I’ll admit, I didn’t expect to like Phoenix Jones. I was excited to attend Sasha Pasulka’s Tech Show on Feb 20, but Jones was not the person I came to see.  I figured at best he’d be kind of uninteresting.  At worst, a complete joker. I was pleasantly surprised.

For example, I did not know that Jones actually wore the same body armor that our troops wear – and that he has been shot twice in that armor.  I also did not know that he works closely with Police, making sure he gathers evidence properly when he is at a crime scene.  Also, whenever a police officer orders him to stand down, he does exactly that.

Jones has an interesting stat in his corner.  Since he and his crew started patrolling, Police response times have improved – possibly to avoid the embarrassment of being beaten to the crime by a guy in a super hero costume.  Response times in Belltown on weekend nights were 29 minutes before Jones started his work.  How they are around 6.

You may not believe in vigilante justice.  But after hearing Phoenix Jones talk for 5 minutes, I believe the streets of Seattle are actually safer with him guarding them.

To: Kirby Wilbur, Mitt Romney, Sean Hannity, Fox News et all:

People who know me know that I lean right fiscally, and lean left socially.  I am a Federalist who believes in leaving decisions to the States. I’m a small business owner and University educator at the same time, so both parties think I should be beholden to them.

Honestly, I am sorry that the election went so poorly for you, but I’m more than a little shocked that you are so surprised by it.  I cringe when I see your people blaming Hurricane Sandy, the liberal left media or any other ridiculous assertions for why you got drubbed.  Let me explain to you why the results went against you.

You lost because people like me, who believe in a lot of the things you say about the economy, can never ever ever admit to being Republicans.

People like me have gay friends and clients.  We have sympathized with women friends who have had abortions.  We simply can’t identify ourselves with a party that wants us to bash our friends.  We won’t do it.

As a party, you have stubbornly made a conscious choice to put your fundamental beliefs above anything that resembles compromise.  As such, you are asking people like me to trade social capital and give up personal or professional relationships in order to support your party.  And I’m sorry, but we won’t do that for you.  We are not selling out our friends and colleagues.

As long as you stay on your high horse, you will continue to lose.  You will find the 2016 version of Sandy to blame when the next Republican is narrowly defeated in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania.  And while I agree that any self-respecting media that can still justify prime-time airtime for Al Sharpton leans too far left, that’s simply not your issue.

You may have incredible ideas for saving the economy.  Unquestionably, it’s the macro issue that is uber important.  However, I can never dive deep into your solutions and/or sell your vision to my friends if you continue to persecute them.

As someone who thinks he is pretty well-centered politically, I beg you to please pick a philosophy and stick to it.  Don’t be pro-death penalty and pro-life at the same time.  Don’t tout States rights while trying to stop those states from enabling marriage equality. Above all, please stop making it a social crime to be a Republican.

Good luck in the next election cycle.  I hope you are able to learn something from the $1 Billion spent in 2012.

Many of you know, that I’ve been a partial Mariners season ticket holder since 1996, splitting great seats behind home plate with 5 other families.

Throughout the decade of losing, we’ve kept our seats, and I’ve kept my share.  We know it’s a waste of money.  We know they’ll be bad.  We know that our September tickets will be worth pennies on the dollar.  But we do it because we feel a sense of community with each other, our fellow season ticket holders and baseball overall.  Like good passive aggressive Seattleites, we allow the team to roll out a sub-par product, grumble a little and renew no matter what.

There is now a straw being waved around and threatening to break the camel’s back.

It’s one thing for the Mariners to fight to keep an arena out of Sodo.  It’s a little extreme, but I suppose still ok, for the Mariners to use the Seattle Times Editor in Chief to push anti-arena sentiment.  But when the County and City Councils vote to approve the arena, it’s another whole thing whatsoever to sponsor a “citizen’s referendum” with the hopes that the simple delay of getting something on the ballot will force the Sacramento Kings to be sold to another city.

Here’ is the letter I asked the head of my season ticket group to send to his ticket representative.  The upper executives of the Mariners do not care about you.  The people who care are the ones whose paychecks will be affected.  If you want to get a message inside the Golden Fortress, you need to hit the people who will immediately be affected financially.

My letter:

Ken:

Can you let your ticket guy know, that if the Mariners go through with any resolutions or referendums to try to stop the new Sodo Arena, after 16 years, I’ll be giving up my season ticket package next year.

I find it hypocritical for a franchise that solely exists thanks to a stadium paid for by $350MM in taxpayer dollars, would do anything to prevent a privately financed arena from bringing more sports to our marketplace.  Plus, let us not forget that the Sonics were here before the Mariners, and I don’t remember them trying to block a baseball team from coming to town.

Not only will I pull out of my tickets, I will encourage everyone I know to pour their money into franchises that are friendlier to the Seattle community.

Thanks.

Andy

I’ve blasted the Obama 2012 team in the past for their relentless email spamming. So, I have to give credit to a little piece of brilliance that should go down in the campaign Hall of Fame.

While the Republicans are rallying their base in a conference center in Tampa, President Obama was holding court in the virtual world, hosting an AMA on Reddit. As of 3:00pm PDT the post had 17,378 points (62% like it), with 43,822 up votes 26,444 down votes. There were more than 12,000 comments.

It’s hard not to come away impressed that while the Republicans are involved in the “old way” of engaging people, Obama is leveraging the “new way” of reaching out to his base (and stealing eyeballs from them). The Republicans are kind of left without a way to fight back. If they put Romney on Reddit during the DNC, they’ll look like copy cats. If they don’t have Romney do a AMA, they look scared, like they don’t trust what he would say. That’s check and mate Democrats.

Meanwhile in Tampa, Google is reporting that they have received the most searches ever for the term “Reddit” from a single geographic area. (No, not really.)

This is not a political blog post. I’m neither endorsing or not endorsing the idea that we should or should not re-elect President Obama.

This is a slam on the campaign communication team who spams my inbox for donations.

Here is the email I just received:

==================

From: Barack Obama
Subject Line: Hey

Andy –

My upcoming birthday next week could be the last one I celebrate as President of the United States, but that’s not up to me — it’s up to you.

This July deadline is our most urgent yet, coming after two consecutive months of being significantly outraised by Romney and the Republicans.

And if you pitch in $3 or whatever you can before midnight tonight, you and a guest will be automatically entered to join me at my birthday get-together next month:

https://donate.barackobama.com/My-Birthday

Thanks. Hope I’ll see you soon.

- Barack

==================

Why does this bug me?

• Maybe because I imagine the most powerful person in the world might address me in a way other than saying, “Hey.”
• Maybe because the sentence, “My upcoming birthday next week could be the last one I celebrate as President of the United States, but that’s not up to me — it’s up to you” implies that the most powerful person in the world is dependent on a $3 donation from me.
• Maybe it’s because I get 3-5 emails a week from these guys and each day the sky is falling a little lower.
• Maybe it just doesn’t look right for the President of the United States to sign his name, “Barack.”  Like if I saw him in person I would slap him a high five and call him “Barack.”
•  Maybe I can’t imagine being a German citizen and receiving an email from Angela Merkel with the subject line, “Hey” and signed, “Angie.”  I can’t even imagine getting an email from Steve Ballmer or Marissa Meyer with the subject line, “Hey.”

So I work in social media.  I teach some social media.  I play around in some social media channels.  I own a blog with my own name as its url simply so I show up in Google searches.  Through all these years playing around in social media as a profession, I’ve never really made it a huge focus of my personal life.  Maybe I’ll make a connection here or there.  But nothing substantial.

And yet today, a simple tweet seemed to strike a chord with people.

All day long Occupy Seattle mayhem shut down streets downtown.  People couldn’t get home from work.  Rogue anarchists broke windows.  Children couldn’t be picked up from school.  Store clerks feared for their safety.  Middle class parents – and their bosses – had to figure out what was best for their kids, their businesses and their co-workers.

I was unaffected by the chaos despite being right around the corner from it.  I took my wife home from her surgery but thought to myself, “Thank God this mayhem didn’t affect us getting to the hospital, or home from it.” I tried to rid my mind of thoughts of how angry I would be if I was stuck in traffic due to a protest, while my wife sat groggily in pain in the passenger seat of our car.

I scanned the Twitter stream and noticed that people who supported OWS had lost patience with OccupySeattle.  OccupySeattle wasn’t about a revolution anymore.  What started with good intentions but no real purpose, had transformed into an incubator for people with negative intentions and directed purpose. The movement had created a dark side, or at least allowed the dark side to breed.

And so I said:

Dear #OccupySeattle. The 99% has gotten together & decided we need better representation. Thx for the effort.  Good luck w/ future endeavors.”

It was exactly 140 characters.  My point was pretty clear.  Whatever goodwill the original Occupy movement had generated had been pretty much decimated here in Seattle.  The most liberal town in America was saying, “WTF are you guys doing? You are totally destroying this.”

Meanwhile,  my most nagging thought as I hit “Tweet this” was whether I should be using “has” or “have” for the verb.  I was out of characters, so I went with the former. It was a quick line, and after I sent it, I had all but forgotten about it.

A few hours later, it’s become the most retweeted thing I’ve ever sent out. For the first time ever, I started trending in Seattle.  People we retweeting this because they agreed with the sentiment.  And yet two tweets back at me stand out:

• joshuatticus619: @aboyer OWS have nothing to do with 99% of these rogue hooligans.
• funkisockmunki: @aboyer So get out there and represent then, instead of snarking from the sidelines.

To the 1st repsonse I counter, “I agree. To the normal everyday 99%, the rogue hooligans have nothing to do with OWS.  However, Occupy Seattle has little to do with OWS as well.  Somehow OccupySeattle has developed an identity of its own, and not in a good way.”

The 2nd response made me realize I had struck a nerve with some folks.  I run a small business, invest in a startup and teach at a University.  I enjoy creating commerce and inspiring others to do the same.  More commerce means more transactions.  More transactions means more jobs.  More jobs means more wealth for everyone.  But to this person, I was simply “snarky.”  Trying to build small businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship isn’t enough. I’m evil because I don’t want to join or represent a revolution with no goal or purpose.

It will be interesting to see if this tweet fades away into the night as May Day passes.  Maybe more and more people will agree with the sentiment and retweet it.  Or, will we see more of the negative side of #OccupySeattle come out tomorrow.   Either way, it’s a great social media lesson in progress.

You won’t see this analysis written anywhere else – this content comes from part of an email chain where a bunch of people were discussing the differences between the original Occupy Wall Street and the local spin-off versions such as Occupy LA and Occupy Seattle.  It all stemmed from an LA Times article that explained it would cost Los Angeles $2.3 Million to clean up the park which had been Ocuppied.  I’ll keep the whole email from this anonymous person for contexzt, but the paragraph with the poker analogy is the one I found most compelling.

Note: At this point the discussion had moved to talk about whether the movement, or the offshoots of the movement, would be successful on getting student-debts absolved.  (And no offense to puppetry and history majors.)

People take risks and develop new and improved goods and services because they believe that they will profit from it. That is at the root of our free market economic system. That is exactly what Adam Smith wrote about all those years ago. Plus, where do you think all that money comes from to pay off people’s debts (whether student loans or mortgages or bank bail outs or whatever)? Government takes in revenue through taxes. The inhabitants of a country pay the taxes. So, if one group of people want money from the government (and that is exactly what asking to have your debts payed off is- getting money from the government), in essence those people are asking other people to pay for their choices. Why should I have to pay for the choices that another person made (that is the root of the whole social contract and the obligations of citizenship)?

For example, I am OK with helping to pay for education in general- most people are. That is why we have free public K-12 education. It is an investment in the future. I am also OK with student grants for college kids who can not afford college. That also helps society and is an investment in the future. But if some guy takes out a massive loan from a private business (i.e. a bank) to fund his two years in college to get a masters degree in literature or history or puppetry or what have you, and then the guy can’t get a job with his worthless degree, why should I have to pay to get his loan written off? That guy is in essence begging money from me. He better be able to explain why and persuade me to pay off his loan, or I will not want to pay it off for him. And if his first attempt to persuade me to pay off his loan is to “occupy” the park down the street from my house and threaten to stay there until I pay for his loan, then frankly he has failed at making his case from the get go.

To put it in poker terms,  imagine if some guy at the table made big risky bets over and over, chasing long odds on flush draws hand after hand, borrowed money repeatedly from other players to buy in on more hands, and when he finally craps out and has no more money, he demands that everybody else pony up money to pay off his debts. How would you feel about that? How would you react to that? How would the other players react to that? Now imagine if that guy- rather than to try to logically explain why you should pay off his debt- decides to go sit in the bathroom and “occupy” it for several weeks. He messes the place up, refuses to clean it up, disturbs other people who are just trying to use the bathroom, refuses to leave even though he is on private property and the owners ask him nicely to leave, and becomes belligerent when the police to evict him. How would you react to that?

Michael Neu posted this article on our company blog.  I think it’s a good summary and am re-posting it here.

>>

Techcrunch posted an article today called “Cheezburger’s Ben Huh: If GoDaddy Supports SOPA, We’re Taking Our 1000+ Domains Elsewhere”. The story is in reference to GoDaddy’s support of SOPA the (Stop-Online-Piracy-Act). Although the bill sounds like a good thing many people are worried that the bill goes WAY too far. If SOPA passes it would makes it really easy for copyright holders to censor content and shut sites down that they think are offensive. The censorship issues go far beyond that as well.

Ben Huh, The CEO of The Cheezburger Network, has decided to pull his names from GoDaddy because of their support of the bill. Many other big media companies support the passing of the bill as well.

This is very hot topic right now #SOPA and many sites have spoken out against the bill including Google, Yahoo and others.

I completely agree with Ben’s stance and think he is giving GoDaddy a chance to make it right before he moves his domains. However, as the article stated it GoDaddy is used to taking some heat, and it will probably take a lot more for them to change. There seems to be a push to transfer domains away from GoDaddy because of their support of this bill so we will how GoDaddy reacts if that trends gains any more momentum.

People need to familiarize themselves with what is happening with the SOPA bill, and how poorly it was written. It truly is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and needs to be stopped before it passes by a completely technologically uneducated group of political representatives.

I strongly urge you to familiarize yourself with what is going on and take action like Ben did.

What are you doing to stop this bill from passing?

Click on the picture below to head over to the Stanford Law Review. Don’t let anyone you’ve ever voted for vote for SOPA.

He’s no Antoine Dodson… but as far as maniacal dictators go, he does ok with a dance beat behind him. Apparently, according to the New York Times, this is a hit in Israel.