corruption! >8/

Mukasey Offers View on Waterboarding – which, oddly enough, is exactly the opposite of what former US Acting Assiatant Attorney General Daniel Levin said about it. it’s extremely suspicious to me that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t say anything about it before he was “elected”, but now that he’s actually got the job, he’s falling right in line with everyone else in this corrupt administration… 8/

Illegal Government Surveillance: It’s Not Just For Foreigners

Continue reading corruption! >8/

it was fun while it lasted… 8/

When they took the fourth amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment,
     I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment,
     I was quiet because I didn’t own a gun.
Now they’ve taken the first amendment,
     and I can say nothing about it.

Citizen blogger censored, detained by the FBI!feedmore informationmore information

Ask Al-Quaeda: Answers!feed

Move Along, Nothing to See Here…

The Free Network Project
Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents

what have we done?

Hijackers’ Friend Objects to 9/11 Report – i was sorting through some old paperwork and found this, from august 2004, but still relevant, despite the fact that nobody remembers it. it goes right along with the story of Maher Arar.

We’ve Seen the Enemy, and He is Us – another article from 2004 that still hasn’t gone away, and, in fact, has gotten worse… 8/

Continue reading what have we done?

this is looking pretty cool…

i am posting this from my laptop, which is running dyne:bolic on a live CD. dynebolic appears to be an open source multimedia workstation, that will “automatically join the CPU power of all the computers on your local network: let the old computers work together with the new, united they’ll all work better”. it appears to have software to create, edit and manipulate, video, audio and images, along with having a respectable net section as well. right off the top, i’ve noticed that it appears to view my monitor differently, but it’s got a lot of cool things to distract me from that. i can apparently create a “nest” on my flash drive where it will remember my environment, so i’ll be able to boot from the CD with my flash drive anywhere there happens to be a computer.

Public Service Announcement

Your help is urgently needed to help defeat a Senate bill to revise FISA, the warrantless wiretapping surveillance program and provide sweeping, retroactive immunity, requested by the president, for telecommunications companies that participated in this program.

President Bush is insisting that the phone companies need this immunity or we would be at risk of future terrorist attacks. I remain unconvinced that this is the case and the House passed bill did not include this measure. As I mentioned in previous emails about this issue, if the president was serious about keeping us safe from terrorism while advocating for this immunity, he would long ago have provided us with the necessary documents for Congress to review this program.

In the Senate today, the pressure is on from Republicans to end debate and force a vote to grant phone companies retroactive immunity before any details of their activities is revealed.

Your help is needed now. Contact your Senators today and ask them to vote no on today’s FISA cloture vote. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an action page below that can help you reach your Senator now.

https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?alertId=357&pg=makeACall

Even after today, further efforts may be needed to make sure that a bad bill does not pass the Senate.

Thank you for your help today and your continued support for a better democracy.

=====

Here’s what’s at stake with today’s imminent vote on the FISA Amendments Act:

1. The FISA Amendments Act permits the Attorney General of the United States to order physical searches of your home, your workplace, your property or any other place without the warrant required by the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. A secret FISA court can retroactively determine that the search was inappropriate, but if the Attorney General decides at his or her own discretion that information gained has something to do with a threat to somebody’s security, the information can still be used. The sick punchline is that the Attorney General is tasked with determining whether the Attorney General’s conduct in this regard is legal.

2. The FISA Amendments Act permits the government to eavesdrop on your private conversations over the phone, by e-mail or by fax, indeed on any American’s such conversations, without the warrant required by the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. Even if a secret FISA court retroactively determines that the search was inappropriate, the administration in office can decide that the information gained was important anyway and still use it. And yes, as with physical searches, the administration is itself tasked with determining the appropriateness of its conduct.

3. Telecommunications corporations are prohibited by law from sharing your personal private information with the government unless there is explicit legal authorization. That’s for your protection, and it is, again, mandated by the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The FISA Amendments Act lets telecommunications corporations off the hook for breaking this law for year after year during the reign of the Bush administration. What’s worse than simply coddling corporate crooks, by giving telecommunications corporations immunity from lawsuits for breaking the law the Bush administration makes it impossible for its system of warrantless wiretapping to be brought into the court system for adjudication, which is how the constitutionality of government action is decided. If the FISA Amendments Act is passed, say goodbye to your chance to see surveillance of Americans without a warrant ruled unconstitutional. Such cases will be outlawed.

=====

Call the Congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the offices of the two Senators for your home state. Fill up their voicemail systems with demands that they support two actions:

1. A vote AGAINST cloture on the FISA Amendments Act. Ask your Senators to keep debate on the bill going, because when debating stops voting can begin…

2. Active support FOR Senator Dodd’s filibuster against the FISA Amendments Act should the vote for cloture prevail. Senator Christopher Dodd has committed to intervening and preventing a vote with a personal filibuster. The more Senators that participate in a filibuster, the easier it will physically be for the filibuster to continue. Also, the filibuster can be stopped if enough Senators vote to stop it. Ask your Senators to at least let the filibuster keep going, and preferably support it with their own bodies.
Call the Congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Right now!

big brother is everywhere!

Closing the noose on the USA – this is the beginning of having a storm trooper on the corner, asking for papers to go from one part of town to another, making sure that you’re where you’re supposed to be, doing what you’re supposed to be doing. what will have to happen before people will say enough?

Jack Bauer Cellphone Network to Detect Nukes, Surveil Cities – We’re sure some readers are already screaming “Big Brother” and alt-tabbing to their blog window to write about this evil new “Nokia 1984 phone”

Cloudwar – on january 8, bush signed an order expanding the power of federal law enforcement and spy agencies to combat internet attacks on government

Continue reading big brother is everywhere!

great… 8b

i just received a letter from DSHS/DVR – the Department of Social and Health Services, Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. they are in receipt of my request for vocational services (it’s about time! i applied almost 5 years ago, and this is the first i’ve heard from them except for a notice telling me that i was on the waiting list.) and have scheduled an appointment for me on "Monday, 2/12/2008 at 10:00 am."

i wonder if this is a test, to discover whether or not i am aware of the fact that neither the 12th of february, nor the 2nd of december, if you’re being european, come on a monday this year… strangely enough, they’re both tuesdays…

if it is a test, i wonder how i should respond…

if it’s possible, huckabee is a bigger idiot than bush

after a week of campaign stops in the south where huckabee told his audiences he wanted to rewrite the constition to bring it in line with “god’s standards”, during last night’s republican debate on MSNBC, he assured the audience that he did not want to “impose” his beliefs on anyone…

8/

the question that prompted this remark begins about 6:17 into the video. i didn’t pay any attention to the rest of it.

economic downturn expected for everyone

Draft Economic Recovery Program To Stop The Bush Depression – now, of course, none of this has the remotest hope of actually coming to pass, which makes me wonder what’s really going to happen…

Let Market Crash Now Or Face Financial Train Wreck – more stuff that will never actually happen, which raises more concerns about what is actually going to happen…

Professor Anderson Explains – having trouble understanding the impact of the national debt on the volatile economic situation? here’s laurie anderson in a PSA from the 1980’s, putting it all into perspective. the numbers have become more extreme and depressing of course – in this video the debt was around 2 trillion dollars and now it’s something like nine trillion…

Continue reading economic downturn expected for everyone

rant + gripe

i have written my representatives several times concerning, among other things, getting bush and his cronies out of office and reversing the direction this country has been headed for the past few years. i have always gotten nice “we’re as concerned as you are, but there’s nothing we can do” responses from my democratic representatives, but my republican representative constantly comes back with this:

One of the most difficult questions raised by these provisions is: What are high crimes and misdemeanors? The conclusion reached by most scholars is that clear criminal law violations represent impeachable offenses, whereas misconduct that is not necessarily criminal but that undermines the integrity of the office (such as disregard of constitutional responsibilities) may rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

when george w. bush took office, he made the following affirmation:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

it is evident to me – and to around 60% to 75% of the rest of the voters in the country currently – that he failed to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” by deliberately misleading us, repeatedly, over a period of two years following september 11, 2001.

False Pretenses – at least 935 false statements about the national security threats that didn’t exist!

i’m pretty sure that at least one of those misleading statements were illegal in some way or another, and even if they were all legal, the resulting mess that was created, without a doubt, contained many aspects that were illegal, and of which, bush and his cronies were definitely a part. to me, this very clearly represents “high crimes and misdemeanors”, and yet, my elected representative, and, presumably, the constituent which elected him (of which i was apparently not a part) says that there are questions about what constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors.

it’s really frightening to me that this country is going the direction it is these days, and the fact that my elected government representative would be so deliberately ignorant of it frightens me even more. and for the icing on the frightful cake, we have mike huck-a-bee and his drones – chuck norris chief among them – who want to change the constitution to more perfectly match the “word of god” on things like birth-control, abortion and homosexual marriage, but not when it comes to other biblical laws like eating shellfish, keeping the sabbath or shaving. and people think that he’s exactly what this country needs!

<shudder>

and, on top of that, i don’t have a job or health insurance, my country is sending old, brain-injured men to war, while at the same time, claiming that there are no homeless vets, and it’s illegal for me to commit suicide. i wonder why?

yep…

Pakistan’s Decorated Vehicles – these are far more decorated than Ganesha The Car, which is what i was originally thinking of when i first started work on it. if i ever want to get Ganesha that decorated, i’d better start working on it. these are good inspirations for what i can do…

Talking About AT&T’s Internet Filtering on AT&T’s The Hugh Thompson Show – the editor of Boing Boing Gadgets was interviewed by Hugh Thompston, but the interview didn’t go the way Hugh’s corporate sponsor, AT&T, wanted it to, so they cut it, right after the (hand-picked AT&T) audience voiced their opinions about AT&T filtering their email, and started over. here is just the video, and here is a FAQ about the EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency. “AT&T: Your World. Delivered. To The NSA.”

Elephants Evolve Smaller Tusks Due to Poaching – more blasphemous evolutionary facts that further negate the jeezis-people’s divine intelligence. what with the mounting evidence over the past 200 years, you would think that evolution would be getting a better rep these days. but at the same time, mike huckabee is supporting a state constitutional amendment in georgia which would reclassify most birth control as abortion. this is to put up a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade and, eventually, make birth control illegal. it used to be that i would seek out people like this in order to blast holes in their arguments, but since my injury, all i can do is shake my head, because anything more than that and i end up sounding more idiotic than they do.

Surge To Nowhere – Don’t buy the hawks’ hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it.

dude, where’s my country?

Bin Laden’s son plans peace ride on horseback – good for him! it’s about time someone close to bin laden had some ideas for change that didn’t involve violence against innocent people… although i must admit, i’m not sure whether or not i posted this, more than for any other reason, just so that i could have the name “Bin Laden” in my blog… is that shallow of me?

Canada Adds U.S. to List Of Nations That Torture – finally! it’s too bad it was a mistake…

Huckabee vows to defy birthright citizenship – what part of “huckabee should not be in the competition to lead this country” do you not understand? why are more people not up in arms about this?

Montana Governor Foments Real ID Rebellion – let’s hope it’s not too little, too late… why are more people not up in arms about this?

Continue reading dude, where’s my country?

jeezis pirates with illegal drugs and super-vision…

Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision – right here in my own back yard…

Guess which drug is illegal? – mark morford is god!

The Pirates Can’t Be Stopped – will that stop them from trying to defeat the pirates? only time will tell, but at this point, it’s not likely.

Banned From Church – more fun with jeezis

Continue reading jeezis pirates with illegal drugs and super-vision…

stress level back up to 75

the letter i wrote to my "friend" CO resulted in the end of our friendship. this isn’t as stressful to me as the fact that other friends of mine actually live in the same city with CO, and have to put up with her much more personally, and on a daily basis. i’m really glad i don’t live in that city any longer, but it’s really sad to think that some of my former friends are so hung up with childish, petty bickering that they miss out on what’s really important.

sigh… oh well… 8P

i have had too many certifiably crazy people in my life – R&B, osiris, almitra, zanthia, JR, the PHBFH, and now CO – they have all had fairly similar attributes, and i am SO tired of dealing with people who are crazy in that way. you know people say i’m crazy, and i’m sure other people say they’re crazy, but until you have dealt with a person who is certifiably crazy, you won’t know what i’m talking about. you say you’re crazy, i say i’m crazy, but then we get on with our lives and everything is good. but with certifiably crazy people, you don’t have to say they’re crazy, because you’re too busy dodging whatever they just threw at you, both figuratively and literally. they can seem like nice, safe, “normal” people (and i use that word advisedly) one minute, and be completely off the wall the next, and you don’t know from one minute to the next what they’re going to do.

it’s like they say: crazy people make even sane people act crazy. i am SO glad i’m 100 miles away from CO, in a completely different city. 8/

stress level is down from 95 to 60

according to the mechanical reckoning given me by amarok, i now have 2 weeks and 4 days worth of music loaded on my computer, which is about 75% of the music that i own. that’s if i listened for 24 hours a day, which i don’t. at the same time, it’s done the job on my depression… that and the fact that i got another incense order yesterday. i got most of the compressed media (mp3s, ogg files, flac files, etc.) loaded earlier, and now i’m ripping the rest of it, currently on Tangerine Dream – Tangents. what’s playing currnently is Fatboy Slim – Fucking In Heaven. i also copied Dead Can Dance – The Serpent’s Egg for ezra, who i’m going to be seeing tomorrow.

moe wasn’t entirely together when she left, and it turns out that she didn’t pack any business cards, so i overnighted her some business cards. remind me not to overnight stuff. it’s expensive!! for a 1oz. personal-sized envelope, it was $16.50 to get it guaranteed to get to miami florida by tomorrow at noon.

random blah

my depression is getting to be more tolerable, but that’s partially because i now have close to 5 days worth of music loaded on my computer. i’m really liking this open-source alternative to iTunes a lot, especially because it apparently has the ability to go out and find the names of the tracks that got lost when i burned them onto windoesn’t-format CDs that abbreviated the names to 8+3. it also apparently has the ability to find track names based on cover art, because i had the album name of an album by The Insect Trust (and there are only two of ’em), but i couldn’t either find, or automate finding the track names. but when i applied cover art to the album, suddenly it knew the track names as well. admittedly, the track names were in the .jpg file that i cut up to get the cover art (the front and back of the album had originally been scanned and then combined into one file), and i figured i would copy them off the other half of the .jpg, but then, suddenly, they were there and i didn’t have to. also it has a script that finds the lyrics to whatever song is playing… although it doesn’t work as well as it could (it can’t find the lyrics for Fliperama by Tom Zé, or Black Cat by Gentle Giant).

also, i got my first incense order of 2008 yesterday, and while it was only $25, it doesn’t take too many orders like that to make a living, and, if i recall correctly, i didn’t get my first incense order of 2007 until february.

i talked to moe last night. she was taken into the pool where the dolphins were, and she got to meet them. she says that if i want, i can go and “meet” the dolphins for a weekend. apparently the husband of one of her co-workers is an employee of the FAA or something like that, and they’re always getting free airline passes to go to various exotic places. and when i’m not “meeting the dolphins”, i’ve got a potential job, of sorts, helping the father of another co-worker get several warehouses full of stuff sold on ebay. of course, it wouldn’t be with moe, because somebody has to stay home and take care of the dogs – there’s no way we’re taking four dogs on a cross country airplane flight – but if things work out the way we’re hoping, moe and the dogs and i will be there together in a year or so.

this corrupt society

In the future, your music could be listening to you

Man wants his $400K back from the FBI – Rule #1: NEVER let cops into your house unless they have a warrant, and if they have a warrant, allow access only under protest! regardless of how much they seem like they’re “on your side”, you can never trust cops to do the right thing when they have the opportunity.

NBC disinvites Kucinich from debate – no matter how they say it, they don’t want kucinich at their party, which is one of the primary reasons why he gets my vote even if he is forced to withdraw from the race.

Faith Based Science

Continue reading this corrupt society

Bush can’t resist starting one more war before leaving office… 8/

Mischievous ‘Filipino Monkey’ could have triggered latest US-Iran row – i realise that it’s just a name, but does the “filipino monkey” really have a radio that will reach all the way to the strait of hormuz? it’s about as likely as “the new jersey monkey”…

Continue reading Bush can’t resist starting one more war before leaving office… 8/

depression

i just got back from dropping moe off at the airport so that she can go to florida for 2 weeks. she took the ipod with her, so i have to load any music i have onto my computer (because hers is the computer that has the itunes library on it, i haven’t gotten around to installing rockbox yet), and currently i don’t have any music loaded. i don’t have any rehearsals for anything, because the BSSB and the banda gozona are on winter hiatus and we haven’t started rehearsals for the fremont philharmonic because stuart isn’t back from bogota yet. and very good friends of mine are acting like second-graders, tattling about each other behind the others’ backs and expecting me to make sense of it.

bleah! 8P

real life drama… 8/

hi CO,

i must admit, i haven’t read your letter thoroughly yet, but on the surface, it appears as though you have a lot to say about KM, and not all of it is positive. you apparently also have a lot to say about what KM said about MO which also is not entirely positive. you say that KM is a gossip, and then you go into great detail (6 pages) about exactly why KM is a gossip. this is the first i have heard about it, apart from the fact that KN told me that he and KM were banned from TMH. KM didn’t want to tell me anything, but it appears as though someone wanted to “gossip” about what has been going on, even after i said “i won’t even pretend to understand”…

you say you feel that i have “judged” you. quite the opposite is actually true. i have not judged anybody: i consider what i know of both your stories to be so outlandish that “i won’t even pretend to understand” and prefer not even to hear about it.

just so you know, of all the people i know, apart from MO, KN and KM were the only people who cared enough about what was going on, to come and see me when i was in the hospital – not even my parents came to see me. they came for 3 days and stayed in the same room you stayed in, at my house in renton. i have known you for a long time, and i have never had particularly good feelings about BE, but as long as he was married to you, i treated him with respect. in the same way, KN is married to KM so she gets my respect by defaut.

at the same time, i have never had any reason to believe that KM is a liar, and i have never heard the negative things that KM has allegedly said about MO… and, just for the record, MO is a “weirdo who hates people and only likes animals”. in that way, MO and i are very similar, although i admit that MO seems to like animals a little more than i do. nevertheless, i have the very strong impression that the things you reported to me were overheard as a part of a conversation with someone else, not part of a conversation that you had with KM directly, and if they were a part of a conversation that you had with KM, there is a very good chance that you grossly misunderstood what she was saying. i say this because i know that KM’s way of speaking is very easy to misunderstand (having done so repeatedly myself) and has a tendency to grate on people who don’t understand what she is trying to get across. nevertheless, i don’t believe that KM has any reason to be anything less than 100% truthful.

i haven’t spoken with JE and GY for a long time, and i know nothing about any conversations you may have had with them, or with TA, or with anybody else concerning KN and KM. one of the reasons that i am glad that i finally moved away from bellingham is that i am out of the line of fire when somebody like PHBFH, or AL, or JR decides to go off on me or one or more of my friends, and part of the reason why i said “i won’t even pretend to understand” in my previous letter is because even if you tried to explain it to me (as you apparently have), i still don’t understand why people that were all my friends when i was in bellingham, now seem to be turning against each other, almost as if they have nothing better to do with their lives.

regardless of what you say, as long as KM is married to KN, she will be a very good friend of mine. in the same way, regardless of what you say about KM, you will continue to be a very good friend of mine, and as long as you and KM don’t get along, for whatever reasons, i will fail to understand it.

i haven’t decided whether or not i will bring all of this up with KM, because i don’t feel that it is important to my friendship with her, but if i do, i plan on including your name, and i expect to hear some equally wild story from KM about how insane you are… to which i will also give absolutely no credence, because it will very likely be as wild and ranting as your story apears to be.

this strikes me as being very similar to a situation that i was involved in a few years ago, when PHBFH and i were still in the middle of our court battle over custody of E. PHBFH had introducted to the court signed affidavits from two people who were supposed to be very good friends of mine, who, in reality, had been out of contact with me for almost 10 years – C and WJ – saying all kinds of hurtful and untruthful things about me. i talked with both people some time later, and they were both intensely sorry that they had said those things in PHBFH’s presence, because they were unaware of how sick PHBFH really was, and how their words would be twisted against them.

it strikes me as similar because it seems as though you have all of these stories about other people (JE & GY, TA, L, D, etc.), but i have seen no evidence of this myself, and, in fact, i know from having talked to D, that he still “sneaks out” and visits KN and KM, despite what you say about KM trying to “influence” him against you. admittedly, i am out of the line of fire, and drama that originates in bellingham often times stays in bellingham, but at the same time, i have more important things to do with my life than determining which of my two friends’ outlandish stories about the other friend is true or not.

yes, yoganandaji said “treachery is the greatest sin before God”, but i think you should pay attention to what he says about “friends who stab you in the back”, because even though i said “i won’t even pretend to understand”, you took it upon yourself to “gossip” about KM anyway. i don’t care: guruji loves both of you equally anyway, and so i love both of you equally anyway.

corruption in high places

Bush can’t resist starting one more war before leaving office – iran, of course, says that the video is a fake…

Supreme Court Weighs Photo-ID Requirement for Voters – photo ID that costs money… but it’s not a poll tax, because there isn’t a fee for voting, just a fee to get the ID that means you can vote…

FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills – didn’t i read a report about something like this a few months ago? well, in any event, it’s happened again…

why do we put up with things like this? it wasn’t that long ago that people were marching in the streets, demanding change (yes, i’m referring to the ’60s), and now we just lie down and let them roll over us! i do what i can, but i can’t do it alone by any stretch of the imagination, and the more i read of stuff like this, the more i am tempted to just abandon ship and go somewhere else.

Continue reading corruption in high places

random bits of this and that

Bush Begins Preparations For Nation’s Final Year – let’s start things off with a bit of humour – or is it?

Conservative pastor urges buying Microsoft stock to fight its gay rights efforts – a black man uses race and his position as a pastor to encourage white people to discriminate against gays?

Iraqi Soldier Who Killed U.S. Troops is a Hero in Iraq – what do you expect? the US troops were acting like assholes, and they got what they deserve for a change!

Adobe, Omniture in hot water for snooping on CS3 users – yet another reason not to use adobe products… it’s too bad that adobe went from making one of the best page layout programs in existence to the microsoft-clone that they are currently…

Continue reading random bits of this and that

hybrid elephant update

i paid (heh) my state taxes today… which is to say, i filed my tax return, but i didn’t owe anything. i’m not really sure how that works, because i actually did around $1,200 worth of “taxable” business (i.e. that which isn’t mailing stuff to people who are out of state), but i’m not complaining – if i could complain, it would be because the lady from the department of revenue i talked to on the phone about how to correct the errors in my tax return was wrong, but i don’t know that yet, and i’m hoping that everything is as cool as she assured me it was. i also did about $1,100 worth of mailing stuff to people who are out of state. this year’s inventory came to $1,066.89, and this year’s filled orders came to $2,454.85 which is about twice as much as it was last year, although about $1,200 of that was stuff that didn’t cost me anything to produce, and i didn’t have to buy anything in order to be able to fill their orders. i’ll never figure out why this business of print brokering actually makes money, but as long as it does, i’ll keep doing it.

shortly after i had the irritating, irrational phone conversation with the lady at paypal yesterday, i received the following email from “teresa”, who is one of the uncountable number of paypal agents i have talked to in the past:

I went in and tried to request a debit card to your po box and I
received an error I believe this error was due to the length of your
name. I have escalated this to the debit card processor for review and
you should receive a notification within 24-48 hours. I do apologize for
the inconvenience this may have caused you.

i don’t know if teresa was the person i was talking to yesterday, or before that, and i don’t know whether or not the lady i was talking to yesterday has anything to do with this whole fiasco, but it appears that i am, once again, waiting for 24 to 48 hours for a mysterious email from some unknown body that either will, or will not tell me that i am, or am not eligible for a paypal debit card. just to make sure, i actually purchased $20 worth of swastika jewelry from ManWoman yesterday, so it’s possible that all this uproar is for nothing anyway.

paypal gripe

i am apparently ineligible for a paypal debit card because i have “insufficient transaction history”, despite the fact that i have been a paypal member for 3 years. when i have to purchase something, i have had to transfer money to my bank, because i have a debit/mastercard from the bank that allows me to make purchases as though they were credit card purchases, but the vendors that i make purchases from don’t accept paypal as a payment method. when i don’t have enough money in my bank account, i have to transfer money from my paypal account to make purchases, which takes two or three days. so i have made transfers from my paypal account, but apparently that isn’t “sufficient transaction history” for them. according to paypal, i have to make at least $20 (in two purchases of $10 each) from my paypal account before they can issue me a paypal debit card. unfortunately, because of the fact that the vendors that i purchase from don’t accept paypal as a payment option, i am apparently ineligible for a paypal debit card. the lady i just got done talking to said that all i have to do is make two $10 purchases from my paypal account to be eligible. this is after i have waited two months for a paypal debit card that i have applied for twice, and gotten zero response from paypal during that time that even came close to explaining why i was not eligible. if i were to go to a bank (like i did recently when i changed banks) they would not hesitate to give me a debit card regardless of what kind of transaction history i had, but with paypal, apparently you have to make purchases through paypal before you can be eligible for a paypal debit card, regardless of how long you have been a paypal member, and regardless of what your transaction history is. is that stupid or what?

one of those things…

no one i would vote for even has a hope of being elected president… why isn’t there another option, other than to put up with the rest of the voting publics’ inane wishes?

94% Mike Gravel
90% Dennis Kucinich
81% Bill Richardson
74% John Edwards
74% Barack Obama
74% Chris Dodd
70% Joe Biden
69% Hillary Clinton
39% Ron Paul
30% Rudy Giuliani
26% John McCain
24% Mike Huckabee
20% Mitt Romney
17% Tom Tancredo
15% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

hybrid elephant stuff

i have to file state taxes for hybrid elephant before the 30th. if last year is any indication, i owe about $50 in state taxes. i also want to buy a canopy so that i can sell incense even if it’s raining, and i want to buy a membership in the fremont sunday market.

after waiting 2 months for a paypal debit card, i think i may have gotten through to them that i do, indeed, want a paypal debit card. i applied, waited a month, and nothing happened, so i called them and discovered that no application had ever been made, so i applied again, this time with an operator on the phone, who confirmed that i had, indeed applied. i waited another month, and nothing happened again. so, i called again today and complained mightily. she said that i would get email confirmation within 48 hours, and you can bet that if i haven’t gotten email confirmation in 48 hours and 1 minute, that i’m going to call back and complain again. if i do get email confirmation, she said that i would actually receive my paypal debit card within 7 business days, but i’m going to wait for the email confirmation before i start holding my breath. they did okay when their system had been compromised a few months ago (even though i had to wait a month before i got my money back), but this is getting ridiculous.

wake up! pat robertston contradicts the bible!

Pat Robertson predicts violence, recession for 2008 – i thought the bible specifically said something along the lines of “you should never pay attention to people who predict things that don’t come true”… if i recall correctly, acknowledging that he has made predictions that didn’t come true himself is one of your biggest clues that pat robertson doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Continue reading wake up! pat robertston contradicts the bible!