring tone of the letter, from the passive-aggressive "to whom it may concern" (when their agent full well knows our names) to the overpriced demands.

Well, they kept at it, kept bugging our agent to have things fixed as per the inspection report.  Eventually, I said to him that we refuse to negotiate outside of the contract, period - that the only things we will accept are proper addendums to the contract issued through regular channels.  That was the end of it, at least insofar as the inspection report went.

Then, on the last day of the finance period (the period of time that the buyers can cancel the contract and keep their earnest money due to failure to secure financing for the house), they send us the appraisal - which they had been sitting on for two and a half weeks, in which the appraised value was lower than the agreed upon terms.  This was incredibly relevant because the bank will not give financing for more than the appraised value of the home.

Because it was a legitimate issue, we agreed to alter the contract to the appraised value.  We are still making a lot of money, so we agreed to the change in order to assist the buyers secure financing.  We are not irrational people!  But it was at the absolute last minute in a way that was totally unnecessary.

(I suspect it was part of the buyer's agent to try to lower the price even more.  I suspect the plan was to get us to agree to fix up a bunch of stuff and/or give credits to lower the cost of the house and then hit us with the appraisal.  Which means she was either trying to scam us or is incompetent, or both, no need to pick just one!)

They also asked for extensions which - with some hesitation - we gave.  Apparently, the buyers had to contact the IRS for paperwork the bank needed and needed more time to insure the IRS could get it to them.  We understood, having lost a place due to similar issues.

Well, the extended finance period was about to come to an end and we had heard nothing.  On the very last day, apparently they got into gear to contact the bank in order to get it done.  We received a letter confirming financing at 3pm on the last day of the extended period.

Except . . . well, the letter we got only has three pages out of five.  It is incomplete.  There is no way for us to know what is on the other two pages.  It is possible - improbable, I know, but possible - that the other pages contain information that voids the contract, such as proof that the buyer has a history of fraud, for instance.  I suspect it doesn't have a lot of legitimacy as proof of financing.

The buyers also threatened to cancel the contract after giving us proof of financing if we didn't extend the finance period.  This was just weird.  They had already given us proof of financing, so they couldn't cancel the contract without losing their earnest money.  We said "no" and it turned out to be a hollow threat, unsurprisingly.

That really should have been it, but there's more!  The buyers haven't gotten mortgage insurance, which they need to get to secure financing for real.  They have had months to get this, to contact the homeowners association to get the documents needed for title insurance.  I can't imagine this is anything other than sheer, unadulterated laziness.

With less than three weeks left before closing, we have no word that they have started a title search (which will come up squeaky clean, fortunately).  It's like they're not taking this seriously, even though if they fuck up now they'll forfeit their earnest money.

I suspect that they'll get everything done at the last minute, but it is just another example of the bullying bullshit and incompetent performance of people in Miami.  This time, it isn't crushing us with depression and anxiety - though there has been some of both - because we're in a better spot, but it reminds us why we want to get the hell out of here.

There are still more to come!  Stay tuned!

PS: Literally as I was posting this, I got an email from my realtor asking me to contact the homeowner's association and management company because the buyer's agent and banker had been unable to get the required insurance information to complete the mortgage insurance.

Mind you, this is their job.  It is up to the buyer to do stuff like get their mortgage insurance.

So I contacted the management company and the HOA board of directors and . . . well, I think that I've got it sorted out, but it's hard to tell because the buyer's agent is so goddamn incompetent!  She has asked for our help and been unclear about who she's spoken to, what she's asked for and other details that will make it easier for me to help her and her clients.

I told Adrienne that all of this is like being in a group project in a class where you're the only person who cares what grade you get.  The vexation is almost constant.