I believe the following:

• The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
• The church does not belong in government.
• The government does not belong in church.
• Schools should teach reading, writing, arithmatic, history, science, and art – not religion or politics.
• The right of freedom of speech for all people, not just those with the “correct” political views.
• Government should get out of the marriage business.
• The government should stay out of the bedroom.
• You are responsible for your own life; I am responsible for mine.
• With all rights come the duty to use those rights responsibly.
• All powers not expressly given by the Consititution to the federal government belong to the states.
• Our tax system punishes those who produce and rewards those who do not.
• The so-called “war on drugs” is merely a cover to get people to surrender their individual rights.
• War is the last resort in diplomacy.
• When it’s time to fight, the wars should be fought by the military, not micromanaged by politicians with an agenda.

So, you all decide: am I a right-wing extremist?

Names aren’t important as you dish out steaming bowls of piping hot brutality to your enemies. You also enjoy a good spaghetti dinner once in a while.

Over the last couple of days, there has been a huge buzz about the internet regarding the explosion at The Planet’s H1 datacenter facility.  The Planet, by the way, is the company at which I work, so I have a bit of an insider’s view at what happened, and it is not pretty.  It also happens that I live only a few blocks away from the building in which the explosion occurred.

I spent the better part of today working in the damaged building, trying to facilitate the moving of servers to an area that was still functional or to our other Houston datacenter.  At one point during the day, I snuck back to the area where the explosion had taken place.  My experience in firefighting and damage control (courtesy of the U.S. Navy) was enough to tell me that this situation could have been much worse.

I cannot go too deep into details because of privacy restrictions, but I can put some of the following rumors to rest:

It was not an FBI raid.

The building was not blown up in an insurance fraud scam.

The building was not attack by aliens (as far as I know).

There was no experimental project testing mutagenic particles on humans.

Anyway, if anyone wants to know the official story, you can check out the forum in which all updates are being posted.

 I can live with that.

Fortunately, my reasonably mature and level-headed handling of this has opened another potential opportunity.  On Monday, I had an interview with the manager of the training department regarding position here at the company.  The interview was a positive experience, and judging from the manager’s behavior after the interview, I am certain that I have secured the position, pending final department transfer approval from Human Resources.

I am not going to get my hopes up, though.  I have learned through many years of bitter experience that every silver lining has a huge dark cloud lurking behind it.

I recently blogged about an issue at work that has, to be blunt, really made me angry.  I keep telling myself that it is not a big deal, and that I should not get myself worked up over it.  Naturally, as with any previous attempt at self-deception, I keep failing miserably.

The truth is that I am angry about it, and no amount of self-consolation seems to be able to assuage that anger.  In fact, I had to stop and evaluate the cause of the anger.  Only by determining the cause would I be able to properly address the issue and force myself to accept the situation in a more rational manner.  The self-analysis did not take long given the speed at which my brain processes and analyzes information.

The source of the anger goes back more than three decades.

I grew up in a small and heavily Baptist East Texas town where the only two things worse than being black was being Jewish (the Jews killed Christ, after all), and being homosexual.  Sameness was the order of the day; a cookie-cutter community where everyone looked the same, worshipped the same, acted the same, and most importantly thought the same.  Being different in any way was to be ostracized by the community.  This lesson was paramount in the churches and the schools, and was enforced harshly.

Yet, despite the vigor the lesson of sameness was beat into everyone, I was different.  I was able to read and write long before I entered kindergarten.  While the other kids my age were puzzling out the infinite intricacies of the letter “K”, I was reading (and understanding) books that kids more than twice my age could scarcely comprehend.  By the time everyone else in my class had grasped the concept of the letter “B”, I had finished my classwork and had moved on to some other activity.  This resulted in my workbook being taken up, having a big red “X” drawn across the page, and I was sent home with a note to my parents accusing me of cheating.

I was never able to figure out how, exactly, one cheats on learning the alphabet.

That is the earliest memory of my educational experience, but it was far from the last.  At least once a week over the next three years, I would be sent home with a note to my parents accusing me of being a cheater.  The most common phrase I heard from my school was “He is not smart enough to learn the material, so he has to cheat.”

Finally, when the school was at a complete loss with how to deal with an irredeemable cheater, the decision was made to put me in Special Ed classes with the rest of the morons.  To justify moving me to the Special Ed classes, the school had to administer an IQ test.  In their own arrogance, the school administration was not prepared to deal with the results.

At age 7, my IQ was higher than that of any teacher at the school.  But the damage had already been done.

I had already decided to never again do my classwork.  Why should I?  Every time I did my work, I was publicly called a cheater and given no credit for my work.  I figured I would just save myself the aggravation of having to deal with such public abuse; it simply was not worth the trouble.

In my seventh grade year, my family had moved to a different town.  The teachers at my new school immediately recognized that I was far smarter than I ever let on – yet I steadfastly refused to do my schoolwork.  The teachers lectured and ranted about how special I was, and were frustrated at my continual low grades that resulted from not doing homework.

It was in the eighth grade that the situation really boiled to a head.  One of my teachers publicly called me a moron in front of the class, to which I responded, claming that, compared to me, the teacher was an idiot child who had been lobotomized at birth.  I then proceeded to prove the truth of my statement.

That was not the most diplomatic way of dealing with the situation, but it did get quite a few laughs from the rest of the class.

So, here I am, some thirty years later, still being told that I am not smart enough to learn new things by people who have absolutely no clue of what I am truly capable; still being told that I am a moron by those who are, in all probability, my intellectual inferiors.

And that makes me angry.

I have spent many years training myself to not take such things so personally, to not get angry over things of little significance.  However, despite that effort, despite the vast amounts of armor I have built up around my emotions, I still have a sore spot in my personality that flairs up whenever I feel someone is insulting my intelligence – whether or not that person realizes he or she is doing so.

There is a bit more to the situation that rubs salt into the wound, but I have ranted and raved long enough for this post, so I’ll come back to that issue in the very near future.