Category Archives: the very big stupid

depression, frustration, i am a terrorist, pictures, the very big stupid, weather, wind-pocalypse

wind-pocalypse?

between tuesday night, 241119, and wednesday morning, 241120, we experienced a “bomb cyclone” (whatever that means: basically a huge wind storm, with lots of rain) that took out electricity in ALL of western washington, from the sea-tac area up to vancouver, bc, and left many roads impassable. we got electricity back on sunday, 241124, which is also when 276th/issaquah-hobart road (two of the three ways to get here) opened up again, following MANY trees fallen over the road and utility lines.

ALLEDGEDLY we’re going to have internet restored thursday, 241128 (i’m writing this on my tablet, which is using my cell-phone WIFI hot spot to connect to internet), but i’m not holding my breath, because it’s a “holiday” (for what, i never have gotten it entirely straight), and, besides, i went out today, and saw MANY downed lines, trees over lines, and general mayhem and confusion… although i didn’t see ANY traffic lights out, today, which is quite a bit different than it was a couple days ago.

#drumpf and his cronies don’t believe climate change exists, and they want to fire all of the people in government who maintain otherwise. if our infrastructure is so fragile that all it takes is one bigger-than-normal wind storm to knock everything out for more than a week, what we’re experiencing now is, very likely, as good as it’s POSSIBLY going to get for the forseeable future.

241121 covington
241121 covington
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technology, the very big stupid

🙄 😒

that didn’t last long… 😒

here i started my reddit profile, and here i deleted my reddit profile.

there are just WAY TOO MANY people who don’t know what they’re talking about, who give expert advice like they DO know what they’re talking about, and who DOWN-VOTE anybody who DOES know what they’re talking about, who tries to clear up the rampant and uncontrolled misinformation.

i’m not JUST talking about me, in this case. 😒

stupid people, the very big stupid

warum?

why are they called “scholars” and given titles like “doctor”, when what they study is entirely based on easily disprovable lies? why is the study of easily disprovable lies even a thing, much less a thing in which one can get advanced degrees??

why do they CONTINUE TO BE honoured, and (apparently) well paid, to disseminate these easily disprovable lies to gullible and vulnerable people, who (apparently) don’t know any better?

why do we, as a society, encourage this, rather than actively working to eliminate it? 😒

farcebook, the very big stupid, twit-turd

i’m so tired of so-called “social media”… 😒

so, having given up on farcebook and twit™-turd™ (otherwise known as 𝕏itter — pronounced “shitter”), i decided to try reddit.

after creating an account, i went searching for “sub-reddits” in which i might be interested, and almost immediately i came across r/Incense. however, after only a couple weeks on the sub-reddit, i was permanently banned for “spam”, because i mentioned that i had some particular kind of incense for sale, in response to ONE person. i didn’t include any links or even an indication of what my business name was, i didn’t address large numbers of people, or post indiscriminately, but the moderator wasn’t interested in discussing it because “we both know what spam is”. 😒

another frustrating sub-reddit that i discovered was r/trees, which, oddly enough, is the sub-reddit for marijuana enthusiasts (if you want the sub-reddit for actual “Trees”, try r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts). the majority of the posts in the r/trees sub-reddit can be largely summarized as: 1) “i have taken too much cannabis and think i’m going to die, what do i do?” or “how much is ‘too much’?”; 2) “how do i cheat/pass a drug test” or “i’ve failed a drug test”; or 3) “i’ve decided to quit/cut down smoking weed because of reasons”. i’ve developed a tendency to ignore the posts in the first category, because they’re just too frustrating. in response to comments in the third category, my default response has come to be r/leaves, which is the sub-reddit for people who want to quit smoking weed. however, my default response to posts in the second cateogry — do not work for companies that require a drug test as a condition of employment. 😒👎 — generates A LOT more ‘👎 dislike’ responses than anything else. people seem to believe that it’s okay to ‘cheat’ on a drug test in order to get an ‘ideal’ job, but when i suggest that not submitting to something that is not only wrong, but is, in some cases, illegal, just to get a job that appears to be ideal in the moment, is simply allowing the companies to continue to abuse their “workers” with impunity, and is, very likely, just giving them the opening to inflict further abuse on their “workers” at some indeterminate time in the future, I AM the one who is “crazy”, and people go to great lengths to enumerate the reasons WHY my approach is the wrong one.

fundamentally, we don’t NEED “jobs” — i can authoritatively state this because i have lived significant portions of my life without having had what most ‘normal’ people would think of as a “job” — however, companies NEED people to work for them. if WE decide not to work for companies that require drug testing as a condition of employment, those companies would either IMMEDIATELY STOP requiring a drug test, or THEY WOULD GO OUT OF BUSINESS!!

plain and simple.

similarly, r/PsilocybinMushrooms is full of posts from people who have taken too much and don’t know what to do, or have never done psilocybin, want to start with a heroic dose and want to know EXACTLY what to expect (while refusing to take the advice of people who have a lot of experience and recommend against it), and A LOT of actual misinformation about microdosing and mushrooms that don’t contain psilocybin, like Amanita muscaria, and it is JUST SO FRUSTRATING to attempt to communicate with people who refuse to listen. 😠

i haven’t totally given up on reddit, yet, but my impression is that i will, eventually. and, given my recent interactions with discord, i’m beginning to wonder if what is recognised as “social media” is designed not to be particularly “social” for those of us whose brains don’t fit into the “social” mold. 😒

frustration, medication, mushrooms, stress, the very big stupid

one step forwards, fourteen steps back… 🙄

the workers haven’t showed up yet, but HoneyBucket® showed up, took away their porta-potty, and didn’t leave a new one — i suspect because they originally contracted a porta-potty for the “one day” that they said it would take, and never bothered to change the porta-potty contract when it turned out that it was going to take more than one day…

however, moe’s at work, won’t be home until 21:00, they SAID that the “scheduler” would call her on friday, but she didn’t, so even when the workers DO show up, they won’t know what to do, i don’t know what they should do, and moe is in surgery all day, which means that she may not be able to answer her phone.

they originally said that they “do this kind of job all the time”… i wonder if they screw up this badly on the jobs that they do “all the time”, and, if so, how they have managed to stay in business. 😠

.25 g 🍄 @ 08:00, but i don’t think it’s going to help. 😒

articles, i am a terrorist, the very big stupid

Ukraine says Israel-Hamas war shows West must ramp up arms production

Ukraine says Israel-Hamas war shows West must ramp up arms production — but, here’s the million dollar question… WHY? WHY SHOULD THE WEST SUPPLY WEAPONS TO PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT TO PURSUE A PEACEFUL RESOLUTION TO THEIR PROBLEMS, BUT WANT NOTHING MORE THAN TO MAKE WAR? if these people want to make war so much, let them make their own weapons! so, this doesn’t do much to help ukraine (why they’re raising the issue is another question entirely), but i’d be willing to bet that a significant portion of the weapons currently being used by israel against hamas gaza PALESTINE are being supplied to them by the united states… what if we just said ‘no, we will not provide weapons for war to anyone’?

Continue reading Ukraine says Israel-Hamas war shows West must ramp up arms production →

miscellaneous, the very big stupid

add turtle

thoughts about the current crop of chaos that is currently engulfing the world:

it all comes down to belief, generally, and belief in absurd and demonstrably false things in particular. jews hate arabs because they are muslim, and believe “the wrong things” about “god” and his “chosen prophet” who, supposedly, lived around fifteen hundred years ago. arabs hate jews because jews stole the arabs’ traditional homeland, due to jews’ belief in demonstrably false things about “god”, which happened two to three thousand years ago.

“christians” in the US, and elsewhere, are inclined to back jews, because judaism is the foundation of “christian” belief… except that what a certain portion of the jews in israel currently are doing things that are completely the opposite of what jewish — and “christian” — leaders have said, for centuries. there are also a significant portion of people in the US, and elsewhere, who support arabs, because of the evil stuff jews have been doing to them for the past 50 to 100 year, or longer. it doesn’t matter that both jewish and muslim leaders, once again, FOR CENTURIES have warned people AGAINST the exact behaviour that we are currently seeing from both sides, the hatred for things that are totally made up, on both sides, continues unabated.

if humanity could, somehow, magically eliminate all of this false belief, we MIGHT be able to recognise that we are ALL human beings; that nobody is “superior” to anybody else, and that we would ALL get along a lot more easily if we were to actually HELP one another, instead of killing one another.

but, of course, we won’t, and people will continue killing each other until there isn’t anybody left to kill, and humanity will have snuffed itself out and have no further recourse.

pictures, political, the very big stupid

SNARGGHL!!

there are a bunch of campaign signs that have sprouted up through the area, recently, including this one:

231002 "FEWER" NOT "LESS"!!! 🤬
231002 “FEWER” NOT “LESS”!!! 🤬

knowing NOTHING ELSE about these candidates, i would not be inclined to vote for them PRIMARILY because of their ungrammatical use of the word “LESS”… 😒

but BECAUSE OF THE FACT that they (or, more likely, some over-zealous zombie sign maniac) chose to post their sign RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET from a MIDDLE SCHOOL:

231002 Summit Trails Middle School
231002 Summit Trails Middle School

i really start to wonder… obviously they DON’T care about children, despite what their other signs might proclaim, because instead of leading them in education, they are lambasting them with ungrammatical twaddle… and they really MUST NOT have thought about it very much, because the people who are the most likely to see this humongous sign are middle school students who aren’t old enough to vote… 🤣

i want to “correct” it… 😈

231002 SEE ME AFTER CLASS!
231002 SEE ME AFTER CLASS!
articles, the cloud drive crack of 2021, the very big stupid, WD sucks

boycott western digital! 😠

Western Digital confirms digital burglary, calls in law enforcement

western digital is, ultimately, responsible for the great cloud drive crack of 2021, and they still haven’t made good. the only thing they’ve done is offer me a 40% off coupon for a new cloud drive. 😠 as if 40% off is going to console me after 40 years of my personal data, artwork, music, and everything else, was summarily deleted by some low-life miscreant who doesn’t even know me. as if 40% off would even REMOTELY convince me to change my mind, and purchase another storage drive from them, EVER… 😠

i say, the more WD experiences shit like this, the better i like it, and if the person or persons who did this, ever need a place to hide out, my house is always open.

Continue reading boycott western digital! 😠 →

corruption, crazy people, depression, frustration, i am a terrorist, i am antifa, people suck, political, the very big stupid

scary…

today is the midterm election.

republicunts are projected to win majorities in both the house and senate, which means that

  1. they plan on impeaching president biden, more out of spite than anything else (because there’s nothing to charge him with, but that won’t make a difference, because democretins impeached #drumpf TWICE 😒), and…
  2. they are actively planning on (and bragging about it)
    1. eliminating social security and medicare
    2. any and all investigations into the crimes of #drumpf, the stolen government documents at mar-a-lago, and the january 6th insurrection will cease immediately
    3. a national ban on abortion
    4. a national ban on birth control
    5. a repeal of gay marriage
    6. further oppression of trans people
    7. making cannabis and other marginally legal drugs illegal again
    8. further wanton environmental destruction, promoting oil, coal, and elimination of endangered species protections
    9. gerrymandering and further voter suppression to make future election wins by democretins a lot more difficult
    10. other horrendously awful, inhumane, and massively unpopular stuff, primarily because they can.

and, if they win, there’s a much greater chance that #drumpf will run for president, again, and if he does, he will likely win, because of the republicunts’ love affair with voter suppression, and that will basically be the end of a democratic united states. 🤬

and if they don’t win at all (preferably), or if they don’t win enough to make a difference, the republican’ts have openly vowed to wreck the global economy, by refusing to raise the debt limit.

i am staying OFF twit-turd… maybe forever, but at least for a couple of days, or until the election FUBAR has died down a little.

politics, the very big stupid

so…

yesterday, the FBI served a search warrant at Mar-A-Lago, home of the former #SCROTUS, #drumpf. #drumpf wasn’t home, he was in new york, testifying in another legal proceding against him…

but he’s publically losing his shit, which is amusing to watch. 😉

however, forgive me for being skeptical, but, with all of the other fiascos going on — abortion, gun control, healthcare, climate change, nazis/fascists in the government (and elsewhere), and so on — while this is excellent news on the surface, i doubt that it’s going to amount to much.

we can always hope, but i’m not going to hold my breath. 😒

rants, the battle of the tablet, the very big stupid

and to think… 😒

2 Comments

at one time i was a major apple fanboy… 😒

admittedly, it was back when the operating system was free, and all you had to do was go into your local computer store with four floppy disks, and you would walk out with a functioning operating system… in the early ’90s…

these days, apple has turned into a proprietary nightmare, which penalises people who buy and sell apple products without going through “proper” channels.

example:

my tablet has been needing service more and more frequently. it got a slight bend in the frame, and, apparently, the way they are made is flimsy enough that the strongest element is the screen… which breaks at the slightest breeze in the wrong direction.

my tablet first started exhibiting the symptom of “not charging” a few years ago. the first time it happened was when it was still under applecare warranty, but i took it to a third party repair shop (one hour device repair) once the applecare had expired. one hour device repair has a lifetime warranty on repairs, so subsequent times it started exhibiting this symptom, i took it back and got it fixed for free… and, usually, got a new screen in the process, because they had broken it in the process of fixing the charge port.

then, a couple months ago, someone (it may have been thaddeus, but i’m not sure) sat on the tablet (or something) which put enough of a bend in the frame that the screen no longer met the edge of the frame… at which point i started needing to get it repaired (for free) more frequently, but, on the up side, they could get the screen off without breaking it.

the last time this happened was last week. i took it in, and they diagnosed a new problem with one of the power management chips. they said that, under normal circumstances, their experience has been that once this power management chip starts to go, there isn’t anything that can be done to fix it.

🙄

so, knowing that apple sells “refurbished” equipment for EXORBITANT prices, the first place i looked was on craigslist, where i found an ALMOST IDENTICAL tablet (the old one is a 3rd gen., and the new one is a 4th gen.) for $690… which is A LOT less than i could get it refurbished (starts around $1,200 and goes up from there). i contacted the guy, and arranged to pick it up (which is what i was doing at dick’s drive in the other day). he said that the applecare subscription expired tomorrow (which is now yesterday), but he was going to extend it a month, so i could get a chance to switch it over to my name.

so, i called applecare, and (after getting cut off mid-call), i finally learned that i couldn’t switch the applecare to my name, because it had to be done by the original owner. so i contacted the guy, and arranged to meet him in issaquah. when he called applecare, they asked him his name, and the serial number of the device…

and then, they told him that it is NOT POSSIBLE to switch the applecare to anybody else. i can’t even wait for the applecare in his name to expire, and then subscribe with my name, because i am not the original purchaser.

if i had bought a “refurbished” tablet (from apple), it would have come with “refurbished applecare”, but, because i bought it directly from the seller, they didn’t have a chance to “refurbish” it, and they aren’t willing to issue a new applecare subscription.

AT ALL!

EVER!!!

🤬

apple has just lost ANY loyalty i may have still had for their products. this is totally stupid! 🤬

COVID19, health, malfunctioning people, stupid people, the very big stupid, twit-turd

stupid motherfucking anti-vax republicunts!! 🤬

i SHOULD BE at the oregon country fair, at this very moment… but i am not.

less than 12 hours BEFORE i was supposed to leave, i tested positive for COVID-19. moe tested positive, as well. 😒

i mentioned it on twit-turd™, and some random person responded “your (sic) fully vaccinated? why blame the anti-vaxxers?”

to which i responded “”your” fully vaccinated?” PLONK! 😒”

(if you don’t know, “PLONK!” is the sound that spam messages make when they are shit-canned)

however, here is my reason for blaming the antis/republicunts:

if you recall, way back, two years ago, when this whole pandemic was first starting up, the CDC came out with a statement along the lines of “if we can get EVERYONE to wear a mask for a month, we can defeat this.” this was BEFORE they even had a vaccine…

but there were a whole bunch of anti-mask republicunts who believed #drumpf when he said that it would miraculously disappear, and totally ignored the CDCs recommendations.

and tens of thousands DIED because of it.

then they announced a vaccine, and there were a whole bunch of anti-mask republicunts who said that the vaccine contained aborted fetuses, or some such garbage, and refused to get vaccinated.

literally MILLIONS died, but the antis stood their ground, as millions of THEIR OWN KIND were dying around them…

and, more recently, there has been the “federal” (#drumpf-appointed) judge who decided that the mask mandates for airlines and public transportation were “unconstitutional”, and the rush to re-open businesses, and the rush to “get back to normal” that has totally ignored the CDC recommendations (AND, i might add, COMMON SENSE) which means that millions MORE died…

if we had listened to THE EXPERTS about this, we would have been done with it, or, at the very minimum, be well on our way to recovery by now, but…

now, don’t get me wrong: if a person CLAIMS TO BE an “expert” on something, i ALWAYS take what they say with “a grain of salt”, particularly when they claim to be an “expert” in MY health. but i also know enough history to know that, in 1918, when we had a pandemic of the “spanish flu” (which turned out to be an american phenomenon that was first isolated by spanish doctors), BEFORE the advent of reliable vaccines, the “anti-mask” crowd was the PRIMARY reason (along with world war one) that it lasted for 3 years.

yesterday, i felt “under the weather”, and slept most of the day. towards the end of the day, i transitioned from feeling “under the weather” to feeling truly awful, but (fortunately) moe was there with over-the-counter medicines and common sense, and i actually slept through the night (which is something that i rarely do, under the best of circumstances, these days), and i feel weak, but more-or-less normal today… but i was SUPPOSED TO BE at OCF LAST NIGHT — my panto comrades are going to miss me, there are at least two pieces of music they CAN’T PLAY because there are prevelant tuba parts, and, because of the fact that i tested positive on tuesday night, i can’t even go out in public (even with a mask) until sunday or monday.

and i have ZERO compunction about naming the stupid motherfucking anti-vax republicunts as THE primary cause of this. 🤬

and, despite the fact that boris johnson (the UKs answer to #drumpf) stepped down as the prime minister of the UK, yesterday, i am still not holding my breath that anything is going to change for the better, any time soon.

fortunately, i haven’t seemed to have lost my sense of taste and smell: i’m currently burning incense, which i can smell, and moe made chicken soup, which tastes AWESOME, but both moe and i have commented on the “brain fog”, which will, hopefully, go away over time.

articles, geek links, geek stuff, technology, the very big stupid

micro$not, mshtml, and activex

back in the dark ages, when i was working at STLabs, before we moved to factoria (i.e. STLabs… so, what? maybe 1995? 1996? somewhere in there), i was testing Internet Explorer version 3.0, which meant, basically, that i was testing micro$not’s browser engine, which is called MSHTML.dll. at the time, a very good friend of mine from college, saint fred (now, sadly, passed on) was mucking about with the innards of micro$not’s operating system, and discovered a problem which had existed for several years prior to this, which micro$not had “made disappear” by changing the technology’s name from OLE — which was, itself, a “renamed” technology, originally called Visual Basic for Applications, or “VB-A” — to “ActiveX”, and, in the process of making it “disappear”, actually made it more prevalent and insidious, by making it work seamlessly with even more micro$not technology.

and, saint fred being who he was, took advantage of this by writing the “Exploder Control”, which could be embedded in a web page, or a microsoft document, and would, when “activated”, perform a clean shutdown of the computer on which it was being viewed… whether you wanted to shut down your computer, or not.

you hit this web page, and, within seconds, your computer shuts down, with no further input from you. 😏

or…

you open this microsoft word document, and, within seconds, your computer shuts down, with no further input from you. 🤣

i watched it happen as it first came out, before anybody realised what it was. it was hillarious! i gave the URI for the exploder control to my boss, and then went back to my workstation and listened, as she suddenly whined “it shut down my computer!” 🤣🤣🤣

and, of course, micro$not’s response to this was to threaten saint fred with lawsuits for doing stuff he shouldn’t have been doing, and when that didn’t work (because fred made sure that the exploder did everything strictly “by the book”, including getting micro$not’s signature on the control), they made the exploder control something that was detected by their anti-virus software (even though it was very clearly NOT a virus, and, actually, did everything totally “by the book”, something to which micro$not never admitted), and, once they figured out that they had caused all of this, they pulled their signature on the control, so that it raised even more red flags before actually activating it…

and, basically, did everything EXCEPT fix the problem, which, after a few months of frantic ass-covering by micro$not’s marketing department, while the tech industry had a good laugh, got swept under the rug, anyway, by more current micro$not fiascos.

but the technology remained, and every version of windows has support for activex, every version of MSHTML.dll has support for activex (which is one of the reasons micro$not got rid of MSHTML.dll a couple years ago, and current versions of Internet Exploder… um… what’s their browser called again? EDGE, that’s it… uses google’s “chrome” browser engine, instead. the browser wars are over! micro$not LOST!) and you can, literally, do ANYTHING with activex, that you could do from the normal user interface of windows, and there is, literally, NOTHING stopping you from doing this — or other, more nefarious things — given A LITTLE knowledge of the technology.

which is why, when i saw this headline: Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft the FIRST THING i thought was “Exploder Control strikes again!”

this is one of the VERY BIG reasons i do not use micro$not on my computers. i don’t even have my microsoft 5-button mouse any longer!

i wonder if they’ll ever learn. 🙄

Continue reading micro$not, mshtml, and activex →

the very big stupid, twit-turd

twit-turd

so, i made this tweet yesterday:

210621 killing people is "dispensing freedom"? - what the fuck is wrong with you?
210621 killing people is “dispensing freedom”? – what the fuck is wrong with you?

this afternoon, approximately 24 hours later, this is the kind of reaction it’s having:

210622 more than 300 likes... 🤯
210622 more than 300 likes… 🤯

if there were only some way to get #NationalStrike #GeneralStrike #TaxStrike #LaborStrike #BankStrike #RentStrike #DebtStrike #MortgageStrike #MinimumWageStrike #CreditCardStrike #PeoplesStrike #PeoplePower #EatTheRich #RaiseTheWage #GuillotinesNeeded #WeAreClosed the same kind of response… 🤯

COVID19, drumpf, political, the very big stupid

and, as we all suspected…

#drumpf is refusing to concede, has directed the attorney general william barr to “investigate substantial evidence of voter fraud” (despite the fact that their IS NO evidence of voter fraud), and is refusing to turn things over to a transition team. mitch mconnell and mike pompeo have both stated that they support a second #drumpf term. he’s fired a whole bunch of people within the last 48 hours, including directors at the pentagon and the FBI, and replaced them with “loyalists”. 😒

this despite the fact that biden won the popular vote with 50.8%, compared to #drumpf’s 47.5%, and is projected to win the electoral vote with 306, which is the largest difference since the 1930s.

biden says he’s “dissapointed”, but doesn’t think legal action will be necessary. 😒

if this isn’t a blatant attempt at a coup, i don’t know what is. if this happened in any other country, the US would send in the marines to ensure a democratic government emerged. 🤬

we’re going to have to drag him out of the white house by his heels, kicking and screaming like a child having a temper tantrum. 😒

p.s. (he’s NOT the president of the united states, and never has been.) 😒

and then, there’s also this:

politics, the very big stupid

#drumpf lost, but…

it’s official now: #drumpf is our lame-duck president. the first time a president hasn’t won re-election since 1992.

big surprise. 😒

but democrats didn’t take the senate, and democrats actually lost seats in the house… which means that the changes that #drumpf made in the supreme court (a “lifetime-appointed” body) are going to be a lot more difficult to chalenge, and expanding the supreme court is, also, pretty much out of the question… and #drumpf got to choose three supreme court justices, who are, now, going to determine whether or not his claims of election fraud are actionable… a qanon believer is on their way to the senate… “nothing, fundamentally, is going to change” says our “new” leader.

meet the new boss. same as the old boss.

politics, the very big stupid

#drumpf lost

it hasn’t been officially announced yet, but biden won. however, as biden, himself, has said, “nothing, fundamentally, will change”… so, now, it’s “fascism light”, rather than “fascism extra-bold”, but, essentially, the same font. 😒

we’ve got a couple months of a lame duck session, wherein #drumpf has every occasion, opportunity and encouragement to screw things up even more badly than he already has, and then, naturally, when he finally steps down, the first thing to happen is that biden will pardon and absolve him of any crimes that he may have committed.

but at least he didn’t actually win… again… woo. 😒

tesla tequila
tesla tequila
in other news, tesla (the overpriced electric car, not the scientist) has come out with a branded tequila, which, in unbranded bottles, runs around $45 a bottle… but in their fancy, tesla lighting bolt bottle, it costs $250 a bottle, but you can’t get it, because it already sold out the entire run, within hours of its being announced.

if you ask me, it looks more like a bottle of cologne than a bottle of tequila. 😒

frustration, political, the very big stupid

can i start murdering people yet?

200915 USPS misleading postcard
200915 USPS misleading postcard

the postmaster general, louis dejoy, the republican mega-donor to #drumpf, who has no actual experience with the post office, but who was, nevertheless, appointed to be postmaster general by #drumpf; who, in september, 2020 (yes, that means last week), was blocked, by a court ruling, from sending out false or misleading information about the election, and when secretaries of state requested that he show them examples of the mailing he was planning to send out, he refused to do so…

… has sent out false or misleading information about the election! SHOCKER!!! 😲

how many things can i count on this postcard that are false or misleading? 😠

1) it was sent to me, a voter in washington state, where we have had ALL MAIL-IN VOTING FOR AT LEAST TEN YEARS! and, yes, i am aware that it was actually sent to “Postal Customer”, and not directly to me, but the fact remains that i, and hundreds of thousands of my closest neighbours, LIVE IN WASHINGTON, WHERE WE HAVE MAIL-IN VOTING!! 🤬

in my opinion, the biggest “false or misleading” thing about this poscard is that it was sent to anyone in washington state! 😠

2) “start today…” go to this URI… but when you follow the link, all you find is MORE false and misleading information… especially if you live in a state (there are 10 of them) which has all mail-in voting…

3) “request your mail-in (often called “absentee ballot”)”… except that, in states where they have all mail-in voting (once again, there are 10 of them), they’re NOT called “absentee ballots”, which are, in fact, an entirely different sort of ballot, for a different purpose, altogether.

4) “Add postage…” my ballot is postage paid. does that mean i have to add MORE postage? the aforementioned web site doesn’t have anything to say about that.

5) “at least 7 days before election day.” does that mean that, even if i drop it in a ballot drop box 5 days before election day, that my ballot won’t be counted? as before, the aforementioned web site doesn’t have anything to say about that… 😒

and, as far as murdering people goes, if i can’t murder someone important, like #drumpf, pence, or dejoy (which, i admit, is pretty unlikely), or someone more local, like katie daviscourt (seriously, look her up… she’s a certified nut case with a dangerously wild imagination and a BIG audience), i’m perfectly happy to murder myself, so you other people don’t have anything to worry about. 😒

ETA 200921: HERE is a link from the secretary of state for washington, that has a lot more reliable information about the election than anything you can get from the federal government these days… 😒

the very big stupid, videos

fascism has taken hold

we are no longer a democracy, or even a constitutional republic. we are, now, a fascist dictatorship, under the rule of donald john trump.

if donald john trump decides that the election is unfair, he will make such a decision once the election is complete. if he doesn’t win, that will mean that the election is unfair.

we no longer have a president.

we have a dictator.

this has been announced, today, by his mouthpiece, kayleigh mcenany:

also, today, nancy pelosi told postmaster general louis dejoy to put back the post office infrastructure that he, recently, ripped out, in an attempt to thwart people being able to vote by mail, something donald john trump has clearly admitted to wanting done.

his response was to say that he has no intention of doing that.

if he doesn’t win, the election is “rigged”, but even if there’s a democratic landslide, he’s making sure that he’s going to win anyway he can, even if it includes cheating.

if that’s not fascism, i don’t know what is.

former president barack obama says that we can still save the country by voting.

fascists don’t let you “vote” them out of power. that’s not the way fascism works. 😠

spam, the mallet, the very big stupid

Rule #3

Rule #3 states “Spammers are stooOOpid.”

if you need an example of rule #3, i have one for you:

the spammer sent mail from a computer called… get this…

UCEBOX.CO.ZA

😝😂🤣🤪🤦😠🤬

for those of you who still don’t “get” it, not only is the computer in south africa, home to all things shady and illegal, but “UCE” stands for “Unsolicited Commercial Email”… in other words, “spam”.

it’s as though they’re saying, “fuck yeah, we’re so gawd-damned proud of the illegal spam we send, that we’re going to name our computer after it, and nobody will care, even if they do notice!”

people should have to take an intelligence test before being allowed into the human race.

seriously.

pictures, politics, the very big stupid

in response to the murder of George Floyd by police

200531 Serve and Protect sculpture, Salt Lake City
200531 Serve and Protect sculpture, Salt Lake City

increasingly violent protests have been escalating globally. if we had all listened to colin kaepernick, way back when, we might have avoided this.

meanwhile, drumpf has issued an executive order making antifa a “terrorist organisation” — meaningless, as antifa isn’t an “organisation”, but convenient, because now drumpf can claim anybody is antifa, and have them arrested — and inciting violence on twitter with rhetoric recycled from the republican side of the ’60s-era race riots.

and “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” means the same thing 50 years ago as it does now.

COVID19 has facilitated increasing fascism. it’s just a matter of time before drumpf declares martial law, and/or someone assassinates him.

something that would be supremely ironic, in drumpf’s case: “assassinate” is a word that begins with not one, but two “ass”es…

crazy people, drumpf, people suck, the very big stupid

🤬

#drumpf is still “winning”… demolishing sacred native burial grounds and tossing 70 million people off of SSI and SSDI so that he can build his ill-fated wall; dr. stabby, cruella devos, and a whole range of people who have never done anything in government being appointed to important positions of power in the government; endless war in the middle east; not taking a presidential salary, but taking more golf excursions than the past 4 presidents COMBINED, despite a campaign promise that he wasn’t going to play golf; muslim ban; climate-change; etc., etc., etc., etc., ETC…. 😒

but all we hear about, TODAY, is the fact that flerfer “Mad” Mike Hughes died in yet another attempt to take his home-made, steam-powered rocket up to 5000 feet so that he could photograph the “lack of curvature”…

as though the news that some crazy person dying while trying to prove the impossible is, somehow, more important news than the distaster immediately destroying the planet… 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

political, the very big stupid

I have seen the future: Donald Trump is going to get worse

in 2003, i almost died.

i would have died, if it hadn’t been for my wife, and a team of doctors… and the fact that i have been a musician most of my life…

after my injury, when i regained “normal” consciousness, one of the first things they told me was that i had a brain injury, and that i would have to spend the rest of my life “getting used to it”.

since then — 17 years ago — i have been forced to watch, more or less helplessly, as a whole bunch of my friends have died, pretty much everything that i cared about, and fought for, politically and socially, throughout my entire life, has been totally ruined, or is in the process of being totally ruined, with no visible hope of recovery, and the world in general, environmentally, sociologically, and politically, is going down the tubes, rapidly. the very strong probability, at this point, is that we are experiencing the “end of the world as we know it”, but most of us are too stupid to realise it.

this is very definitely NOT what i signed up for, even before my injury — to be honest, i never signed up for it in the first place — and i’m really pissed off that i didn’t die when i had the chance. 🤬

I have seen the future: Donald Trump is going to get worse
February 8, 2020
By Lucian K. Truscott IV

The only thing Donald Trump didn’t do in his victory-lap appearance in the East Room on Thursday was announce the pending arrest of Adam Schiff or Nancy Pelosi. He did everything else. He told his roomful of hacks and sycophants that the impeachment trial “was all bullshit.” They cheered. He called the Democrats and lone Republican who favored his impeachment and removal from office “the crookedest, most dishonest, dirtiest people I’ve ever known,” “lowlifes,” “stone-cold crazy,” “evil,” “sick,” “corrupt,” “scum,” “bad,” “horrible,” “vicious” and “leakers.” Stammering, wheezing, snorting and sniffling, he said those who impeached him were “mean.” His fans applauded. They screamed. They laughed: Fox host Laura Ingraham; Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, whom Trump called “so great, so tough, and so smart”; Rep. Devin Nunes of California, “this congressman who kept going into basements, into files, he’ll find any document”; and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a “top, top wrestler.” Every single one of them laughed and shouted their encouragement as the man who has told more than 15,000 lies since taking office called his Democratic enemies “liars.”

It was Donald Trump unbound. Having stomped on every single “norm” that has been adhered to in Washington for more than 200 years, Trump taped up his bone spurs and stomped some more. Remember Richard Nixon’s “enemies list”? Amateur hour. Trump has an enemies binder, a whole fucking enemies database. He’s got people over at the IRS lining up audits. He’s got deputy attorney generals drawing up subpoenas and crafting indictments. He waited less than 24 hours before he had the Treasury Department release “evidence of questionable origin” about Hunter Biden to Republican senators seeking to open the investigation of the Bidens that was spurned by the Ukrainian government.

Senate Finance Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham and Senate Homeland Security chairman Ron Johnson have all issued letters requesting records from the State Department, Justice Department, FBI, Treasury Department, National Archives and Secret Service, seeking documents regarding Hunter Biden, his associates and their businesses. Having stonewalled every request for documents and testimony from House committees investigating the Russia and Ukraine scandals, Trump is opening the floodgates on Hunter Biden. Who’s next is anybody’s guess.

“Republicans are turning the Senate into an arm of the president’s political campaign, pursuing an investigation designed to further President Trump’s favorite conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and smear Vice President Biden,” Ashley Schapitl told Yahoo News. Schapitl is a spokesperson for Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Finance Committee.

It’s going to get worse. Trump made a point of mentioning former FBI Director James Comey and the “dirty cops” and “FBI lovers” who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. They are targets of the Department of Justice criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation being carried out by special counsel John Durham. Trump singled out Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother, who serve on the National Security Council. Both were fired from their positions on Friday afternoon. It’s only a matter of time before he targets the House impeachment managers, if only to harass them and make them waste campaign money on defense lawyers.

But it’s the people Trump didn’t specifically mention on Thursday who should be worried. We didn’t know he was trying to extort the Ukrainians into investigating the Bidens until it was exposed by the whistleblower last October. Trump’s secret campaign against the Bidens had been going on for six months by that time, and even longer if you include the machinations by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that had begun as far back as the fall of 2018. Who else has Trump been secretly investigating overseas? We don’t know, and we will remain in the dark unless another patriotic civil servant in the bowels of Trump’s government blows another whistle.

But Trump has gutted the State Department, the Defense Department, the Treasury Department and every other cabinet-level governmental office under his command. Gone are all the “adults in the room” like former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and even former White House chief of staff John Kelly and Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton. Down in the lower reaches of the bureaucracy, turnover has been record-breaking and there are so many vacancies, they’re holding garage sales to get rid of empty desks. There are numerous “acting” deputy and assistant secretaries in every single cabinet-level department of Trump’s government. He likes it that way. Everybody is either on their way out, planning to get out or frightened of being fired. The likelihood of new whistleblowers emerging from this chaotic governmental swamp is less and less the longer Trump remains in office.

What’s next? Well, we’ve already seen the capitulation and surrender at Helsinki, when Trump took Vladimir Putin’s word over that of his own intelligence services about Russia’s hacking of the 2016 elections. I think what we’ll get next is an Oval Office meeting with some dictator like Viktor Orbán of Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or Putin himself, and Trump coming out and asking them in public, before television cameras and reporters, to help with his re-election campaign. He’s gotten away with it twice. Why wouldn’t he?

He’s equally likely to order more assassinations of people he’ll name as enemies of the United States. We may never have heard of them before, nor will we ever hear about them again once they’re gone, because who they are and what they allegedly did will not be as important as the fact that Trump can order their deaths. The recent assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Republican Guard, got only passing criticism from Democrats and was a huge hit with the Trump base. He got to blow up bad guys with smart bombs and show everyone he’s as tough as his idol, Putin. What’s not to love about that? If you carry an AK-47 and follow Muhammad, I’d keep my head down between now and the first Tuesday in November.

Every time we think Trump has gone about as far as he can go with demonizing the “enemies of the people” in the press, he cranks it up a notch. The recent dust-up between NPR and Lickspittle Von Pompeo proved to Trump and his minions that they can muzzle the press and get away with it. I’d look for them to start yanking White House press credentials and banning entire news organizations from covering the Trump campaign. MSNBC and CNN should start looking for cheap flights. They won’t be on Air Force One for long. I predict it’s only a matter of time before some Trumpaholic MAGA-hat-wearing militiaman takes a potshot at a reporter outside one of Trump’s rallies. Trump will promise to defend the Second Amendment and rant and rave against the “enemies of the people” at his next rally. His base will lap it up.

Donald Trump is like a kid who gets on an elevator full of people and pushes the button for every floor. He does stuff because it pisses off the Democrats. He does stuff because it “owns the libs” and delights his base. He does stuff because it makes his pathetic, pinched little life a tiny bit bigger. I would say that he does stuff because it makes him happy, but I don’t think he’s capable of even a scintilla of joy. Mostly he does stuff because he can, and the big question we face, now that we’ve had an impeachment but failed to remove him from office, is whether he’s going to break the great American elevator and bring this country crashing down with him. I hope not, but every day he’s been in office he’s gotten worse, and it’s working for him.

articles, links, the very big stupid

🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬‼

ever since he was born, i have been afraid that i will be forced into the situation where i have to apologise to my son for bringing him into a world that, through no fault of his own, is going to end, for all intents and purposes, before his life will end. to me, it seems a large amount of irresponsible, to have brought a being into the world, who is faced with his own death, before his time, especially since i seem to be charmed when it comes to the potential of my life ending before my time.

and it’s even harder for me, because i have been fighting my entire adult life to change the things that i can, that would lead to my not having to offer that apology.

ezra, i’m sorry that the world is such a fucked up place. i’m sorry i brought you into this world, with no way to change it. i’m sorry you have to share this world with people who don’t care that it will end before your lifetime is complete.

A Grim New Definition of Generation X
by Ted Rall – 191231

People born in the 1960s may be the last human beings who will get to live out their full actuarial life expectancies. “Climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat” to humanity, warns a recent policy paper by an Australian think tank. Civilization, scientists say, could collapse by 2050. Some people may survive. Not many.

Some dismiss such purveyors of apocalyptic prognoses as hysterics. To the contrary, they’re Pollyannas. Every previous “worst-case scenario” prediction for the climate has turned out to have understated the gravity of the situation. “Paleoclimatologists have shown that past warming episodes show that there are mechanisms which magnify its effects, not represented in current climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the Paris Accords,” reports The Independent. It’s probably too optimistic to assume that we’ll make it to 2050.

Gives new meaning to Generation X.

Millennials and the children we call Generation Z face the horrifying prospect that they will get stuck with the tab for humanity’s centuries-long rape of planet earth, the mass desecration of which radically accelerated after 1950. There is an intolerably high chance that today’s young people will starve to death, die of thirst, be killed by a superstorm, succumb to a new disease, boil to death, asphyxiate from air pollution, be murdered in a riot or shot or blown up in a war sparked by environmentally-related political instability long before they survive to old age.

Long threatened, never taken seriously, not even now that it’s staring us right in the face, human extinction is coming for the children and grandchildren we claim to love but won’t lift a finger to save.

Shelves sag under the weight of books that have been written arguing that we still have a chance to save ourselves. I wish I could believe that. Human population has tripled since the 1950s. More than a million species have gone extinct. Ninety percent of the fish in the ocean have vanished, replaced by one billion tons of plastic. Two-thirds of the trees have been cut down. The polar ice cap is gone; it’s never coming back.

We can’t stop global warming. An increase of four degrees Celsius over the baseline set at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution means game over. We’re well on our way there. It doesn’t make sense to think that we can avoid extinction.

What if we woke up and demanded action from our political leaders? Radical problems require radical solutions; only the most radical of solutions could resolve the most radical problem of ruining our planet’s ability to sustain us: revolution. We would have to rise up and abolish — immediately — consumer capitalism in all the major greenhouse gas-producing nations, prioritize cleaning the environment as the human race’s top concern, and pivot to an economic mindset in which we extract the bare minimum from the ecosystem that we need in order to survive and nothing more.

Voting might achieve some incremental reforms but reform falls far short of what we require. Saving our young people (and their children, should they be foolish enough to have any) would require global revolution, the violent overthrow of the ruling elites and replacing them with people who understand what must be done. It would need to happen today. Fifty years ago would be better. Got a time machine?

None of this is going to happen. We are going to sleepwalk to our doom in a haze of social media and corporate entertainment distraction.

So it’s time for people who are younger than I am to start thinking about how they want to spend the rest of their likely-to-be-truncated lives, and how they plan to face mass premature death.

Pending human extinction destroys the answers provided by religion and philosophy. Knowing that there won’t be anyone to know that we were ever here raises the question: why bother to do anything? This column, this year’s “important” presidential election, love, hate, everything will lose its meaning when the last member of our species draws her last breath. Earth is unlikely to be visited by an alien archaeologist, much less uncover everything we’ve made and created (assuming any of it survives), much less figure out what any of it meant, before the sun expands into a red giant and ends it all.

Much is to be said for hedonism: eat, drink, have sex, and don’t bother to sort your recycling, for tomorrow we die. Stoicism has its advantages too; go out with dignity rather than weeping and gnashing your teeth and making your fellow survivors miserable.

Nihilism is about to become the best worst possible life strategy. Life is meaningless. That will soon become obvious. Moral principles, relics of a time with a future, will blow away like the irradiated dust we leave behind.

None of this will have mattered.

anhedonia, depression, frustration, political, the very big stupid

yeah, woo… 😒

so, #SCROTUS has well and truly been impeached, but pelosi now says she’s not even going to send the articles of impeachment over to the house, because the house has said that they’re not going to follow through…

so we’re sitting here with an impeached president and nothing is being done about it, even from the people who impeached him.

meanwhile, he’s requested and been granted even MORE money for the wall, and for the “space force”, and he’s paying for it with massive CUTS in food stamps, SSI, and SSDI (which includes me), and there has been precisely no response from the people who impeached him, apart from mildly harsh words…

and there has been some protest, in a limited sort of way, but no mass uprising, which means that they are probably not even going to try…

and people wonder why i want to die. 😒

brain injury, depression, frustration, stress, the very big stupid

woo…

1 Comment

#SCROTUS #drumpf has been impeached, but the republican’ts in the senate have already said that they’re not going to remove him from office, so it’s not having the kind of effect everybody said it would have. 😒

i lost my sunglasses a couple weeks ago, and i lost my faraday pouch with all my credit cards, my medical permit, my AAA card and my passport, along with $30 or so in cash. it disappeared somewhere in between the time that i walked out of total wine (i watched myself on the security video leaving the store with the pouch in my hand), and the time that i got home. the receipt from total wine was in the recycle bin, so i’m fairly sure the pouch is somewhere at home, but i don’t know where, which PISSES ME OFF!!! ‼

ETA: somebody found it in the parking lot of total wine, and turned it in with everything, including the cash, intact. maybe there’s hope for humanity after all… 🙃 but tulsi gabbard, the democratic representative from hawaii, who is also a candidate for the 2020 presidential election, voted “present” rather than voting for (preferably) or against impeachment… which means that, unless she’s the ONLY candidate running against #drumpf next year, i will not be voting for her. 😒

the very big stupid

.org TLD

originally, the .org TLD was intended for non-profit entities, although it was never enforced, and it has been operated by the Public Interest Registry since 2003.

on november 13, 2019, it was announced that the PIR had agreed to be acquired by Ethos Capital, a for-profit investment group, as their first “investment”.

so, basically, what this means is that the .org TLD, which was originally intended for use by non-profit organisations, is now owned and controlled by a for-profit organisation.

also, i’ve heard that some of the executives for ethos capital are also connected with ICANN, and have sneakily maneuvered around so that ICANN has eliminated the cap restricting the registration fees for domains under the .org TLD, which means that registration costs for .org domains are going to go up, MASSIVELY, in the next couple of years…

because that’s what for-profit organisations do with newly acquired resources…

i mean, they made this “investment”, and now they have to make sure that it pays off for them, otherwise why make the investment in the first place? 😒

i currently own 5 domains under the .org TLD.

i am, at this very moment, determining whether it’s possible for me to register all of them for the maximum of 10 years, all at once, rather than having to do it one at a time… because, one way or the other, i’m going to register them for as long as i can at the current price, rather than waiting to be gouged out of business, later on. 😒

🤬👎‼

spam, the mallet, the very big stupid

spammers spamming spam! 🤬

just as a reminder, this has been posted at the Hybrid Elephant Contact Us form:

PLEASE NOTE: This contact form is solely for the use of Hybrid Elephant customers who need to get in contact with us. Every message that is sent with this form includes a unique IP address in the header, which identifies the computer from which the message was sent. If you use this form to spam us, all you will accomplish is to put your IP address on the list of IP addresses which are PERMANENTLY BANNED from accessing Hybrid Elephant for any reason. Please DO NOT USE THIS FORM to send us advertisements or solicitations. It WILL NOT WORK! You have been warned!

this morning, i got spam from my response form (big surprise).

the difference, this time, is that the following message was included at the end of the spam:

IMPORTANT NOTICE: This message has been posted via a Contact Us form on your site. Contact forms are publicly accessible and they can be used for posting messages by anyone. We don’t use, hold or archive your e-mail addresses.

yes, contact forms can be used by anyone, but, particularly when an anti-spam message like the one previously posted is present, a concientious user of internet won’t use it unless that person is also a “Hybrid Elephant customers who need to get in contact with us”.

the message that you sent me was definitely NOT because of a need to contact me about something having to do with my business. 😒

and the fact that you say you “don’t use, hold or archive your e-mail addresses” is a moot point, because you ALREADY HAVE used my email address, and the fact that you have already used it means that, very likely, it is stored somewhere on your system, and probably gets backed up with everything else on your computer, which, for all intents and purposes, is “using, holding and archiving”… 🤬

so, the IP address from which this spam was sent is 85.203.22.215, which is part of the 85.203.22.208/28 range, located in monaco.

as of now, 85.203.22.208/28 (16 individual IP addresses) is no longer able to access my domains for any reason whatsoever.

thanks, spammer.

the message also contained references to wexxluxurycars dot com, which also goes on my block list.

thanks, spammer.

the IP address to which that domain name corresponds is 198.46.134.35, which is located in new york. because of the fact that it’s in new york, that IP address goes on my email block list, with today’s date, so that, in case i get an inquiry regarding it at some future point, i can state, unequivocally, that it was added to the list on that date, in case the person inquiring wants me to remove it…

which i will do ONLY if they can convince me that they are no longer associated with spam.

thanks, spammer.

and, of course, nobody is going to be seriously affected by all of this falderal (except, possibly, me), because the message was, doubtlessly, sent by a script that scans for “Contact Us” forms, and dumps meaningless spam into them automatically, without any one person having to do anything other than launch the script, which is why i’ve taken to blocking CIDR ranges outside of north america with no further warning. if people are going to be that careless with their own security, it’s up to people like me to take their security seriously, for them.

thanks, spammer. 🤬

anhedonia, corruption, depression, drumpf, malfunctioning people, mushrooms, ocf, political, stupid people, the very big stupid

bleah…

i’ve been under the attack of anhedonia and depression. my mushrooms have lost their potency: the last time i tried, i took 6 of them and they had, essentially, no effect at all. i connected with a person at SACBO — ranger’s connection — but she is only one step closer to the source… although she did mention that starter kits are available on ebay, and that they practically grow themselves, so that’s worth looking into.

part of the reason i have been so depressed is because of what i call the “political situation”: that is, drumpf and his latest atrocities. it just keeps on getting worse, and, when i think there’s no way he can get any worse, he blows the world away with the magnitude of his atrocities… and his republicon base of supporters get upset about a black disney princess and a pair of nike sneakers, but totally ignore the concentration camps and the gestapo Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, not to mention the totally inept people, including his own children, he’s put in charge of such things as education, housing, healthcare and the environment. it’s literally going to take us 100 years JUST to fix his fuckups, and that’s not taking into account the fact that the world is already in a crisis mode. it’s almost as though everything i’ve ever fought for throughout my entire life has been eliminated by this orange babboon in less than 3 years, and replaced with climate-change deniers, corporate stooges, forced-birth and anti-vax controversies, and so-called “christian” love, which is only for the so-called “christians”.

drumpf spent $92 million, which he appropriated from the national parks department (🤬), on a “military parade” in washington DC, complete with tanks and a flyover by the blue angels and “airforce one” — which, of course, wasn’t “airforce one” because the #SCROTUS was on the ground, observing the flyover… and the tanks were stationary, because, apparently, if they had moving tanks, they would have destroyed the streets and damaged the lincoln memorial… but the only people who could view this were his donors, because everyone else had to pay to get in… and then it rained, HARD and everything was postponed. the photos and videos i’ve seen show a very few thoroughly wet people and drumpf giving a long, boring, confusing speech that one writer i read compared to having been written by artificial intelligence, and a retired admiral said that it was on the level of an 8th grade history lesson… and the live video feeds from the top of the washington memorial, and the lincoln memorial were inexplicably shut down and removed from the whitehouse dot gov address, apparently to cover up how few people actually attended this debacle.

so, basically, we, the american people, threw away $92,000,000,000 on an egotistical, childish, boorish, dictator-emulating orange rapist with the IQ of half a rock, instead of addressing the concentration camps, or the homeless issue, or the healthcare issue, or… 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

as can be well imagined, despite my love for exploding things, i take little interest in such activities in celebration of this country, this year… which is, also, at least partially, because of the fact that we now have a dog who is totally terrified of fireworks, AND a next-door neighbour who is prone to setting off a ton of fireworks which ignite their lawn, and other suchlike wonderful things. 😒

OCF is 5 days away, and i’m hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. by this time, we’ve usually had one run through, and have some rough idea of how long the show will be. this year, we’re nowhere close to that, despite the fact that we started out with a working script, which we created 15 years ago, when we did this show (Jack And The Beanstalk) the last time. and we’re still missing two songs, one of which is probably not going to make it into the show for OCF.

and, on top of everything else, MAD magazine is shutting down! PBLFLLT!! 😠

clients, dead people, frustration, rants, stupid people, the battle of the computer, the very big stupid

oy! 😖

the continuing saga of the mailing list fiasco has reached a new plateau:

so, it started out that one of the subscribers to the list sent a message to the list that didn’t go through, for some unknown reason (demons).

when his message didn’t go through IMMEDIATELY — as he was used to them doing — he started looking around for other addresses, and he found two of them. one goes to the list owner, and one is a “machine only” address that sends bounce notices to the owner. it is not for sending email TO, and it is definitely not for sending mail to when your message doesn’t go through, because that triggers the MTA on the user end to blacklist your message.

i found out about this whole fiasco about 6 hours into it, when he sent mail to my personal address, asking me if there was something wrong. i noticed that he had sent mail to the machine-only address, and got blacklisted by micro$awful, so i wrote to the host provider to see if there was something that could be done to reverse the problem.

the host provider’s response was to accuse me (and my mailing list) of sending spam, and they have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to sending spam. 😒

they generously offered to set me up with a new IP address instead of arbitrarily closing my account, but the new IP address they gave me didn’t have a PTR (pointer) record, or a RDNS (Reverse DNS) record, which only made the machine that controls the email list mad, because usual mailing lists have a PTR and a RDNS record, and the end result was that i was blacklisted by a number of services with which i have been exchanging emails without a problem for years.

fortunately, these other services were ones for which i could submit delisting requests myself, which takes the host provider and their sensitivity about spam and spammers out of the loop.

nevertheless, i started losing patience, and i might have said some things in my communications with the host provider which ended up making things a whole lot worse, ending up with yesterday, when they asked me to move my web sites to a different host provider immediately.

at EXACTLY THE SAME TIME, the PTR and RDNS records that they installed on my new IP address took effect, which meant that i can no longer send email from my local email client, because it’s not the same server that my VPN has been talking to for more than a year, and i lost it. i didn’t actually curse at them, but i did everything but that.

while i was in the process of figuring out that it was my VPN that was my primary problem, i had, simultaneously, to explain the mistake to the guy who sent the original message, re-assure the members of the mailing list who were trying — and failing — to send messages to the list that they weren’t actually the problem, despite the fact that their email addresses were not interacting correctly with the mailing list, and fend off the more and more insistent demands that i leave, immediately, from the host provider.

long story short, i didn’t sleep very well last night. 😠

at about 3:30 this morning, i finally wrote a letter to macque, saying that i was no longer able to host the web sites he has me hosting, i was no longer able to maintain the mailing list, and that i was retiring from the hosting business.

then i checked, once again, with micro$awful, and determined that I HADN’T ACTUALLY BEEN BLACKLISTED AT ALL!

the WHOLE THING had been caused by “demons” in the machine! 😖

and, to top things all off, we’re scheduled to go to the beach for a week, starting monday, which meant that, if i was going to move, i would have to find a new host and give them the information they need to move my web sites in 3 days, or wait a week, and do the same thing when i got back from vacation. both of these options made going on vacation TO BEGIN WITH not a very exciting prospect, and i was getting severely depressed about it.

and, to put the cherry on top, it turns out that sketch, the drummer for Snake Suspenderz, died yesterday, which made me even more depressed… primarily because he, being dead, didn’t have to worry about all the CRAP that has been going on in the world, while i, being not dead, had to deal with seven times MORE CRAP and had no say in the matter, whatsoever.

then, things started to get better… kind of…

the first thing that happened is that, when i told them that i would be moving my web site in two weeks, that micro$awful hadn’t really blacklisted my IP address, and that i had dumped the client that had caused the whole fiasco, they let up a little bit, and allowed that, since i had paid access until july, that i could stay until then. with a bit more discussion back and forth, they relented even further, and allowed me to keep my web sites where they are.

but i’m still giving up being a host provider for people who don’t know how it works, because it’s WAY too stressful.

so, in the end, i can go on vacation without having to worry about internet SHIT, either while i am on vacation, or after i get home; i will no longer have to deal with people who don’t know doing things that they shouldn’t do and feeling awful about it afterwards, and i won’t ACTUALLY have to move my web sites that aren’t going away anyway (which is an entirely different ball of wax)…

but sketch is still dead, which means that, either, Snake Suspenderz will break up, or that we will find a new drummer… neither of which are very attractive alternatives at this point.

articles, drumpf, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

Trump’s Attack on Medicare for All Has Industry Fingerprints All Over It

Trump’s Attack on Medicare for All Has Industry Fingerprints All Over It
By Wendell Potter
19 October, 2018

Recently, the president decided to take a break from tweeting conspiracy theories to write an op-ed attacking supporters of Medicare for All. While engaging in what psychologists would probably call “projection,” he accused the Medicare for All movement of putting seniors at risk, rationing health care and trying to destroy the Medicare system.

I’m a former executive at two of the country’s largest insurance companies. I spent 20 years working in PR for Humana and then Cigna, rising to the level of vice president before I had a crisis of conscience. As a result, I know exactly how this op-ed came to be. The process doesn’t start at the White House. It didn’t include a careful review of policy, and it wasn’t an idea his staff came up with.

I can see the industry’s fingerprints on this op-ed from a mile away, because I was the ghost writer for many pieces just like it. During my two-decade tenure in the industry, every time an idea that would threaten shareholder profits started gaining momentum, my employer would decide we’d need to find a friendly and influential politician to carry water for the industry. I’d sit down with my communications team, create talking points, or even write a complete op-ed or speech, and then make sure our well-connected lobbyists got it to the right people.

And the industry won’t just go to Republicans. For instance, Ed Rendell, a Democrat who was formerly a governor of my home state of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, recently wrote an op-ed promoting several half-measures he claimed would be stronger reforms than single-payer health care, none of which posed a serious threat to private insurance. Currently, Rendell is affiliated with the Bipartisan Policy Center, which has regularly hosted organizations like America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Meanwhile, so-called think tanks like the Pacific Research Institute regularly write Medicare for All hit pieces for Forbes and other outlets.

The purpose of these op-eds was always to mislead and scare people, because when the facts aren’t on your side, you have to find a politician who’s willing to obfuscate, misdirect and outright lie. It’s no surprise that the industry went right to the White House.

Many people were quick to challenge the president’s claims. Medicare for All would actually expand coverage for seniors currently on Medicare by covering dental and vision care and lowering drug prices. And contrary to Trump’s claim about rationing, the truth is that real rationing occurs in the US when people don’t seek treatment due to cost. It happens every day because millions of Americans are either uninsured or have such high deductibles they can’t afford to actually get the care they need. Medicare for All would eliminate that barrier.

Others have pointed out the hypocrisy. Since taking control of Congress and the White House, President Trump and his party have been engaged in a non-stop assault on Medicare, threatened patients with pre-existing conditions and tried to force through a plan that would have kicked tens of millions of people off their insurance.

Here’s the thing: I’m fairly confident that the president and his staff don’t actually believe that Medicare for All would threaten seniors. I can tell because Trump doesn’t use the national platform as an opportunity to lay out a vision to expand coverage, or protect people with pre-existing conditions, or manage drug prices or lower health care costs.

What the president does know is that a Medicare for All system is the worst nightmare of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Right now, they have a virtually limitless ability to charge American patients, families, workers and businesses exorbitant prices, and they want to keep it that way. That’s why they have spent decades abusing our campaign finance system, pumping money into campaigns, hiring armies of lobbyists, and using a combination of political incentives and threats to push through legislation they like, making sure that any legislation that threatens to limit their profits never sees the light of day.

Now that the American people are starting to wake up to their scam, the entrenched special interests have decided to cash in their favors. And so, the president decided to parrot the talking points of his donors and their shareholders, no matter how much harm it will cause the American people.

articles, drumpf, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

Trump Tower board seeks nearly $90,000 from estate of art collector who died in 50th-floor fire

Trump Tower board seeks nearly $90,000 from estate of art collector who died in 50th-floor fire
By Meagan Flynn
18 October 2018

Six months after a fire in Trump Tower killed 50th-floor resident Todd Brassner, the building’s residential board is coming after Brassner’s estate for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid common charges stemming from a lien on his apartment, according to a complaint filed Tuesday in the Supreme Court in New York County.

Brassner, a longtime Trump Tower resident who lived alone with hundreds of vintage instruments and an elaborate multimillion-dollar art collection, died April 7 after an electrical fire engulfed his apartment, which had no working smoke alarms. He was 67.

Now, with backing from a Trump Organization attorney, the Residential Board of Trump Tower Condominium is suing Brassner’s estate for more than $64,600 in unpaid common charges, an amount that includes fees accrued in the months after Brassner died. The residential board is also seeking a judgment of at least $25,000, bringing the total amount sought to nearly $90,000. Common charges are condo fees that typically include maintenance, utilities or other services. Brassner defaulted on common charge payments in June 2015, according to the complaint.

Brassner’s family members and executors of his estate, Heather and Aaron Brassner, could not immediately be reached for comment, nor could the attorney representing the board.

The fire at Trump Tower, where the president’s penthouse and the Trump Organization headquarters are located, captured wide attention in April both for Trump’s silence on Brassner’s death and for the lack of sprinklers in the building, a feature that Trump had lobbied against installing in the condos in the late 1990s.

Brassner moved into Trump Tower in 1996, according to property records. The son of a wealthy New York art collector, Brassner was described by friends as an “utter expert on Pop Art” who was “constantly swapping, buying and selling” and at the center of the action in the art world, as his friend, Stuart Pivar, told the Art Newspaper. Brassner ran with Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd in the 1970s as he built his impressive art collection, including a 1975 portrait Warhol made of Brassner, which the Trump Tower resident valued at $850,000 in 2015.

He kept the portrait in his Trump Tower condo, along with a collection of more than 100 vintage guitars, $25,000 worth of banjos, about 150 ukuleles from the early 20th century, an organ, a Robert Indiana sculpture and artwork by Jack Kerouac — just to name a few items.

But over the years, he appeared to have trouble keeping up with the condo payments. Trump Tower’s residential board filed multiple liens against him between 2003 and 2013 for unpaid common charges, New York court records show. And in 2015 he filed for bankruptcy, which included listing all of the assets kept in his apartment. The condo was valued at $2.5 million.

At the time of Brassner’s death, friends told the New York Times he was in declining health and that he had been trying unsuccessfully to sell the apartment. Once Trump became president, resulting in omnipresent armed security outside Trump Tower, Brassner couldn’t seem to find a buyer, one friend told the Times.

“It haunts me,” Brassner’s friend Stephen Dwire, a musician and producer, told the paper. “He said, ‘This is getting untenable.’ It was like living in an armed camp. But when people heard it was a Trump building, he couldn’t give it away.”

Trump built the tower in 1983, when installing sprinklers was not required. In 1998, when two tragic New York City high-rise fires left several people dead, the city moved to begin requiring sprinklers in high-rises. But Trump opposed retrofitting his building with the sprinklers and lobbied to persuade city officials to drop a proposal that would have required them in older apartment buildings, as The Washington Post previously reported.

Some speculated that the April fire could have been mitigated had they been installed.

The New York City Fire Department ultimately found that the fire was caused by an overloaded electrical board. The Times reported that the building was equipped with smoke sensors, which is what alerted firefighters to the blaze.

In a statement on Twitter in April, Trump did not offer condolences for Brassner’s family but did brag about the construction of the building.

“Fire at Trump Tower is out,” he tweeted, before the fire had been put out. “Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!”

A month after Brassner died, a Trump Organization attorney filed a lien against the deceased man on behalf of the Residential Board of the Trump Tower Condominium, seeking at that time $52,000 in unpaid common charges since July 2016, according to New York City Department of Finance records.

politics, the very big stupid

this is scary dangerous!

i got a very alarming email today, from lara trump. it said:

President Trump will keep cutting through the fake news filter, and deliver our message straight to YOU — the American people. Now he wants to be sure that you’re all signed up to get REAL NEWS UPDATES straight to your phone.

SIGN UP NOW
The more we can bypass the fake news media, the less power they have to manipulate the news, distort our message, and unleash a flurry of attacks aimed at distracting us from our agenda.

It’s time to take power into our own hands. So please, sign up for texts today to get REAL NEWS straight to your phone.

Lara Trump
Senior Advisor
Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.

so, drumpf is encouraging people to get the news straight from him, so they won’t be “distracted” by the truth…

and she’s the senior advisor for "donald j. drumpf for president, INCORPORATED"…

i sure won’t be signing up for it, but i get the distinct impression that a whole bunch of american citizens will. 😒😓

depression, stress, the very big stupid

bleh/catsup

same old bleh: government shut down because democrats won’t agree to fund the wall, or some such horseshit. it’s going to take a generation to fix all the things #drumpf has screwed up. although, it appears, that, with the government shut down, it’s actually impeding #SCROTUS’s ability to vacation in mar-a-lago, AGAIN, and it may also affect betsy devos’ trip to sweden, so it may not be all bad.

got into an accident with monique’s car a week ago. i pulled out of a parking lot into what i thought was a clear street, only to discover that there were two cars on a collision course with my left side. i sped up, to try to avoid colliding with them and succeeded in having only one of them clip my left rear corner, but speeding up caused me to go out of control, and i zipped across the street and ran into a rock in the driveway across the street… and, of course, it’s more than likely 100% my fault.

the weird part is what happened afterwards. the collision didn’t injure anybody, a cop came and took a statement from everyone, but issued no tickets. monique’s car is pretty banged up, it may or may not be a total write off, but they may be able to fix it… but because of the fact that we’ve got insurance, our total out-of-pocket will be $500, plus $4 a day for the rental car, which showed up less than 24 hours after the accident. and, if the car, which is a few months away from the end of its warrantee anyway, is a total write-off, we can use the settlement to buy a new car from monique’s best friend lora’s husband, who owns a car dealership.

there are a number of things that would have happened if i had this kind of accident and were still living in bellingham, which DID NOT happen this time. these things are REALLY freaking me out: significantly, nobody got upset with me, including monique, whose car got munched. she said that’s why we have insurance. then, we went to the beach for 4 days, three days after the accident. if things were as they were when i lived in bellingham, we WOULD NOT have been able to go on “vacation” after an accident as serious as that, even though nobody got injured. and there are a few other things: i’m having my trombone slide rebuilt(!), and it’s costing me around $800. that project would have suddenly been put on hold. also, we’re planning on going to hawai’i(!) for our 20th anniversary, in june, and, after the accident, that would have been out of the question, if this were bellingham.

on the other hand, when i lived in bellingham, most of the time i didn’t actually own a car, and when i did, i only had minimal insurance, and that only part of the time… and in all the time i lived in bellingham, i don’t think i took what i now consider to be a “vacation” even once, despite the fact that i “camped out” in various places a number of times.

upshot of the whole thing is that i’m still thinking i should be in orders of magnitude more trouble than i, apparently, am, currently… and i’m waiting for the axe, which may not actually be there, to fall… which is seriously affecting my ability to enjoy anything else that may be enjoyable. 😕

political, rants, the very big stupid, torture

a ray of hope, snuffed out…

to continue the post started here, it appears that #drumpf “leaked” code-word-protected intelligence about the current US fight against #daesh to russians, and the media is all up in arms about it. the washington post (a decidedly UN-“fake news” source) reported about it in detail yesterday…

but drumpf and his surrogates have stated that this is 100% false — however, after saying that it’s 100% false, drumpf actually tweeted an admission that he had, indeed leaked classified information — but they are bolstering this claim by saying that he has the right to do so, because he’s the president.

Trump Says He Divulged Intelligence to Russians Because He’s Such a Great Guy

furthermore, there have been several other “legitimate” news sources that say that drumpf is a “shoe-in” for the 2020 election, in spite of the democretins gearing up to regain the majority in the 2018 election.

i’m not sure how the world is going to survive eight years of oprobrious orange “leadership”, but if this goes on much longer, it’s looking as though I won’t survive that long. 😡

the very big stupid

😠

it seems incredible, as in “un-believable”, but #drumpf keeps on getting worse… and, at this point, it’s a lot more likely that we will experience nuclear armageddon within the next six months than it has ever been in my life… and, as noah mickens says, it’s difficult to get motivated to do anything when the news is that there’s going to be nuclear war within the week. 😠

and it’s going to be at least 2018 before we can legally vote the crap out. at this point, it’s my very strong impression that we will either annihilate ourselves, or experience a violent revolution before then, and, while i hope that neither one happens, it appears that either option may be better than allowing #drumpf to run roughshod over what is left of america until november of next year.

the only thing that keeps me going, at this point, is the vague realisation that what i hear in the news is deliberately made to sound as dire as possible, in order to provide that extra “thrill” required to make people want to know more, for as many people as possible, and that, in reality, things aren’t anywhere near as bad as they’re making it out to be…

but when they’re talking in serious tones about nuclear war between donald trump and kim jong-un — the two most childish leaders on the face of the planet — there’s an awful lot of leeway that still includes a large swath of the entire population of the world before we get anywhere close to “reasonable”. 😐

in other news, snake suspenderz has two gigs coming up this weekend. an hour at the opening of a new winery in woodinville, on saturday, and at the blue moon on sunday. woo… if #drumpf doesn’t blow us up before then…

malfunctioning computers, technology, the very big stupid

i’m really glad…

the computer industry has been a-twitter for the past few days, concerning a zero-day “bug” in micro$lop word, which gives an attacker full execution control of the victim’s machine — a Very Bad Thing®.

this reminds me of a couple of things that i experienced, more-or-less first-hand, while i was working at micro$lop, and is the PRIMARY REASON why i’m really glad i don’t run machines with their software on them.

there’s this, which outlines what the “bug” is, and how it allows an attacker to take control of a victim’s machine (i put the word “bug” in quotation marks because bugs are usually things that appear in the code by mistake, but it is my impression that micro$lop put this in deliberately, without realising the potential damage it could do)… which brings up the fact that they have known, particularly, about security problems with OLE (which went through a stage where they were referring to it as “ActiveX”), at least since my friend, and computer-god fred debuted The Exploder Control in 1995, which did a clean shut-down of any machine unfortunate enough to be running Windows95 — PLEASE NOTE: the Exploder Control is not harmful, and will not run correctly unless you’re running Windows95 and Internet Explorer version 3, which, by this time, presumably, you’re not. fred’s premise was, and still is, that if you have a method of excersising THAT MUCH control over a machine, it better well be FULLY AND COMPLETELY SECURE, otherwise people WILL take advantage of it.

i worked at micro$lop when the first Word Concept Virus was discovered. it was unique (at the time) because it allowed an attacker to infect a victim’s machine over email, without actually having to have physical contact with the target machine. it worked by utilising micro$lop word’s “normal.dot” template, and required the victim to have macros enabled by default. the new, most recent word problem doesn’t require macros to be enabled, and doesn’t work if the application is running in “Protected View”. so, the solution micro$lop has come up with is to recommend that you run word in “Protected View” in order to avoid this particular vulnerability.

it is significant, to me, that the primary reason we have things like active antivirus software on our computers today is because of actions taken by the micro$lop corporation when i worked there. when i was working there, they were the largest manufacturer of computer software in the world.

and it reminds me of the solution micro$lop came up with to avoid another “bug” in another one of their “excellent” programs, internet explorer: version 3 exhibited a flaw in the way that it displays URIs in the address bar, and by opening a specially crafted URI an attacker could open a page that appears to be from a different domain from the current location. the solution? “Do not click any hyperlinks that you do not trust. Type them into the address bar yourself“… despite the fact that one of the features of all web browsers is that you can get from one source of information to the next, easily, without having to type in long, unintelligible strings of code.

Rule of thumb — Every time Microsoft uses the word “smart,” be on the lookout for something dumb.
     — John Walker

A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame.
     — John Walker

pictures, the very big stupid

M&Ms

i’m not particularly concerned about whether or not my food contains GMOs… i’d rather that they not, but it doesn’t concern me an awful lot if they do, it’s just one of those things…

so, i was intrigued when i saw, on the back of the costco-sized package of peanut M&Ms that i bought recently, when i saw a notice on the back of the package that said “PARTIALLY PRODUCED WITH GENETIC ENGINEERING”…

GMO M&Ms?
GMO M&Ms?

so, i called the customer inquiry line that they posted on the back of the package, and this is the story i got:

they are required, by law, to label potentially GMO products. however, suppliers of some of the ingredients — i.e. NOT associated with the M&M/Mars factory — may OR MAY NOT use genetically modified organisms to produce the raw material that gets sold to M&M/Mars, AND…

get this…

THEY DON’T HAVE TO TELL M&M/Mars whether they do or not.

because of the fact that M&M/Mars DOESN’T KNOW whether or not their suppliers use GMOs, they HAVE TO label their products, whether they contain GMOs or not.

in other words, by law, M&M HAS TO notify us, even though they DON’T KNOW THEMSELVES!

THIS IS WHY I AM VERY SUSPICIOUS OF FOOD LABELING! 😡

the very big stupid

it gets worse and worse…

drumpf has appointed ben carson — otherwise known as dr. stabby — to the department of education: great, a guy who believes the world was created in six literal days, and has compared evolution to satan will now be in charge of what our nation’s kids will learn.

not only that, but he has appointed sarah palin secretary of the interior… no more worries about fracking and DAPL. forget alternative energy, drill, baby, drill. 🙁

and, he has appointed white supremacist stephen bannon to be his chief of staff and bridgegate governor chris cristie as attorney general.

he’s notified 3 million “illegal” aliens to be ready for deportation… 😡

i’m a white man, and i’m worried about the future of the world. 😐

the very big stupid

😲

every four years i post about how i voted for the guy that didn’t win, and, for the most part, i’ve been disappointed more than not.

this year, the worst of all possible people got elected: donald drumpf… worse than nixon, worse than reagan, worse than george bush, worse than george bush jr., even worse than hillary clinton. and less than half as smart as any of ’em.

seriously, if we don’t have a revolution soon, we’re going to end up EXACTLY like germany in the mid-1930s.

we’ve gone WAAAY beyond the very big stupid, this time… 😠

i am a terrorist, rants, the very big stupid

people suck! 😠

1 Comment

i ran into another stray dog down by the park. this time i had my phone (but still no treats, DAMNIT!) but i couldn’t get the dog to come to me… if i had had treats with me, i’m sure he would have come to me, but without, he stayed JUST out of reach, and when i stood up, he walked off in the other direction. i’m fairly sure i’ve seen him before, but on the other side of the main thoroughfare, and fairly far from where he was at the time…

so, i got in my car (i was just returning home from a run to the post office), and tried to catch up to him. i found him in the front yard of the place i’ve noticed in the past, because of the fact that their car has a “HILLARY FOR PRISON” bumper sticker – i went by there again this evening to confirm that the address is, in fact, 11224 S. 384th St., Auburn, WA, 98001. i parked the car out of the road, and crouched down to call the dog to me again, and he looked like he was going to come to me, but then a guy who i hadn’t seen before asked me if that was my dog. i said no, it’s not my dog, but he appears to be lost and i want to capture him and call the number on his tag. at that point, the guy asked me if i was law enforcement. i said no, and he asked me what interest i had in the dog. i said that i was concerned because he was running loose in the intersection, and almost got hit by at least two cars. then the guy said that, if i wasn’t law enforcement that i should “get the hell out of my driveway, we don’t need your kind around here”…

i said “if you say so…”, got in my car, and spun out as i was leaving his driveway. 😠

first, i wonder if something can’t be done about dogs wandering loose in the south part of king county. this is the second time in two weeks that i have run into stray dogs that i’ve tried to rescue. the other time, i actually succeeded in rescuing two dogs, whose owner apparently lives on the same street as my new “friend”, and, if nothing else, i think i should probably warn him that his neighbour is a supreme dick…

second, i wonder what i can do about this guy. i’ve had my share of negative interactions with the local constabulary, otherwise i would call and report him for harboring a stray dog and “intimidation”. there’s not a lot that the cops could do about it, under the best of circumstances, but they could go and tell the guy not to be such a dick, and he’d probably listen to them, for a while anyway… it’s times like these that i’m sorry i don’t live closer to my friend gordy, because i have used gordy as an “intimidation shield” a couple of times, to great effect, and my impression is that this guy would have thought twice about being such a dick if i were accompanied by someone like gordy.

the very big stupid

fInaLLy! but 😠 about it anyway… not very enlightened of me, is it?

i ordered a book on december 26, 2014. it was supposed to be delivered in june of 2015. in may of 2015, the publication date was delayed until december of 2015, and in november, it was delayed again, until some unknown point in the future.

i started getting notifications that it was being printed around the end of may, 2016, and it was actually delivered on june 10, 2016.

because there was no place to leave seller feedback, i posted the following as a product review:

i waited from December 26, 2014 to June 10, 2016 for this book to arrive. yes, that’s right, it was on order for a year and a half, and was delayed by amazon twice.

it’s a good thing this is as great a book as it is, that’s all i have to say.

their response, which i just received by email, was as follows:

Your review could not be posted.

Thanks for submitting a customer review on Amazon. Your review could not be posted to the website in its current form. While we appreciate your time and comments, reviews must adhere to the following guidelines:

http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines/ref=cm_rv_rej_eml

We encourage you to revise your review and submit it again.

but, the problem is, that when i follow their instructions for leaving seller feedback, as listed here, i get to step 3 and THERE IS NO FUCKING “LEAVE SELLER FEEDBACK” BUTTON!!!!!!! 😡

160610 amazon fuck up
160610 amazon fuck up
the very big stupid

notuchup

every now and then i actually listen to the “christian” AM radio that i frequently have on in the car, and today was one of them. this time it featured “doctor” robert jefferess of Pathway To “Victory” (although they never state over what, exactly, you will have victory if you listen to their broadcast), and i got to thinking:

fundamentally, the things that “doctor” robert jefferess was talking about, for the most part, are either demonstrably false, or not supported by the preponderance of evidence, at the very least… so why is it that he has the priveledge of being addressed as “doctor”, which carries the added reputation of being extremely studied in your chosen field. but, the thing is, in this case, being “extremely studied in your chosen field” means studying the works of people whose study is of a single book which is demonstrably false, or not supported by the preponderance of evidence, at the very least…

which, essentially, is saying that “doctor” robert jefferess, and all of the “doctors” on whose study his “doctorate” is based, and all of the “doctors” on whose study their “doctorates” are based, and all of the “doctors” on whose study their “doctorates” are based, and so forth, are, essentially, “doctors” of lies and falsehood.

which makes me wonder how they got into positions of authority. somewhere along the line, somebody must have said “i know this is not true, but i’m going to teach it as though it is, anyway, because if i do, these suckers will give me money”. it may even be that the person who said that was long enough ago in history that nobody remembers who he was.

it also makes me wonder how many other people in positions of authority are there because nobody bothered to check to make sure their “authority” is not, also, based on lies and falsehood.

malfunctioning computers, the very big stupid

god damn it!!!

i have an ipad, so i can keep farcebook off of my real computers.

i don’t know whether it’s the ipad itself, or whether it is farcebook, but i’m getting really pissed off at the behaviour i’m seeing:

1) it randomly crashes: the screen freezes, then goes black, and then it gives me the “desktop” screen, and then, when i restart the farcebook application, it automatically goes to my “News Feed” rather than to the “Most Recent” page, where i normally read stuff. this happens a lot more frequently when i am reading a “link” that someone posted, but it also happens when i am simply reading farcebook.

2) it takes FOR-FUCKING-EVER to load a “link” from the farcebook application, and even when it says it’s finished loading, frequently it freezes until the entire page actually loads, which is sometimes as much as two or three minutes later. this is a lot more common on links which contain videos, although YouTube links usually load fairly quickly, which makes me suspect that there’s something else that is gobbling up bandwidth.

3) in the farcebook application itself, it frequently freezes for a couple of minutes, and then goes back to “normal” behaviour.

4) frequently, when i go to a “link” in the farcebook application, it loads completely, and then the screen gets a grey tinge to it, and the entire page is overlayed with an advertisement of some kind, and unless i touch EXACTLY the right place, which changes semi-regularly, instead of getting to read the page that i intended to, i have to wait for farcebook to put another, complete, entirely unrelated page, the advertisement, on the screen, which frequently takes up to five minutes, before i can go “back” to the page i was intending to read.

4½) a related problem is that, frequently, when i touch a place that should be a link of some kind (like a URI) it doesn’t do anything at all, and other times, when i am “scrolling”, it interprets my “touch” as a “click” and loads something in which i wasn’t interested, and then gives me a lot of difficulties (involving one or more of the previously enumerated items) getting back to where i was.

to make matters worse, the specific problems outlined above don’t happen individually: they frequently come in batches of two, or three, and, frequently all four of them at the same time.

as i said, i’m not sure whether it is due to bugs in the farcebook application, or bugs in the hardware, but it’s getting to the point where i feel like throwing the device against a wall, or out the window or something.

i’m fairly sure that this is NOT the way it is supposed to work. 😠

forward into the past, the very big stupid

God help me resist temptation…

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27: BOB LARSON’S CURSE BREAKING SEMINAR

Hilton Seattle Airport & Conference Center
17620 International Blvd
Seattle, WA 98188
Starts @ 7pm Free and open to the public

FEBRUARY 27-28: ONE-ON-ONE ENCOUNTERS WITH BOB LARSON
To schedule a one-on-one personal SPIRITUAL ENCOUNTER with Pastor Bob, call 303-980-1511.

the phone number is the same one he used back when i was messing with his head, which, if i recall correctly, is a denver, colorado area code… but my understanding is that his headquarters is now in phoenix, arizona…

geek links, i am a terrorist, rants, the very big stupid

hey, bono… i’ve found what you’re looking for…

AUTOMATIC SONGS-OF-INNOCENCE REMOVAL TOOL — Apple finally sees the point of millions of disgruntled people like me. hopefully they’ll learn something from it, although i’m not going to hold my breath… 😐

also, Apple puts up support page to get U2 album out of your iTunes — Too many people don’t want U2 anywhere near their libraries

geek links, i am a terrorist, pictures, rants, the very big stupid

The U in U2 stands for “Unwanted”!!

1 Comment

😡

the U stands for "Unwanted"

Not pro Bono: Apple’s audio junk mail made spammers’ lives easier

Apple: take this fucking U2 album off my iPhone, NOW. I do not want it, I did not ask for it, it takes up space, it’s my device. Go to hell.

Just say BO-NO: Mark Hosler of Negativland on Apple’s ‘U2rusion’

Got iTunes? You got a U2 album. Here’s how to delete it.

unfortunately, it’s not how to delete it. because of the fact that it’s “in the cloud”, it doesn’t necessarily take up space on my device, but i can’t immediately delete it using any of the methods recommended — using iTunes on my computer doesn’t even show that i have a U2 album, so re-synching my device doesn’t do anything, and there’s nothing to un-check, and you can only delete something once you have downloaded it from the cloud…

i don’t use twitter, but i am outraged, and i reflect that guy’s twitter: Apple: take this fucking U2 album off my iPhone, NOW. I do not want it, I did not ask for it, it takes up space, it’s my device. Go to hell. 😡

political, rants, the very big stupid

grr…

apparently pierce county wants to display a banner that says "In God We Trust" in the county council chambers. only two council members (out of seven) think that might not be such a good idea…

if you know me, you should know that i’m not a “conventional” person, especially when it comes to religion. part of the reason for that is experiences like the one i had when i was twenty-<mumble-something-into-my-hand>, and i was going to a halloween party with some friends. we were dressed in costumes, i was wearing a black, horned mask with red tilaks, one of my friends was wearing a chimpanzee mask, and one of my friends was wearing a santa-claus mask. as we walked to the party, we happened to pass a “christian” “storefront ministry” called “Set Free Fellowship” which was having an anti-halloween rally. we passed by without incident, but as soon as we had our backs to them, about 10 of the “christians” rushed us, knocking me to the ground, and surrounding me, pushing me to the ground when i tried to get up. then one of them who, i presume, was the “pastor” started chanting “thereisonlyonenameunderheavenbywhichamancanbesaved” over, and over, and over, and over… when i asked him if he could say anything else, he responded with “thereisonlyonenameunderheavenbywhichamancanbesaved”, when i told him that a parrot could say the same thing, he responded with “thereisonlyonenameunderheavenbywhichamancanbesaved”… at that point, i got up — they didn’t push me down again — and started wondering where my friends had ended up, and when the police were going to show up. evidently the people surrounding me were thinking the same thing, because they faded back into the storefront and didn’t bother me again. i wandered down to the end of the block, and met up with my friends. one of them had been punched and elbowed in the face. the other one had managed to call the police, who said that they would be there within 2 hours… we all agreed that we did NOT want to wait that long, and got out of there.

it is that kind of experience which goes into my feeling as though anything representing a “christian” “god” is not going to be very good at representing me.

personally, i believe siva is mahadeva. that’s fine. other people may believe kṛṣṇa is mahadeva. that’s not only fine, but it doesn’t contradict what i believe. some people believe that Jesus is mahadeva. that, too, is not only fine, but doesn’t contradict what i believe… if you can’t understand how i can believe in a God who can be more than one God, in more than one religion, at the same time, without contradiction, then you should start there and figure that one out before you criticise me for not believing in the “correct” “god”…

HOWEVER, if it belongs to a group which claims to represent me, it is my wish that they not display this banner. it is the “current” motto of our country (which it has been since only 1956) but it replaced the original motto of our country, E Pluribus Unum (which means “Out of Many, One”), and, personally, i like the old one better.

if you live in the area, i encourage you to contact the city council and tell them to vote against R2014-80.

articles, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

another very big stupid

U.S. Customs Won’t Apologize for Destroying Musician’s Rare Flutes
by John Hudson
January 2, 2014

U.S. customs officials last week destroyed 11 rare flutes by a respected Canadian musician who was returning home via New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. But the agency isn’t apologizing for the incident — it says the flutes were an ecological threat.

Officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection identified the instruments owned by flute virtuoso Boujemaa Razgui as agricultural products that risked introducing “exotic plant pathogens” in to the United States, a customs official tells Foreign Policy. As a result, officials destroyed every single flute without contacting Razgui in an incident that makes your holiday airport delays trivial by comparison.

Razgui said there are around 15 people in the U.S. with such flutes, which means acquiring one ahead of his upcoming performances in February may be impossible. “I’m not sure what to do,” Razgui told The Boston Globe.

“They said this is an agriculture item,” Razgui continued. “I fly with them in and out all the time and this is the first time there has been a problem. This is my life … This is horrible.”

Razgui’s mishap was first reported by the music blog Slipped Disc on Tuesday before jumping to the front page of the massive link-sharing site Reddit, which nearly melted the small blog‘s servers according to a follow-up post.

Though neither the blog nor The Globe received a response from U.S. Customs on the issue, a New York-based CBP official tells us the agency followed standard protocol.

“CBP is responsible for detecting and preventing the entry into the country of plant pests and exotic foreign animal diseases that could harm America’s agricultural resources,” said an official, after being asked if the agency would issue an apology. “The fresh bamboo canes were seized and destroyed in accordance with established protocols to prevent the introduction of plant pathogens into the United States.”

Razgui, who has worked with numerous U.S. ensembles and performs regularly with the Boston Camerata, said he hand-crafted each instrument with difficult-to-find reeds. “Nobody talked to me. They said I have to write a letter to the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.,” he told The Globe.

The CBP official said Razgui’s luggage was unclaimed and added that “fresh bamboo is prohibited from entering the United States to prevent the introduction of exotic plant pathogens.”

articles, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

happy(?) new year…

Customs officials destroy virtuoso flautist’s 11 instruments because they were ‘agricultural products’
By Scott Kaufman
December 31, 2013

A flute virtuoso was returning to New York via John F. Kennedy Airport when Customs officials confiscated and destroyed the instruments he was carrying with him.

According to Boujemaa Razgui, the officials told him that his 11 flutes — each of which he had constructed, by hand, himself — “were agricultural products and had to be destroyed.”

Razgui, who is a Canadian citizen, frequently travels with a variety of flutes, each of which is designed to be played with a specific ancient or modern genre in mind.

Slipped Disc’s Norman Lebrecht contacted Razgui, who recounted his ordeal with customs. “I told them I had these instruments for many years and flew with them in and out,” he said.

“There were 11 instruments in all. They told me they were agricultural products and they had to be destroyed. There was nothing I could do. The ney flute can be made with bamboo. Is that agricultural?”

Razgui also told Lebrecht that, as a non-citizen, he was reluctant to confront U.S. Customs officials.

the very big stupid

i might have known… 8/

evil google

Hello,

After reviewing your appeal, we have determined that your name does not comply with the Google+ Names Policy.

We want users to be able to find each other using the name they already use with their friends, family and colleagues. For most people this is their legal name, or some variant of it, but we recognise that this isn’t always the case, and we allow for other common names in Google+ – specifically, those that represent an individual with an established online identity with a meaningful following. If you haven’t already done so, you can provide us with additional information regarding an established identity by re-submitting an appeal that includes references to where you are known by this name either in online or offline settings.

Note that if you’re trying to set up a page for a business, band, group or other organisation, please sign up with your own name and then create a Google+ Page. If you’re trying to add an alternative name (such as a nickname, maiden name or name in another script), please sign up with your full name; you can add this alternative name (which will appear alongside your full name) once you’ve signed up.

You may re-appeal with additional information, if you have not already done so. If you’re already using Google+, your current name will continue to be used.

The Google+ team.

i suppose i should have known better than to trust google with my name… Don’t Be Evil? Google Funding a Slew of Right-Wing Groups – the question remains whether or not i actually WANT google to know who and where i am…

enlightenment, links, the very big stupid

internal dissent

let me preface this by saying that I KNOW this kind of dissent is prevalent in every other religion on the planet, and that’s not stopping people from believing it (whatever “it” is) anyway, but it’s things like this that make me suspicious of ALL religions, and this one in particular.

and that’s also not to avoid the subject of “the really big” dissent, which is the difference between catholicism and protestantism, which far outweighs any other, relatively minor dissent that comes after it, but that also does nothing to negate the fact that these are two protestants who disagree with one another… one to the point of hanging up on an interviewer who has taken “the other side” of the argument, despite the fact that he really should be answering some of the questions the interviewer is asking.

if you haven’t figured it out by now, i’m talking about the feud that is brewing between hometown right-wing nut-job mark driscoll, and equally right-wing nut job, national “christian” broadcaster janet mefferd. i think it’s really instructive to see these two right-wing nut-jobs battle it out, to the point of one of them hanging up on the other one. quite apart from the fact that great peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall offend them (psalm 119.165, hat tip to bruce gerencser for the reference) and mark driscoll definitely seems offended by janet mefferd’s line of inquiry, it’s not an athiest pointing out the fallacies of a “christian’s” argument, it’s two “christians” battling it out over who has the “right-er”, wrong position… 😐

as much as i hate to say it, i agree with janet mefferd this time. mark driscoll has some extreme soul searching to do, as well as quite a bit of going back over old publications to find the plagiarisms and footnoting them correctly… if nothing else.

and it makes me seriously wonder how anyone can take him seriously after this… i mean, my philosophy makes people think i’m out of my mind, and that’s okay with me. but mark driscoll preaching against plagiarism, while, at the same time, plagiarising, himself, follows what i believe in a technical sense, however, there are limits to how meaningless it can be, before it actually becomes meaningless… and it is my impression that mark driscoll crossed that line a while ago. any credibility that mark driscoll may have had disappeared a long, long time ago, and judging by how he responded to janet mefferd’s line of questioning, it’s not going to reappear again any time in the forseeable future.

links, rants, the very big stupid

this is… amusing??

as you may or may not know from the news, george zimmerman has, once again, made headlines by doing something extraordinarily stupid for someone with as much public “rep” as he has currently, but that isn’t what i am referring to.

apparently the national report has a couple of articles, including Mainstream Media Falls for George Zimmerman HOAX – Social Media Abuzz and a poll whose question is Which Ethnicity Will George Zimmerman Murder Next?

under ordinary circumstances, i would think this was “too current” to make jokes about, but, at the same time, i think that george zimmerman deserves both to have people laugh at him, and to go to jail… and, i’m sure that, eventually, people will realise that the national report has about as much credibility as the onion, but considering how many people read articles from the onion and take them seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me too much if someone took this and ran with it…

… which would be HILARIOUS! 👿

links, rants, the very big stupid

put this into a perspective that we can relate to…

Don’t panic: Earth has at least 1.75 billion years to go, scientists say — saying it like that makes it seem like there’s something that we, as living individuals, could do about it. putting it into a little more realistic perspective, i.e. 100 years is 3 to 4 generations, that is 52,500,000 to 70,000,000 GENERATIONS they think we will last until the sun gets too hot…

i’m pretty sure they will have completely forgotten about me, and my son, and his offspring, and their offspring, and their offspring, before we even have to think about worrying that we’re approaching the end of the world. we have a better chance of ending the world ourselves before then than we do actually lasting that long.

get over it. the sun is eventually going to get too hot for humans to live on earth, but, unless we act a lot more sensibly than we have been the past 2000 years, we’re very likely to drive ourselves into extinction a long time before that will happen.

cannabis, corruption, i am a terrorist, the very big stupid

well, so much for that fantasy… 8/

my impression is that there may be a different reaction if they called it by its proper name, which is CANNABIS, instead of what the “people” call it… CANNABIS, as a word, bears a very strong resemblance to other useful things, like canvas (which was made out of cannabis fibers, in the past)… and if we’re EVER going to convince “scientific” people that cannabis is beneficial, we’re going to have to use terminology that is correct… “marijuana” and “pot” are good for casual references, but, please, use “cannabis” when you’re talking about legalising it, okay?

the same goes for “reschedule”… it would be an entirely different headline if it read “White House: Obama has no plans to legalise cannabis”… if you’re going to use obscurity to mask the fact that you’re not going to do something that would actually produce a positive change in society, that makes it even more devious, scheming and wrong than if you were being direct about it. 😐

—–

White House: Obama has no plans to reschedule marijuana

The White House said Wednesday that President Barack Obama had no intention of altering the government’s policy towards marijuana.

At a daily press briefing, CNN’s chief White House correspondent Jessica Yellin asked Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest if the Obama administration had any plans to reschedule marijuana. The drug is currently classified as a Schedule I substance, while cocaine and methamphetamine are classified as less harmful Schedule II substances.

“The administration’s position on this has been clear and consistent for some time now that while the prosecution of drug traffickers remains an important priority, the president and the administration believe that targeting individual marijuana users, especially those with serious illnesses and their caregivers, is not the best allocation for federal law enforcement resources,” Earnest replied.

In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder directed federal prosecutors to not go after medical marijuana patients. Holder said prosecuting medical marijuana patients was a not good use of resources, but marijuana dispensaries were still fair game. Under the Obama administration, more than 200 medical marijuana facilities have been raided, even though they are legal under state laws.

At the press briefing, Earnest also indicated that the Obama administration has no intention of making it easier to research the medical benefits of marijuana.

cannabis, drugs, rants, the very big stupid

OY!

i thought i was fairly clear about my disapproval of “K2” and suchlike stuff, but this makes me wonder how muddied my explanation might be, without my knowing it… 😐

i got an email (for a change, most people call me with questions of this nature, which may be a sign that i overlooked) which said “Do you sell anything like K2?”. i responded with a link to the page mentioned above — http://www.hybridelephant.com/K2.php — and figured that would be the last i would hear from that particular potential customer…

which is fine with me, as far as i’m concerned. if someone wants to go out and poison themselves, instead of taking a substance that has never killed ANYBODY in recorded history*, i’m certainly not going to stand in their way, but i’m also certainly NOT going to sell them the poison, and i’m going to do my best to inform them that the substance they want to take, is, in fact poisonous, but if they’re still dead set, i’m not going to stand in their way…

but this is where it gets weird. i logged in this morning and found a response. the guy had written me back, and said “I checked the link but I didn’t see K2 for sale. Can you advise?”

… 😮

so i responded, yet again:

the reason you didn’t see it is because it is not available from Hybrid Elephant. i do not sell things that are deadly poisonous if you ingest them.

if you want cannabis, go out and buy cannabis, don’t buy some erzatz knock-off
that might kill you. you’ll get ripped off, at the very least.

that’s my advice.

i hope that’s clear enough for him…

because if he writes me again, i’m going to LMAO at him…

ETA: he wrote back… LMAO! 😀 apparently he “can’t find cannabis” where he lives… it’s my guess that he’s too young to know where to look to begin with. either that or he simply hasn’t looked hard enough.

* i know there are spurrious reports of people who were using cannabis and died in a car crash, or that sort of thing, but, technically, those people didn’t die as a result of using cannabis, they died because of a car crash. the LD50 for THC is 1,270 mg/kg, which works out to over 115 grams of THC (not “of cannabis”) for a 200 pound person, in a limited period of time… which is not possible in this universe… seriously, more than 10 grams of cannabis in a limited period of time, and the 200 pound person that i am familiar with would most likely be asleep, and unable to ingest any more… 😉

in reality, there have been no deaths that come about as a direct result of using cannabis by a human being, in recorded history.

frustration, the very big stupid

GL58315839A – the $20 bill that nobody (except me) wants. 8/

20 dollar bilfthis $20 bill got caught in the dryer a couple of weeks ago. i took it to the chase branch that is in the local safeway to see if i could get it replaced. they told me that “there was less than 50% of the bill” and they couldn’t replace it.

😮

okay, i suppose that’s one way of looking at it…

i took it to the regular bank branch, i don’t know what bank – it was one that i am not a customer of, but it was right next to the local safeway in which the chase branch is located. i figured that the chase branch in the safeway was not a “real” bank branch, and that a “real” bank branch might have a “more liberal” policy regarding replacing mutilated currency. but the teller of that branch said that she couldn’t read the serial number, and that meant that she couldn’t take it.

😮

the serial number is GL53815389A. you can see it by combining what is visible in the upper left corner with the part that is visible in the lower right corner… and there is a solid, unbroken band running along the top of the bill, that PROVES i didn’t try to “moodge two bills together” to make a readable serial number.

i then called BECU, who told me that if i took it to one of their branches, along with my ID, they could help me out. so i took it to the BECU financial center in federal way (which is the closest financial center to my home, about a 10 minute drive away), but they don’t have tellers, so the lady suggested that i put the mutilated bill in a deposit envelope (because, obviously, it wouldn’t go into the cash machine) and they would automatically deposit it in my account. she even filled out the deposit envelope for me.

two days later, i got the bill back, in a fancy transparent envelope, with a note that said “The above deposit was adjusted for the following reason: Non-negotiable item cash $20.00 – if you have any questions, please contact Member Services…”

😮

it is either “Non-negotiable item” or it is “cash $20.00”. it CAN NOT be both, at the same time. it is either “legal tender for all debts public and private” or it is a “Non-negotiable item”… 😐

so, i called member services again and they explained that, because of the fact that the branch i had taken it to didn’t have tellers, that was why the bill had been returned. however, they assured me that, if i took it to a branch that had tellers, they “guaranteed” me that they would replace my mutilated currency.

unfortunately, the closest BECU branch that has tellers is the tukwilla branch, which is about a 45 minute drive from my home… 😐

SO, i drove to the tukwilla branch, and stood in line for 20 minutes just to get to the receptionist. when i finally got to the receptionist, i told her the story of the $20 bill that nobody wants, and she said that she would find “someone from the teller line” to help me with my “unusual situatuion”. she then took off, leaving me standing at the receptionist’s desk with a line of people behind me (who were getting peeved that they had to wait this long) to find someone.

five interminable minutes later, she came back and said that there would be someone to help me, and went back to the line of people behind me. after another ten minutes or so, a lady came up, and i told her the story of the $20 bill that nobody wants, and she told me that THEY COULDN’T ACCEPT IT and recommended that i send it to the federal reserve… and, according to their web site, they may or may not accept it, they won’t even let me know for six months, and i have to send it by registered mail, which will cost me more than $20… unless i want to deliver it in person…

not to mention the fact that, technically, sending currency through the US mail is illegal… 😐

i have since taken it to three different commercial bank branches, and they have all given me the same advice: send it to the federal reserve and wait 6 months for them to decide whether to respond or not…

😐

SO, the upshot of the whole fiasco is that i have an acknowledged $20 bill, which is apparently a “non-negotiable item” that nobody except me is particularly interested in redeeming. there has got to be a way to make something artistic out of it, that i can sell for more than $20, in defiance of this STUPID way of doing business… 😡

i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

this might be alarming if we hadn’t already seen this law passed once…

Arizona bill could criminalize Internet trolling

but a similar law, on a national level, has actually been in effect since early 2006, which makes me strongly suspicious that this is some republican’s way of drumming up support prior to an election… either that, or they’re planning some really horrendous laws behind the scenes, and they wanted to pass a pointless law that would raise peoples’ ire to the point where they will ignore the really horrendous stuff…

one way or the other, i’m really glad i don’t live in arizona these days… 😐

Continue reading this might be alarming if we hadn’t already seen this law passed once… →

the very big stupid

this is why the world is going down-hill so quickly…

i was out doing some errands in auburn today, and, because of the fact that they had torn up my regular route – they were actually letting traffic through, one car at a time, and traffic had backed up for a mile and a half, when you could get exactly the same place by going a block out of your way, but nobody (else) had thought to do it – i went past a small, non-descript building that had a sign that really, REALLY confused me… i don’t know whether or not the people meant it to sound the way it does, but, despite the fact that i know what they were probably trying to say, it really doesn’t seem to convey the fact in any immediate way, and, in fact, most likely conveys entirely the opposite of what they were trying to say.

the sign said:CHRIST FREE COMMUNITY CLINIC

at first, i thought they might have meant “CHRIST COMMUNITY FREE CLINIC”, but then i realised that, without punctuation, either way, they were advertising the exact opposite of what they probably intended to advertise… they probably should have chosen entirely different wording, or a more obvious layout for their sign…

and the probability is very high that i am the only person to have noticed this…

spam, the very big stupid

i just thought i’d let you know…

1 Comment

i got 3 (yes, three) spam messages, with attachments, last night, from various addresses at nyc dot gov (which doesn’t mean a lot) with the consistent subject line “Uniform traffic ticket”. upon opening the messages (in a text reader, so that nothing tries to execute and take over my computer), i discovered that i have been charged with “NYS V AND T LAW” (which i assume is “New York State Vehicle and Transportation Law”) “SPEED OVER 55 ZONE”, on 07/05/2011 at 7:25 AM…

except that it neglects to tell me where, and because of the fact that i KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that i was NOT anywhere where the “NYS V AND T LAW” would be in effect, ESPECIALLY at that time of the morning, i have a reasonably good idea that this is actually a spam/virus/malware message that was intended to gain access to my computer via “social engineering”…

IT’S NOT GONNA HAPPEN! ☹

this is just to let anybody know – who might have the slightest idea that this is anything OTHER than a spam message… states may send out tickets for traffic offenses by email, but they’re OBVIOUSLY more legitimate than a message such as this… 😐

geek stuff, malfunctioning computers, the very big stupid

“Native”? HTML5 support?

um… i think that someone at micro$lop should be told those words don’t mean what he thinks they do…

Microsoft breaks own world record for IE nonsense – quite apart from the fact that HTML is designed to run non-“native”ly, and is platform-agnostic – i.e. it DOESN’T MATTER which platform you “run” it on (actually, being an interpreted language, it would be more accurate to say that it “doesn’t matter which platform you render it on”, but the difference may be a bit too complex for the non-geek audience), the fact that they are making such a big thing about it means a possibility of a number of different things:HAH HAH!

1) they are relying on the fact that you don’t know what this means… in other words, they are assuming that the consumer is stupid and will buy any new, shiny toy that the marketers wave under their noses.

this is an almost certain fact, since their job is to know what this stuff means. from engineers to marketers, they all have intimate knowledge of exactly what “native HTML5” means, they ALL know the phrase is essentially meaningless, and they are doing this PRECISELY because they know it will boost micro$not stock prices.

2) not only do they know what it means, they also know that even if it is explained to you, it won’t matter because, as i explained above, their interest is not in serving the customer, but how much money they can make. this is an extension of the “we don’t care, we don’t have to” attitude that micro$awft has developed over the past 20 years or so.

3) judging by the fact that, if you are currently running windows and IE, you HAVE code that renders this line of text as more than one line of text, in spite of the FACT that the HTML specification requires the escape sequence &nbsp; to render a “NON BREAKING space” (meaning that, instead of breaking a line, if you put &nbsp; in between words, they’ll all stay on one line, and cause “horizontal scrolling” instead) – a BUG which i reported IN 1997, and they still haven’t fixed it – the fact that they’ll eventually acknowledge that “native HTML5” means essentially nothing, is quite remote indeed.

(for those of you who are unfortunate enough to be running IE, the previous paragraph, from the number “3” to the phrase just before “a BUG…” should have rendered on one line, and you should see a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of your browser window, because of the “non-breaking spaces” i put between the words)

why should they? it doesn’t make any difference, and it raises the bottom line, which was the goal all along.

and people wonder why i won’t own a computer that runs windoesn’t any longer… pfui… 😛

cannabis, corruption, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, the very big stupid, windoesn't

another week closer to the eschaton…

The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence – “Americans are not as violent as the most extremely violent cultures around the world, but we certainly are not as peaceful as the most peaceful societies. Unfortunately, our culture appears to be going towards increased social violence.” [Author James DeMeo, Ph.D.] points to the general failure of parents and sex-education programs to say much of anything positive about sexual pleasure, with the great emphasis upon “abstinence education”, as a major cause for the growing violence in our schools. “Our young people should be warmly romancing each other, dancing and singing together, making love and enjoying what should be the happiest time of their lives. Instead, we start our children off with a lot of hidden cruelty in the hospital birth, with incubator-isolation, denial of the mother’s breast, time-table feedings, circumcision and so forth. – no wonder we’re screwed up. all the more reason to scrap every vestige of what passes for society these days, and create something different.

The Oil BP Tried To Hide Has Been Discovered, In Thick Layers On the Sea Floor Over An Area of Several Thousand Square Miles – don’t fool yourself, it’s not over yet, by a long shot.

You Are A Terrorist – i’ve been saying that for years. now the gummint is actually catching up… 😐

Osama bin Dead A While – merry x-mas, the war on terror is over, whether they like it or not… but don’t let the gummint know, because they’re all set to whip up another fake osama video to scare us again…

US empire could collapse at any time – are you ready? this is a lot more “for real” than you might think: Missile defence FAIL: US ‘kill vehicle’ space weapon flunks test

Homeland Security Trolling We Won’t Fly Blog, Boy, 13, Busted For Illegal Marker Possession, TSA Too Busy Groping, Perving, Playing God To Notice Guns And Bombs, 10,000 Child Porn Images Found On TSA Worker’s Computer and Police Fatally Shoot Douglas Zerby For Holding Water Nozzle – what they are doing instead of searching for real terrorists… 😐

Plan to Turn Post Office Trucks Into Stasi Data Collection Nodes and Trash collectors to serve as eyes and ears in the street for police – because the police are too busy searching for terrorists people with water nozzles to kill… also, do you think that this just might be because of budget cuts, and/or because of the fact that they want to turn the country into an embodiment of the book 1984…?

Who Is the FBI Really Trying to Entrap? – muslims? people with water nozzles? more likely it’s poor, underpriveledged black and brown people who can’t fight back effectively on their own…

Probable carcinogen hexavalent chromium found in drinking water of 31 U.S. cities – this is one of the reasons i only drink artesian well water, and have for the past 25 years… that, and beer… 8)

UN defends human right to WikiLeaked info – so…

Wikileaks and the Definition of Terrorism – TL.DR: what wikileaks is doing cannot be defined as terrorism except, maybe, to the political elite in washington who are making all the fuss about it. WikiLeaks cables: BP suffered blowout on Azerbaijan gas platform – wow, wikileaks and the gulf oil spill… is this the work of a terrorist organisation?

also, the latest, futile attempt to make wikileaks go away, Feds Seek Computer Firewall to Block WikiLeaks ‘Pollution’ and Pentagon bars own journalists from reading Wikileaks – you would think that they’d have heard of the streisand effect by now…

Broadband firms urged to block sex websites to protect children – yeah, like that’s really gonna happen… maybe they could ban spam, too, while they’re at it… 😐 seriously, i think that any proposed legislation that is being put in place “to protect the children” should be banned on principle. the fact is, proposed “legislation” that can’t find any other reason than “to protect the children” has been proven, in the past, to be distinctly deficient in doing anything other than confusing people, violating someone’s civil rights or lining the politicians’ pockets… and usually a combination of all three…

Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science – there’s some static running around because Faux News is disputing the report from last week that said that watching Faux News makes people stupid, and, at the same time, muddying the climate change waters with false information… not only that, but rupert murdoch’s companies have been on the forefront of the “war against christmas” game, and yet his Holiday Message was just that… why does rupert murdoch hate jesus?

Your right to protest in under threat – britain is being brought under the thumb of the rich politicians, and america is next.

Judge finds ‘increasing’ difficulty in seating marijuana juries – this is related to that post from last week, except that it’s a little more to the point: jury nullification is becoming a widely-enough-known phenomenon that courts won’t seat people on a jury if they have said that they know about it as an option, and when enough people have to be passed over to get an ignorant enough jury to actually be able to convict someone for possession of a miniscule quantity of cannabis, the courts have to look for “other alternatives”…

Your Apps Are Watching You – this is one of the primary reasons i don’t use a “smart” phone. i like my phones dumb and subservient, which is exactly what they’re supposed to be…

Is a BSOD on a bus … a BuSOD? – giggle…

corruption, depression, friday the 13th, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, technology, the very big stupid

another week closer to the eschaton…

double whammy! friday the 13th comes on a monday this month… namely today!

we’ll start this off with more oil-spill madness: BP Challenges Oil Spill Amount In An Attempt to Reduce Cost of Fines – it never ended, media just got tired of reporting it… 😐 for example: Navy Secretary Mabus pushes Pentagon to feed soldiers more Gulf seafood – i don’t know whether this should make me chortle evil laughter and say that they deserved it, or gasp in shocked amazement because nobody should be forced to eat that glop… especially when there are people saying things like “I wouldn’t eat shrimp, fish or crab caught in the Gulf,” and “There is no safe level of exposure to this oil, because it contains carcinogens, mutagens that can damage DNA and cause cancer and other chronic health problems.”

5 Myths About How to Treat Depression – this is the primary reason i am not interested in medication. i’d rather be depressed. i already know how to deal with it without taking medications.

One cigarette can kill you; so can one act of gay sex and House Republicans Try to Kill Bill to Feed Hungry Schoolchildren While Insisting on Tax Breaks for the Rich – at least half of our country’s citizens agree with these buffoons… this is why i’m depressed… 😐

Dick Cheney faces bribery scandal charges in Nigeria – i don’t understand why nigeria can charge him with bribery, but the united states won’t charge him with war crimes… in spite of the prevelance of 419 scams in nigeria, if they can get him on bribery charges, more power to them. Halliburton may pay $500 million to keep Cheney out of prison – wait… hasn’t he been charged with bribery?

the Wikileaks domain has been shut down (and WikiLeaks Dropped by Domain Name Provider) in a feeble and largely ineffective attempt to erase the “stuff that people shouldn’t know” from the web… fortunately, their IP address has not been blocked (so far), and there are also over 500 mirrors in case that is taken down as well. not only that, but because of the ongoing attacks to their infrastructure, they’ve released their entire archive of messages up to this point, just to make sure that the message gets out there if they can’t deliver it personally. meanwhile, US military threatens soldiers not to read Wikileaks – if the US government has nothing to hide, then why are they making such a big deal over this? the longer they keep this up, the more guilty it makes them appear… it also appears as though wikileaks has an ace up its sleeve: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘will release poison pill of damaging secrets if killed or arrested’ so download that archive now… you know you want to… 🙂

also If publishing the WikiLeaks cables were against the law, could the New York Times go to jail? – if julian assange goes to jail for it, then the new york times should go as well. if not, then why was he arrested anyway? and, by the way, Ellsberg: "EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."

meanwhile, Irony? State Dept. criticizes Assange but plans to stage ‘Press Freedom Day’ and Someone Should Tell The State Dept That The State Dept Is Hosting World Press Freedom Day – the way we celebrate World Press Freedom Day in the united states, apparently, is by having julian assange arrested, in another country, for “sex by surprise”… what? especially while It appears that Assange may have fallen into a "CIA Honeytrap". and speaking of free speech, Man gets 33 months for threatening Obama in poem

also, PayPal Busted for Bogus Wikileaks Excuse – so paypal cut off wikileaks’ access to money that had been donated to wikileaks, because of a state department letter saying that what wikileaks does is illegal… that doesn’t exist they were scared that the US govermnent might come after them next… does that sound about right?

and, for those of you who have actually been wondering exactly what was in those cables that made the US government so uptight about wikileaks, here’s a sample: Consult us before using intelligence to commit war crimes, US tells Uganda – not “obey the rules of war”, but “let us know before you use our intelligence to break the rules of war”… yep, that’s a good enough reason to have julian assange arrested on trumped up charges… 😐

Tension grows between Calif. Muslims, FBI after informant infiltrates mosque – they’re stretching the line mighty thin if they’ve got to hire a guy to infitrate mosques and talk up jihad, just in order to get terrorists people who might be terrorists to arrest… also, Holder to Muslims Re Stings: Get Used to It – not only are they stretching the line, but those people who object might just be terrorists themselves, because they “simply do not have their facts straight.”

US Has Lost All Moral High Ground On Internet Censorship and Homeland Security ‘messages’ coming to Walmart, hotels, malls – now they want us to do their job for them, as well… 😐 that reminds me… it’s been a while since i posted this:

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.

Here Come Homeland Security Internet Police, and They’re Already Shutting Down Web Sites They Don’t Like – just like TSA for your computer, whether you like it or not… 😐

and, speaking of TSA, TSA Subjects Indian Ambassador To US To Glass Cage, Enhanced Groping – “It is believed that the TSA operatives flagged Ms. Shankar not because she set of the metal detector, but because she was wearing a sari, a long traditional Indian robe.” – Indian Embassy describes incident as “unacceptable”

Tooth Decay to Be a Thing of the Past – i’ve always wondered why people who brush their teeth religiously still sometimes have extremely bad teeth, while other people can not brush their teeth at all and still have all their teeth at age 80… this is apparently part of the reason. how much you want to bet that the dental association buys all of these guys research and buries it, so that dentists will still be able to fleece everybody?

Light can generate lift – wow! now all somebody’s got to do is figure out how to use it…

UN climate kooks want to cripple US economy and ban H2O – i think the point was that people in positions of power will be more likely to agree to something if they don’t know precisely what it is…

for those that oppose gay marriage, another big slap in the face, as US scientists create mice from two fathers – maybe it wasn’t “adam and steve” “in the beginning”, but the fact that it can be sort of negates your little fantasy about how “god” created everything, now, doesn’t it?

The Insanity Virus – no obvious link to toxoplasma gondii, but it makes me wonder…

Man legally changes name to Captain Awesome – i wonder why Boomer The Dog wasn’t allowed to change his name, but Captain Awesome sailed right through…

big brother, bizarre, cannabis, corruption, i am a terrorist, pictures, the very big stupid

another week closer to the eschaton…

Spanish woman claims ownership of the sun – just wait until she gets sued for sunburn…

evil googleAnti Sarah Palin Post Gets Google Censorship – don’t! be! evil!!

FCC may forgo ‘Net Neutrality’ for wireless networks – say goodbye to the internet…

Homeland Security Seizes 70+ Websites for Copyright and Trademark Violations and Homeland Security shuts down dozens of Web sites without court order – due process be damned, after net-neutrality fails, you’d better believe that they’re going to start cracking down on anyone who has a web site with which “they” do not agree, regardless of whether it contains illegal material or not… and of course nobody cares, because net-neutrality is something of which most people aren’t even aware.

Bioencryption can store almost a million gigabytes of data inside bacteria – “a single gram of E. coli cells could hold up to 900,000 gigabytes (or 900 terabytes) of data, meaning these bacteria have almost 500 times the storage capacity of a top of the line commercial hard drive.”

Minn. Pol With Gun Outside Abortion Clinic Says He Was Just In Area ‘Checking On’ His Girlfriend – this is how one married, republican politician justifies potentially unlawful behaviour: it’s all a “misunderstanding”, he was just “trying to check up on her”… with a loaded gun… of course if he had been a democrat, or an ordinary citizen, he would have been put in jail, and there would have been no story…

Drug tunnel uncovered at San Diego-Tijuana border, officials say; nearly 20 tons of marijuana seized – if they had passed Proposition 19, they wouldn’t have to worry about it, but because they didn’t, the federal government now has to make a big deal out of it, and waste the taxpayers’ money to rid themselves of something that would have been useless otherwise.

Willie Nelson charged with pot possession in Texas – give willie a break: he’s a celebrity, he’s already got massive problems with the government, and he’s an old man, for god’s sake! 😐

Civil Unions for Illinois? – civil union ≠ polygamy, regardless of how much you say it does…

FoxNation.com Reposts Anti-Obama Article From The Onion, Doesn’t Mention It’s A Joke – it’s things like this that are one of the principle reasons why the terrorists have won the war on terrorism.

this is why people treat torture as though it was “no big thing”… – Torture memo author compared waterboarding to speeding – dude, where’s my country? 😐

Clueless Patsy Set-up by FBI in Christmas Tree Bombing Plot and FBI stopped Portland bomb suspect from taking job before sting – the FBI has been up to their old shennanigans again: finding a mentally disturbed 19-year-old kid, preventing him from getting gainful employment, building him up to believe that he’s serving a greater purpose, convincing him that he’s building a bomb (complete with a real test explosion in a remote area), and then arresting him and claiming that they’ve caught another “terrorist”. if they actually had a terrorist, my guess is that nobody would recognise him… 😐

Rep. Kucinich slams fake Afghan elections, fake withdrawal, fake Taliban – i still say he would have made a much better president than the democretin that won…

and, while we’re on the subject of the fake taliban, The ‘Fake Taliban’ Is A Real Embarassment To NATO – “It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.” also Afghan "peace talks" impostor paid by MI6

Woman: TSA Agents Singled Me Out For My Breasts – i wonder how much longer this is going to go on before someone decides to do something violent?

TSA Glass Box Mother Over Stored Breast Milk – she’s a mother, and pumps breastmilk for her infant. she doesn’t have a problem, until one day she’s held up because the TSA doesn’t know their own rules, so she files a complaint. the next time she travels, the TSA is waiting for her and makes up rules to prevent her from making her flight. the reason they get away with it…?

Why the TSA pat-downs and body scans are unconstitutional – 😐

and then the TSA touches their balls... like this...TSA Worker Accused Of Assault Had Prior Record and TSA Groin Searches Menstruating Woman and TSA Tactics Find Ominous Parallel in Nazi Germany and Children Being Trained That Being Taken From Parents & Molested Is Normal – whatever happened, opt-out day apparently didn’t have any effect, and things are continuing to get worse at a surprising pace…

Are Air Travelers Criminal Suspects? – federal agents should be subject to the same laws as ordinary citizens. why aren’t they?

TSA Administrative Directive: Opt-Outters To Be Considered "Domestic Extremists" – we’re teetering ever closer to the edge of an abyss…

meanwhile, Child Finds Loaded Gun Magazine On Flight – oh yeah… the terrorists have definitely won… 😐

"Barefoot bandit" suspect pleads innocent – go colton!

bizarre, corruption, i am a terrorist, the very big stupid

another week closer to the eschaton…

A Vegan No More – i wasn’t vegan, but i was a strict vegetarian for 15 years, and i didn’t have as severe health problems as this lady did, but in a lot of ways, this could be a story about me.

92% of Afghans never heard of 9/11 – four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to “destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan.”

Sir, There’s a Camera in Your Head – this guy has a lot going for him in my book: he hacked a video game and placed a virtual avatar of himself as a suicide-bomber hunting president george w. bush, he confined himself to an art gallery where people could shoot him with paintballs, and now he’s having a camera implanted in his head, and displaying the pictures it takes in a museum in qatar, but what makes me really sit up and take notice is that his current show is called The 3rd I, which was the name of the magazine i designed and printed in the mid-1980s… great minds really do think alike… 8)

Huckabee Calls For Lawmakers To Ignore Court Rulings They Disagree With – um… no. 😐

10 Ways to Outfox Cops That Are Abusing Their Powers to Trick You – common sense, really, but they’re all there, in a brief, understandable format.

How Wal-Mart, Google and Other Corporate Giants Are Trying to Trick Progressive Consumers – “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you, fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

FBI pressuring Google, Facebook to allow ‘back doors’ for wiretapping and Debt collectors using Facebook to stalk and humilate – more reasons to avoid using google and facebook… not only that, but Tim Berners-Lee says Facebook ‘threatens’ web future – and, personally, i believe that tim berners-lee is a person who we should probably listen to when it comes to the future of the web…

Suspected bomb in Namibia was ‘security test’ – wait, so the suspected bomb that everybody was so up-in-arms about earlier in the week was actually a US made “dummy” bomb to test security?? i would say that whatever test that was designed to be a part of, is a resolute failure, if it took them four days to figure out who sent it…

$11,000 fine, arrest possible for some who refuse airport scans and pat downs – if you decide that the porno-scanner and the sexual assault enhanced pat down are too much for you, don’t plan on going to the airport at all, ’cause you’re not gonna get out of it, one way or the other… 😐TSA US Department of Molestation

TSA Opt-Out Day, Now with a Superfantastic New Twist! – wear a kilt and strike a blow against the very big stupid! or, if you’re a celebrity like penn jillette you can get your own, private escort to assure the TSA goons that everything will be okay…

Full Frontal Nudity Doesn’t Make Us Safer and Does TSA Behavior Fall under Definition of Terrorism? – the government are terrorists! porno-scanners and fondling…

Why Congress Isn’t So Concerned With TSA Nude Scans & Gropes: They Get To Skip Them – now it all makes sense…

One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans and Leaked Body Scanner Images Do Not Show The Whole Picture – Advanced imaging technology cannot store, print, transmit or save the image, and the image is automatically deleted from the system after it is cleared by the remotely located security officer? i think not… it’s just a matter of time before somebody posts a web site that offers porno-scanner pictures…

Fly With Dignity – sign the petition to end invasion of privacy and “dick-measuring” scanners now!

Sanford Airport to opt out of TSA screening – orlando says enough is enough. they set a good example for everyone else.

TSA Likely To Face Multiple Sexual Assault Charges For New Searches – the war on terror is over. the terrorists have won.

Is your ISP throttling you? Just switch—if you live in the EU – if you live in the US, you’re quickly running out of options, and those in charge apparently don’t care.

Oil to run out 100 years before replacements become viable, study claims – when in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout… and that’s gonna’ be about all you can do, because there will be no more oil… 😐

Google Is Assembling a City – “When society inevitably collapses, Googleville will be the sole safe haven, but only those with company IDs will be allowed in.” this is the reason why i am more than a little bit suspicious of google and their motives for doing things like sending me $100 in free advertising if i respond by a certain time…

The Dominant Culture Is Killing The Planet…It’s Very Important For Us To Start To Build A Culture Of Resistance – yep.

Panic after ‘Devil attack’ at school – they still blame things on the devil? this is the 21st century, people… 😐

Aleister Crowley for President, 2012 – “We realize that Aleister Crowley is dead. And British. And, moreover, not running for office. Nevertheless, we believe that the most effective vote you can cast in 2012 is one for Aleister Crowley.”

big brother, bizarre, cannabis, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, sex, technology, the very big stupid

another week closer to the eschaton…

in honour of the “holiday” Cambodians beaten, raped and killed at illegal detention camp funded by UN – trick or treat for UNICEF…

A Helpful Venn Diagram by Dave MakesArkansas school board member to resign over anti-gay post – the problem with this guy, and all of the “christians” out there like him, is that the only reason he’s sorry now is because he got caught. if he hadn’t posted those comments on facebook, maybe expressed them privately, but for the most part kept them to himself, then he would continue to be a member of the arkansas school board, and nobody would be wise to his warped sensibilities. the “problems” caused by minorities of any kind are going to be solved only when these hateful, and unfortunately quite large portions of the population are eliminated, either through re-education or attrition.

Furious growth and cost cutting led to BP oil spills, past and present and Panel Says Firms Knew of Cement Flaws Before Spill – if you thought it was over, think again…

Fresh blockades as a quarter of France’s petrol stations still dry – a couple of weeks ago i posted a link to an article which said that there is no “plan b” to fall back on, in case “plan a” (which appears to be something along the lines of “ignore it and maybe it will go away”) fails. this is exactly the kind of chaos that you can expect to see more of, as time goes on, and oil becomes more and more scarce. here are some examples of how things are falling apart faster than we can fix them:

The scary actual U.S. government debt – “Let’s get real, the United States is bankrupt.”

What It’s Like to Work in Walmart – an underemployed teacher gets a job at walmart, hillarity ensues. beware: this could will probably happen to you.

Oops: Pentagon loses contact with nukes in Wyoming – it’s all right, folks, nothing to see here… move along.

Google finally admits that its Street View cars DID take emails and passwords from computers – DON’T. BE. EVIL! 😛

Group offers $10,000 to anyone who can disprove the claim that ‘cannabis is safer than alcohol’ – they’re confident that the $10,000 will remain unclaimed, and i don’t doubt they’re right, but i doubt that it’s going to make that much of a difference when it comes to legalisation. most people are pretty stupid, and that includes the people in charge… 😐

meanwhile: Study: Alcohol more lethal than heroin, cocaine – overall, alcohol outranked all other substances… cannabis, ecstasy and LSD scored far lower… BIG surprise, especially considering that the alcohol lobby has been pouring money into the campains against the legalisation of cannabis…

Sex researchers: "Size" does matter – year-long study from turkey concludes that men with a higher body mass index last longer in bed. mcdonald’s advertising to follow soon.

I Can’t Find My Phone – finally, a web site that’s actually good for something!

John Cage still being cheated out of royalties for his silent work –

bizarre, cannabis, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

another week closer to the eschaton…

news has been too depressing the past week, so this week’s collection of links is going to be mostly fluff. i’ll leave it up to others to decide which is which.

Christine O’Donnell: Where In The Constitution Is The Separation Of Church And State? and she’s now offering a reward of $1,000 For Anyone Who Can Find The Phrase "Separation Of Church And State" In The Constitution – why is there still any question about whether or not she’s actually qualified to be a state senator? that’s like saying sarah palin is qualified to be president of the united states… 😐

Former Surgeon General calls for legalization of marijuana and Dozens of law professors nation-wide endorse Calif. marijuana legalization – but the federal government is going to continue to prosecute people for cannabis, in spite of state laws that legalise it… it’s not exactly what i was expecting from obama and crew when i voted them into office… 😐 They’ve Stopped Pretending

The World’s Largest Gummy Worm – 128 times more massive than a traditional gummy worm, it’s three pounds and 4,000 calories of gummy… um… it looks suspiciously like a dildo…

Dead Sea scrolls going digital on Internet – yep…

Apple Patents Anti-Sexting Device – all the more impetus for kids to learn a large vocabulary.

Gangsta Lorem Ipsum – Lorizzle dang dolor sit amizzle, shizznit we gonna chung the bizzle. We gonna chung sapien velizzle, dang volutpizzle, owned quizzle, break it down vizzle, arcu.

big brother, bizarre, cannabis, geek stuff, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, imaginary pooperty, links, music, pictures, rants, technology, the very big stupid

another week closer to the eschaton…

The City That Ended Hunger – Buckminster Fuller said that we, as a people, have posessed the technology for 50 years (and he said this almost 50 years ago) to create a world where nobody has to work to survive. Why Bother Working At A Job You Hate? and The RICH Economy are my attempts at changing the world’s consciousness, but it may be that Belo Horizonte, brazil’s fourth largest city, has taken it one step further. brazil has a number of other interesting features upon which i have commented previously.

meanwhile, back in hell america, Building sand castles on Florida’s beaches is illegal – this is how BP is hoping to make you think that the oil spill is gone.

What the TSA isn’t saying about Full Body Scanners and Your Right to Opt Out – Say “I Opt Out.” Every Time. – has an interesting URI – Don’tScan.Us – and is there to remind everyone that, when travelling by air, you have the right to say “I OPT OUT” when confronted with a TSA request to what amounts to a strip search. also Portable, rapid DNA analysis tech developed – Big Brother doesn’t care whether or not you have fingerprints, and is interested in your DNA instead… more orwellian doublethink: Welfare is Employment Rights are Privileges War is Peace Illness is Health Collapse Is Recovery

Judge orders lesbian reinstated to Air Force and yet the congress in it’s infinite wisdom has decided that, even though a judge also ruled that DADT is unconstitutional, they’re not going to do anything to change it at this time. correct me if i’m wrong, but the judge that said that DADT is unconstitutional basically said that it’s against the law for the military to enforce the law as it currently stands, and still, congress feels that it’s okay to leave the law as it stands, right? that settles it, our government, and likely the governments of the countries in the rest of the world as well (since they all cooperate with each other, more or less) is irreparably broken. it’s time for that major shift in the way people think that i’ve mentioned before to actually start happening now…

and, by the way, now there’s Irrefutable Proof the Bush Tax Cuts Were a Miserable Failure – and we’re still losing to these morons…

despite the fact that Yes on Prop 19 Holds Steady Lead, 47%-42%, in Latest SurveyUSA Poll, this is what supporters of prop 19 are up against: Ex-Drug Czar Bill Bennett: Showtime’s “Weeds” is “Damaging,” Jonas Brothers Should Fight Prop 19 – regardless of whether prop 19 passes or not, however, Federal judge rules Colorado’s medical marijuana law is no defense for US drug charges. california can legalise all it wants, but until the federal government changes its mind, people will still end up going to jail for smoking a joint. and, while we’re at it, T-Mobile Claims Right to Censor Text Messages – big brother just got a little bigger and a little less like your brother.

along the same lines, according to Chapter 69.51A RCW on Medical "marijuana" (which is actually called “cannabis”, but i’m not arguing at this point), apparently i wouldn’t qualify anyway… oh well… 8/

Twitter blames website upgrade for re-introducing XSS hole – hopefully, the last word on my battle with twitter and their most recent cross-site scripting bug… which is still gone on my machine, but presumably that’s because i deleted my account before this latest round happened, and when they re-introduced it, i didn’t have an account to infect any longer…

twitter… 😐 feh.

Trojan poses as skeleton key jailbreak utility – but it only works on iPhones… wait, what? 8) heh heh heh… i am so glad i’m not a mac-head any longer…

GoDaddy.com Goes on the Auction Block – recently i read a couple of articles detailing how a whole bunch (<200) of wordpress blogs hosted by godaddy got hacked. i don’t know whether selling godaddy will make things better or worse, but it’s one of the reasons why i don’t use godaddy to begin with.

IE captain flees Microsoft for Google – when i was first getting into testing software, back in 1996, i attended a planning meeting in advance of the release of IE3 (which was still crawling with bugs, in spite of bill gates’ claim that micro$not released “bug free” software), and chris wilson was there, although he wasn’t as “important” then as he later became. however giving up micro$hit for google is sort of a lateral move for someone who is allegedly as “important” as he is… and, given that he is ultimately responsible for such travesties as IE4 and IE6, i would think that google would have second thoughts about hiring him…

How do you copy 60 million files? – yet another reason why linux rocks, and you should use it and not that crap operating system from redmond.

Nuclear Winter And Peace – look… another article by Fidel Castro… you might get the impression that he’s actually changed the way he thinks recently, and that i agree with him now…

pubic schools billboardOops! Billboard spelling error creates embarrassment

The true history of the Koran in America – reports of qur’ans in american libraries go back at least to 1683, and the first qur’an to be published in america was in 1806, over 100 years later. both thomas jefferson and john adams owned one and read it frequently… just sayin’…

Pope’s astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him – unfortunately, is not a joke… nor is this: Christian group declares jct 9 on M25 cursed, although it took me several readings to confirm that it was, in fact, totally serious… what?!?

Church of Body Modification – this has been the subject of a bunch of spam messages i have been receiving recently, but it’s a real thing, and it looks fairly interesting…

Fabrican – it gives the reference to “jeans so tight you must have sprayed them on” a whole new meaning…

bizarre, corruption, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, jeezis, technology, the very big stupid

another week closer to the eschaton…

Google guy "invaded teen users’ privacy" Google damages users’ brains – DON’T! BE! EVIL!

On the Advice of the FBI, Cartoonist Molly Norris Disappears From View – this is what happens when you take any religion to its logical conclusion.

Linus Torvalds outs himself as US citizen – gadzooks! i can’t wait to get out, and linus is on his way in… tell ya’ what, linus… i’ll trade you. Silence is the Death of Liberty is an example of why…

New 64-Bit Windows Rootkit Already ‘In The Wild’ – i’m tellin’ ya’… it’s pointless for micro$awft to create “new” operating systems, because they’re all based on former, defective, operating systems, and they’ve already got a built-in cadre of hackers who are already 98% of the way to breaking anything new that they come up with, before they release it. NOTICE TO MICKEY: the way to fix this is to use an entirely different approach, right from the very beginning – instead of basing your next 64-bit “super secure, can’t be hacked” OS on the same 8-bit kernel on which every other MS OS has been based, why not try something that no-one expects and build an entirely new kernel? what? you’re not creative enough to do that? oh, well forget it then…

Open source: a savvy bet, even in tough times – another way of putting it is that “free” is a very good way to keep me as a customer… Principia Mathematica Corporatica

Massive La. Fishkill Prompts Oil Spill Questions, Gulf Oil Refuses to Stay Hidden Underwater and In legal filings, BP says thousands of oil spill victims do not have right to sue – will it ever end? not during this decade…

Nation of Israel Buys @Israel Twitter Account From Miami Pornographer – bwaah hah hah hah hah! 8D

Purging Evil – society still has a very, very long way to go. my impression is that it will continue to be as bad as it is, if not worse, until there is a fundamental shift in the way we think and behave, and guys like cal thomas are preventing that fundamental shift from happening. yet another example (the web is full of them, there’s no counting how many stories like this there are) ‘Devil’ appears in bathroom tile – and, yes, both of these are serious. the people reporting the stories believe that they’re true, no matter how absurd they really are. more absurdity:
Scientists are creating ‘mice with human brains’ Montana Republican Party wants to make homosexuality a crime Mother Denies Heart Surgery For Infant, Cites Religion – these are not jokes.

drugs, pictures, the very big stupid

Portugal

1 Comment

portugal legalized all drugs in 2001 and the world has not ended
(thanks to drug soup, Narco Polo and Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies)

Portugal – A Real “Land of the Free”

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized personal possession of all drugs. Opponenents predicted a “parade of horrors.”

Since 2001, drug usage rates in many categories have decreased. Most notable was the large decrease in the 13 – 19 age group.

From 2001 – 2005, marijuana usage was the lowest in the EU.

Drug-related disease and mortality rates have decreased.

There is no serious push to reverse policy as by virtually every metric, decriminalization has been a “resounding success.”

The American government and media have ignored this story.

bizarre, cannabis, drugs, i am a terrorist, links, livejournal, malfunctioning people, rants, the very big stupid

another week closer to the eschaton…

i don’t use facebook for a large number of reasons. primary among these is that, despite the fact that a lot of my current friends are facebook members, there are certain people from my past that might want to get in touch with me, and i would prefer it a great deal if they did not know how to get in touch with me. not being a member of facebook is a good way to accomplish that. among the other reasons, in no particular order, are these: Facebook users ‘are insecure, narcissistic and have low self-esteem’, Understanding the latest Facebook privacy train wreck, Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook, More Reasons Why You Should Still Quit Facebook and Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook? i’m not going to rant about this, despite the fact that i could rant for quite some time about facebook, because whatever i say, people are going to do what people are going to do, and one of those things is to use facebook in spite of it’s obvious and blatant flaws.

reminder: THIS is the reason why i am no longer using LiveJournal for anything remotely blog-related. i know enough about how these things work to realise that there’s probably a lot going on that i don’t understand, and that i don’t know about, but there’s one distinct advantage to having a blog located on a server over which you have exclusive control, and that is that you don’t have perverts sysadmins stalking poking their noses in where they’re not supposed to be. if you’re looking for an alternative, i can host your domain and you can run your own version of wordpress there, and i promise i won’t comment on flocked entries. contact me for more details.

Death by iPod – this is directly related to last week’s link detailing people still falling for scams, despite the fact that they’ve been running essentially the same scams for at least ten years… society needs a collective brain upgrade. examples: Google squirrels into human brains with Scribe experiment and Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent

Windows malware dwarfs other viral threats – “The vast majority of malware – more than 99 per cent – targets Windows PCs”. another very good reason to use linux.

50 Mind Blowing Facts About America That Our Founding Fathers Never Would Have Believed – Sheriffs want lists of patients using painkillers – for example…

Stuffed Pony Blown Up By Bomb Squad Suspicious ‘FurReal’ pony blown up near elementary school – it was a battery powered, stuffed pony, in the vicinity of an elementary school… because the clowns at clownland security didn’t have anything better to do…

‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Unconstitutional – this actually happened a few days ago, but i haven’t seen it in any of the regular news at all. the “christians” will say that it’s further evidence that they are a “persecuted minority”. meanwhile Self-Described ‘Christian Counterpart To Osama Bin Laden’ Arrested In Plot To Bomb Abortion Clinic and Self-labeled ‘Christian counterpart of Osama bin Laden’ allegedly planned clinic bombing – “christians” are the real terrorists.

What does it take to be happy? About $75,000 – money can’t buy happiness, but apparently $75k a year will get you pretty close…

New research restores psychedelics’ medical respectability – first they were used as medicine for thousands of years, then they decided that they have no medicinal value, now they’re saying that they might have medicinial value after all… i wish they’d just make up their minds and stop decieving us. sign The Vienna Declaration to advocate for evidence based drug policy and strengthen the call for policies driven by evidence. join the movement to end the failed war on drugs!

Cannabis Yoga – to help you come down from your stressful life. this is not a joke.

Noam Chomsky to become new X-Factor judge – this is a joke.

blasphemy, crazy people, evolution, jeezis, rants, the very big stupid

but i don’t believe in gravity!

4 Comments

i’ve subscribed to a number of anti-evolutionist blogs (for entertainment purposes only, mind you). this one, from It’s Harvest Time typifies the combination of laughable, and frightening ignorance which i frequently find so disturbing that i question my own sanity in subscribing to wingnuts like this. i originally wrote “freaks like this” but then i realised that it would be a significant put-down for freaks – like myself – and i decided that a hardware reference would be more along the lines of what the guy actually is.

Stephen Hawking’s Recent Stupidity
British Professor Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s most noted professor [sic], was quoted recently giving his explanations on the origins of the universe. Let me give an EXACT QUOTE – “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” FROM NOTHING! This man believes that the universe was created BY ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! I don’t [sic] who you are – that’s STUPID! Don’t laugh, though. This is a quote from the atheists’ best! This is a prominent professor of theirs [sic]! This is not one of their uneducated paupers on the streets of downtown Detroit; this is the VERY BEST THEY HAVE TO OFFER! And, rather than believing in a Creator who created the universe with nothing, for a specific purpose, they would rather believe that the massive amount of matter and order in the universe came from nothing! How pitiful!

Evolution
NPR (National Public Radio) has been trying to figure out recently how humans became the dominant species. Again, instead of believing in an intelligent Being who created the world with a divine plan, they believe that over a period of BILLIONS OF YEARS, the human race evolved from primates. That is the most laughable theory I have ever heard. Evolution is philosophy, not science. It is not science because it has NEVER BEEN OBSERVED. No species has even been witnessed to evolve into another. No organism has ever been witnessed to reproduce another organism of a different species. IF IT HAS NOT BEEN OBSERVED, IT IS NOT SCIENCE. As laughable as it is, they are “making it as sure as they can.” It’s weak, but it’s the best they have.

to say that he disagrees with stephen hawking would be one thing, but to say that the man is stupid is another thing entirely, and when he offers no proof whatsoever that stephen hawking is, actually, mentally deficient in some way, it borders on libel. personally, i have a tendency to think that it’s possible that stephen hawking may have thought about these things a fair amount more than i have, and, while i don’t completely agree with him about the creation of the spiritual universe, i have a tendency to think that his theories about the creation of the physical universe are more correct than not.

i would point “rev.” bob board (who doesn’t have a wikipedia page, to give you an idea of how significant the world considers his opinions) towards something like this:
since i get the impression youtube is where he has gotten most of his current ideas about evolution. i also believe that he’s a lot more likely to watch an animated cartoon, even a poorly drawn one, than he is to read a book, no matter how simple it is…

but i doubt it would make any difference in the way he thinks…

blasphemy, crazy people, i am a terrorist, jeezis, the very big stupid

a message to pastor terry jones and his ilk:

4 Comments

all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them

i guess that means it’s okay for me to advocate burning bibles…

of course, he should be entitled to burn qur’ans; it’s his right to be stupid in this free country. it’s also right for me to organise a protest against him, which will be just as offensive to him as his is to me.

seriously, i think the proper way to protest this is to organise a mass bible burning on christmas, to protest the stupidity that brought this qur’an burning on september 11th into fruition.

No-one has the right not to be offended.
     — John Cleese

Where books are burned in the end people will burn.
     — Heinrich Heine

i’ll even contribute my collection of gideon bibles that i have stolen out of every single hotel room that i have ever stayed in (there’s at least a dozen)… that oughta’ get the protest rolling…

big brother, corruption, geek stuff, i am a terrorist, malfunctioning computers, rants, the very big stupid

network/s/ing

i am writing this from portland. to be specific, i am writing this from the back yard of my mother-in-law’s house. when i booted up my battery-powered laptop, it automatically found a network, and logged me in. it also found 3 other networks, for which i don’t have the password stored in my computer.

my impression is that i can go pretty much anywhere in pretty much any metropolitan area in this country, and be able to log on to the network with not an awful lot more than a password. this particular network’s password was (probably) supplied by my wife, who set up her mother with wireless ethernet last christmas, but it shouldn’t take any more than asking someone to be able to log in to any network. i just heard someone on the radio this morning who was saying that, inevitably, they’re going to include wireless networking, or wifi hotspots in new buildings, the same way that new buildings currently are wired with electricity, sewers and running water. i shouldn’t have to do more than ask someone to get free access to internet, in the same way that i shouldn’t have to pay someone to get water, or go to the bathroom.

and yet, that’s what google – the “don’t be evil” company – is out to make happen. it’s not bad enough that google anticipates the keywords that you type in, based on information that they have gathered from your previous searches, or that google is willing to sell that information about you to other people without your knowledge or permission, but on top of all that, they want to make you pay to get what should be equally free to everyone.

yeah, i know that you can go into a restaurant and get a fancy glass of water, but you’re also going to get quite a bit more than that in a restaurant, if what you’re starting out with is water, and when water is all you need, paying for all of that other, admittedly desirable, stuff, is starting to be more of a “luxury” item than anything else…

here’s an option: give free high speed internet to everyone, but let google and verizon build their “private, for-pay” internet and have them deliver that “private, for-pay” internet in a way similar to that in which fine food is delivered at a restaurant, and see how long it is before people realise that “private” and “for-pay” means that regardless of how raunchy, evil and nasty they want to be, someone is going to be aware of their actions.

bizarre, drugs, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

another week closer to the eschaton…

Can psychedelic drugs treat depression? – gee, weren’t we discussing the very same possibility FIFTY YEARS AGO⁈⁈ before all this “war on drugs” crap took over everyones’ consciousness⁈ we’ve lost 50 years of medical technology breakthroughs because of this stupid attitude that “some drugs are bad”… 8/

Why The Wars Can’t Be Won – if you needed further explanation.

Nuclear Winter – by Fidel Castro, 24 august, 2010. also, Fidel Castro has a blog, so get out there and subscribe, comrades…

Fidel Castro claims Osama bin Laden is a US spy but that’s not what they want you to think: Corporate Media Dismisses Castro’s Bin Laden Claim As Far-Fetched Conspiracy Theory

Obama administration claims roughly 75 percent of the oil had been removed or Senior U.S. scientist rescinds previous claim that 3/4 of oil from spill is gone, says most is still there? who knows for sure any longer, the reality is, the environment is severely screwed, and will stay severely screwed for quite a number of years… 8/

Calling a truce in the war on drugs – remember when england fired the chairman of it’s "Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs" and he shot back? well, he’s at it again, and he makes just as much sense as ever. will the government listen to him this time? probably not…

The facial recognition software that will put a name to every photograph in the internet – big brother is watching! coming to a browser near you soon, whether you want him to or not… 8/

Steve Jobs Is Watching You: Apple Seeking to Patent Spyware – big brother is watching! coming to a iphone near you soon, whether you want him to or not… 8/

Mobile X-Ray Scanners Hit The Streets – big brother is watching! coming to a street near you soon, whether you want him to or not… 8/

L.A. authorities plan to use heat-beam ray in jail – but only on “unruly” residents.

Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations – if you weren’t paranoid enough already…

Every Time You Forward an Email You Donate To Al-Qaeda – now we’re going over the line into stupidity… 8/

Man Already Knows Everything He Needs To Know About Muslims and Special Investigation – Evolution reflect the way i’ve been feeling about the general public recently, so watch out if you have to be in contact with me for any length of time, especially if you’re upset about either of these issues.

Upgrade Excreta – single malt whiskey from elderly diabetic piss, composting toilets and sparkly shit to lighten up your day…

i am a terrorist, important things to remember, rants, the very big stupid

we are all equal versus i’m better than you

2 Comments

i was driving home this afternoon when i had a realisation: this society is screwed up, mentally, and it comes from the fact that there are two very powerful, but entirely opposite messages being propagated from a very early age. one message is that everyone is equal: things like the constitution, the bill of rights and even the pledge of allegiance emphasise the fact that nobody is better than anybody else, and that all of us are just human beings. the other message is that there are some people who are better than other people. this was driven home to me by a bumper sticker i saw on the back of the car in front of me that said “Cougar Pride” and had the name of some elementary school on it.

of course, what it said to me is that the students of whatever elementary school it was are indoctrinated to believe that their school is better than the other schools in the area. it was intended, most likely, to elicit pride in the school’s sports teams, but it clearly was intended to represent the entire “cougar” population, regardless of whether or not they were on a sports team. and it obviously doesn’t matter to anyone that the population is being indoctrinated, because i’ve seen exactly the same message on bumper stickers for every school that has thought about it in the slightest degree.

i see things like this all the time: “our sports team is better than yours”, or “our city is better than yours”, or “our religion is better than yours” — but we’re all equal, all just human beings, nobody is “better” than anybody else.

society is going to continue to be screwed up until we start teaching our children consistent messages and stop being contradictory.

i am a terrorist, rants, swastikas, the very big stupid

okay, now i’m getting really fed up here…

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the jewish anti-defemation league has declared that the swastika is a generalised symbol of hate. okay, that’s all well and good, the swastika not only represents naziism and so-called “white supremacy”, but it also represents Ganesha, the Lord of Removing Obstacles, and less than 100 years ago, and for 10,000 years prior to that, the swastika was a symbol of love, peace, good luck and auspiciousness for EVERY CULTURE, AND EVERY PEOPLE ON THE PLANET INCLUDING THE HEBREW PEOPLE!

let’s put that in perspective, okay? if we use this image to represent 100 years – 100 years – this is how long the swastika has been a symbol of love, peace, good luck and auspiciousness:

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religious adherants pie chartand this is how long the swastika has been a symbol of nazi and so called “white supremacy”:

80 years

is that something that a normal person should consider reasonable: that a symbol with 10,000 years of history as a symbol of love, peace, good luck and auspiciousness should “magically” be transformed into a symbol of hate, because of less than 100 years of recent history?

the cross, originally a symbol of death, has been “magically” transformed into the symbol that represents the religion with the largest number of adherents in the world, and that took less than two thousand years. the swastika is FIVE TIMES older than that, with a history to match, and yet it has taken less than one hundred years to “magically” transform it into a symbol of hatred. no matter how hard i try, i can’t seem to figure out exactly how that works.

not only that, but according to Adherents dot com, hindus and buddhists, for whom the swastika is still a holy symbol, in spite of the nazi-obsessed west, account for 20% of the world’s population, whereas judaism accounts for less than ¼%…

something is definitely wrong here. i don’t discount the fact that the jews have had a rough time of it in the past, but when a fraction of a percent of the population can state, with authority, that the swastika is a “generalised symbol of hate” and the 20% of the population who hold the swastika as a symbol of holiness can’t do anything about it, something is definitely wrong…

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blasphemy, jeezis, links, the very big stupid

child pornography and the meaning of life

They called me a child pornographer is the story of two families who went camping and took family photos which were misinterpreted as “child pornography” by untrained photo-finishing drones, resulting in a year and a half of hell for the families involved… however, in memphis a pedophile-protecting pastor is the greatest opposition to an ordinance that would have stopped the predator he is accused of protecting with his silence. it really confuses me that innocent people are regularly treated to the “guilty until proven innocent” routine, when people who we are supposed to believe have our best interests in mind are actually the people who are most adamantly against society’s attempts to protect itself.

and, along the same lines, Some Pentagon employees found with child porn still working – so if you work at the pentagon, if you are in to child pornography, it apparently doesn’t matter. it reminds me that ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

Meaning of life – at least according to wikipedia…

blasphemy, dead people, depression, frustration, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, jeezis, rants, the very big stupid

blargh!

Rarely Seen Pictures Of The Devastating Consequences Of The BP Disaster and You Are Not Authorized to See These Pictures of the Oil Spill – i was gone for a week and the oil spill got worse… 🙁 the problem i see is that they’re still referring to this as “The BP Disaster” when, in reality, it’s a disaster that affects every being on the planet, and most directly the wildlife, which doesn’t have the option to relocate when things get too awful in their part of the world. i keep looking at the pictures of eyes of the oiled beasts and thinking that it could, just as easily, be human eyes at which i am looking…

also, there are apparently Live feeds from the Gulf of Mexico ROVs which are, at this point, showing that the oil spill has been shut off showing that their cap has sprung a leak, and even if you can’t see it, they’re planning on releasing the cap within the next 24 hours anyway. good work, BP… 😐

more of the “can’t leave well enough alone” syndrome that we’ve been suffering through, and if the gulf oil spill weren’t disaster enough, now the FDA nears approval of genetically engineered salmon – i would think that there have been enough science fiction movies produced in the past 50 years or so to put some fear into the types of people who would think of ideas like this. but, apparently, if i did so, i would be wrong. just goes to show how our rulers are stupid, stupid, STUPID!!

and, speaking of “can’t leave well enough alone”, Poachers kill last female rhino in South African park – it reminds me of that native american aphorism, which goes “Only when the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught will we realise that we cannot eat money.”

GodBlock – “a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions.” okay, i realise that turn-about is fair play, but i was under the impression that any internet filtering was wrong, and that we were above all that…

speaking of GodBlock, Forget about Noah’s Ark; There Was No Worldwide Flood – if the bible-thumpers won’t listen to their own scholars regarding the “truth” of the bible, then the entire human society is screwed, and there is nothing that we, as sensible humans can do about it. 😐

Tuli Kupferberg died. i’ve said it before, and i’ll probably say it again: all of the cool people of my generation are dying. i say stop it!!

Dwile Flonking? – what. the. fuck??

Continue reading blargh! →

articles, bizarre, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

by the way…

one of my articles was published on American Dream Or Bust a while ago, and i just got around to checking it out.

some doofus named bill commented in such a way as to make him look like a complete, raving loony, or a “christian” racist, or, possibly, a combination of the two. i tore him a new asshole (scroll down past the database error messages to read the comments).

i find it really disturbing that people like bill are in control of what happens in the world – not bill specifically, of course, but people like him. we are never going to change the fucked-up situation the world is in until people like bill are marginalised to the point where nobody pays attention to them any longer.

bizarre, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, jeezis, links, the very big stupid

if i don’t come back from OCF, this is why

How much oil has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico – according to the estimates that have been made public. the faint-hearted should not click for more information.

Immorality is Worse than BP Oil Spill – it’s an interesting way to put it, but knowing that the author is a “christian” makes me realise that even saying “no, it’s not” wouldn’t make any difference, and they would just go on believing blatantly wrong things in spite of clear evidence, so i’ll just put their link here so that everybody else can see what stupid, stupid, STUPID people we have become…

TSA To Block Websites With “Controversial Opinions” – the move to shut down free speech on the internet accelerates… at this point there’s not an awful lot standing in the way of How to Access the Internet (A Guide from 2025) becoming a reality… 😐

County coroners can’t back Brewer beheadings claim – the governor that implimented the “papers please” illegal immigration law in arizona, blatantly lies about people being beheaded in the desert, in a bid to get re-elected. fortunately there are people out there who know how to check facts, and they’ve blown this wide open.

Subway To Start Tessellating Cheese July 1? – you may not read about the previous items on the standard online news sources, but i followed a link from yahoo to get this one. our planet is simultaneously being soaked in crude oil and suffering the rule of idiots, but i’ll be damned if they’re going to get away with selling me a sandwich that has uneven cheese distribution… 🙁

a few days ago marist published a poll which asked people if they knew what country from which the united states declared independence. of adults aged 30 to 44, 15% weren’t sure, and 10% said a country other than “England” or “Great Britain”. of all adult U.S. residents 20% were “unsure”, and 6% said a country other than “England” or “Great Britain”. here are the poll results:



&nbsp		USA Residents
On July 4th we celebrate Independence Day. From which country did the United States win its independence?
Great BritainUnsureOther countries mentioned
Row %Row %Row %
USA Residents74%20%6%
RegionNortheast84%10%6%
Midwest74%21%5%
South68%26%6%
West75%18%7%
Household IncomeLess than $50,00063%30%7%
$50,000 or more86%9%5%
RaceWhite82%13%5%
Non-white56%35%9%
Age18 to 2960%33%7%
30 to 4475%15%10%
45 to 5979%17%4%
60 or older76%19%4%
AgeUnder 4567%24%9%
45 or older78%18%4%
GenderMen81%12%7%
Women67%28%5%
July 2010 Marist Poll National Residents "N=1004 MOE +/- 3%" Totals may not add to 100 due to rounding.

bizarre, blasphemy, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, pictures, the very big stupid

things you learn from r. crumb…

2 Comments

so i recently broke down and purchased R. Crumb’s monumental project, The Book of Genesis, and i was flipping through it appreciating the elaborate artwork, when i came across this:

this is an illustration of a story i had located many years ago, and then promply forgot, but this is actually a better way of looking at it, and illustrates my point even better than i could have previously.

namely, what is this ancient biblical patriarch doing worshipping a shiva lingam?!?

i’ve wondered about this for a long time, and now that i have an actual illustration of it, it will be easier to ask unsuspecting “christians” why this founder of “christianity” felt it was okay to worship the way those “godless heathens” do…

articles, bizarre, cannabis, corruption, i am a terrorist, malfunctioning computers, the very big stupid

ښالاماندر

Humans will be extinct in 100 years – a wonderful way to start out the post, but i’d tend to treat anything said by the guy who helped wipe out smallpox with a great deal of respect. you can argue about it all you like, but this is a guy who knows what it’s like to become extinct, and if he says humans are on the way there, i’d tend to believe him.

Scientists discover riding a bike is incredibly hard – in spite of the fact that the formula they came up with sounds pretty interesting (inertial forces + gyroscopic forces + the effects of gravity and centrifugal forces = the leaning of the body and the torque applied to the handlebars), given all the things that are going wrong with the world currently, there have got to be better things for “scientists” to be working on, don’t you think?

6-Year-Old Northeast Ohio Girl on ‘No Fly’ List – more idiocy on the part of home clownland security. all their antics sure make me feel a whole lot safer… 8/

and, speaking of feeling safer, Police tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn’t breathe – wow… just… wow.

no further comment necessary… 😐

Apple collecting, sharing iPhone users’ precise locations
Apple now collecting, sharing precise location of iPhone users – yet another reason why i’m no longer a mac fanatic… i’ll use a mac, but i’m NOT getting an iphone, and i’m probably not going to get a smart phone at all… 8/

Opt Out of Behavioral Advertising – Opting out of a network does not mean you will no longer receive online advertising. It does mean that the network from which you opted out will no longer deliver ads tailored to your Web preferences and usage patterns… but it’s a start, and if you’re as paranoid about network privacy as i am, you’ll understand the necessity for such a thing.

about every two weeks or so i get a call from a person who is looking for an “incense” called “K2”, or “Spice” – Toxicologist Warning to Parents: Look for Signs of K2 – ‘Fake Marijuana’ and After Indianola teen’s suicide, Iowa officials set sights on banning K2 – i find it really sad that people have apparently resorted to poisoning themselves, because it’s the only legal alternative, rather than getting legitimately high from something that is illegal, but has never killed anyone. from The 420 Times, “If you’re a kid and you’re thinking of trying K2 because it’s still legal to buy in your state, you’d be better off running the risk of buying real, illegal marijuana. Even if you get caught, you won’t die from inhaling a toxic substance or experience “hallucinations, severe agitation, elevated heart rate and blood pressure, vomiting and, in some cases, tremors and seizures,” like you do from K2. You’ll just be another statistic in The War on Drugs.”

Continue reading ښالاماندر →

pictures, spam, the very big stupid

i don’t normally do this, but…

4 Comments

this is so over-the-top ridiculous that there has to be an exception this time…

McDonald’s announces a drink made of Shrek-jizz.

Mint Shrek-Jizz monstrosity

yeah…

not as if i ate at McD’s regularly (or irregularly) anyway, but this doesn’t encourage me in the least. it is either going to be good for business in a way that they probably haven’t realised yet, or it won’t last very long and they won’t know what you’re talking about once it’s gone…

i wonder how long it’s going to be before someone makes a bukkake joke and ruins it for everyone…

articles, evolution, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, jeezis, links, the very big stupid

announcing the end of “christianity” as you know it

US team creates first ’synthetic life’ – along with that important step that came on my birthday, eight years ago, when scientists fabricated an entirely viable polio virus, we’ve taken another important step in clarifying the fact that “christianity” is wrong.

wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG, WRONG!!!

i wonder how long it will be until the “christians” take notice?

Continue reading announcing the end of “christianity” as you know it →

articles, cannabis, corruption, drugs, frustration, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

沫

US drug war has met none of its goals – good ol’ gil’s working his way up the totem pole, and he’s still saying exactly the same thing he was saying ten years ago… i’d wonder about why nobody has taken any notice, but it would be a futile gesture. :/

Continue reading 沫 →

articles, i am a terrorist, links, rants, spiritual, the very big stupid

snep

Regarding "christianity" and the Virginia Governor’s reason for declaring Confederate History Month

7,500 Online Shoppers Unknowingly Sold Their Souls – this is what happens when users fail to read the TOC. i find it interesting and educational to realise that in the commercial world there are two significant industries that refer to their customers as “users”: computer software manufacturers, and drug dealers. perhaps this is one of the reasons why.

Dead man elected mayor of Tennessee town – why is it that all i can think of is that line from the Tom Waits song What’s he Building?, “I heard he has an ex-wife in someplace called ‘Mayor’s Income, Tennessee’.”

finally, i have read in two different blogs about the croatian girl who fell into a coma, and when she awoke, she could no longer speak croatian, her native language, but she could speak fluent german, a language that she was just beginning to learn when she fell into a coma. i find this an interesting paralell to my opera, which sprung to life in all of its complex glory when i lost what passes for normal consciousness as a result of my injury. stories like this have far reaching implications that involve just about every part of my life, and is one of the primary reasons why, in spite of the fact that i agree with him more often than not, i still think that p.z. meyers and his ilk are sadly mistaken when they conclusively state that “god” doesn’t exist. it may not be the old man with the beard that oversees all from his abode in the clouds, but Something that doesn’t exist wouldn’t be able to cause miracles like that.

Continue reading snep →

articles, big brother, blasphemy, imaginary pooperty, jeezis, links, rants, the very big stupid, windoesn't

linque dump Ⅴ, rants and others

2 Comments

i got a spam comment from Anonymous – Operation Titstorm this morning. while i agree with anonymous’ motivation for such action, i am not part of the australian government and not in a position where i can do much of anything except agree with their motivation for their actions. go anonymous, but please go do it somewhere where it’ll make a difference, okay? mass spamming of random blogs is a really good way to make a lot more people not want to deal with you any longer.

Google shuts down music blogs without warning – this is the same company which has recently announced a “1GB bandwidth internet connection to every home” deal that is in the works. making it even more likely that, whether you like it or not, google will have access to all of your data. the fact that google already has their hands in pretty much everything from where you’re going to be to who you’re going to be there with and everything in between, their Gmail was marketed with “never delete another email, EVER” propaganda (which nobody seems to remember these days), and they are in bed with the CIA and have a team of specialists ready to scan every bit of information the unwitting public feeds into their jaws makes their “Don’t be evil” company motto a bit of a malapropism.

People browse by search (or ReadWriteWeb faces the Facebook Login problem) – of course, the problem is confounded by the fact that people don’t seem willing to actually learn what this computer-thingy on their desks is for to begin with. a very good example of this is one of my clients, who regularly calls me because he thinks his “anti-virus software is tired” of zapping viruses on his windows machine, or the fact that he can’t type into his computer because the keyboard is unplugged and he didn’t realise it.

Christians claim hate crimes law an effort to ‘eradicate’ their beliefs – no, hate crime laws are an effort to crack down on hate crimes… if your beliefs are the direct cause of the hate crime, then you’ve got something to worry about. if not, claiming that hate crime laws are an effort to eradicate “christianity” just makes you appear to be really, REALLY stupid, regardless of where you obtained your law degree. even a fifth grader can see that constitutionally protected speech does not apply, when it is clearly written into the law to begin with… ☹

New National Security Distraction: Arabic Language Students – a white-bread american physics major from pomona college is a terrorist, according to TSA officials and the FBI, who spent several hours handcuffed, under arrest and being questioned by no fewer than seven law enforcement officials, but unable to obtain legal council, because he tried to board a plane with… wait for it… not liquids, not matches, not a bomb. arabic flash cards. TSA Supervisor: You know who did 9/11? George: Osama bin Laden. TSA Supervisor: Do you know what language he spoke? George: Arabic. — therefore, you are a terrorist, because you are learning arabic… WHO TRAINS THESE PEOPLE ANYWAY?!? it’s a wonder that i am as nice to strangers as i am… 8/

finally, Security patch results in BSOD – i think this may actually be an improvement in windowsdoesn’t operation. at least now you go directly to the BSOD, rather than thinking your computer might actually be doing what it is supposed to before you go there. this is exactly the reason i don’t use microsoft products any longer. they’re releasing internet explorer eight with the same unfixed bugs in it that i reported to them before they released IE three, and they still haven’t even made an attempt to fix them. why people think that microsoft cares about anything other than making as much money as possible while exerting as little actual work as possible is totally beyond me.

Continue reading linque dump Ⅴ, rants and others →

bizarre, corruption, crazy people, i am a terrorist, rants, the very big stupid

why are people SO FUCKING IGNORANT?!?

2 Comments

Ugandan president urges softening of anti-gay bill – this is the ugandan president, saying – once again – that he is not going to allow the “kill gays” bill to pass. an admirable effort, if it actually happens, however, despite repeated assurances from the ugandan president, i still doubt will actually come to pass.

at the same time…

Witch-doctors reveal extent of child sacrifice in Uganda – this is somewhat of a surprise, considering their stance on killing gays. you get the impression from the first article that uganda is mostly a country of mortified “christians” who want to avoid the gay plague. there’s no clue from the first article that uganda is also a place where “crime is directly linked to rising levels of development and prosperity, and an increasing belief that witchcraft can help people get rich quickly.”

if they’re really just mortified “christians” then i would suspect them to shun “witchcraft” as well, but somehow these supposedly “christian” ugandans are more mortified about gays than they are child-murdering “witch-doctors”.

it’s as though they’re saying “it’s perfectly normal for us to want to kill gays, because they’re evil, but when it comes to getting ahead, a little child sacrifice, especially if it is someone else’s child, couldn’t hurt anyone.”

“(Homosexuality) is not allowed in African culture. We have to protect the children in schools who are being recruited into homosexual activities.”… but if there’s even the remotest chance that doing so would help us get a little bit ahead, we’re not above mutilating or killing children, either…

i’m not sure i even want to try to understand that one… 😐

crazy people, ganesha the car, pictures, rants, the very big stupid

somebody grafittied my car!

grafittisomeone grafittied my car!

i was at Hale’s Palladium this evening for the last performance of Aladdin and The Magic Lamp. i parked there and went in around 1:30 pm, and when i walked out of the palladium at around 6:00 pm, there it was. the paint was dry, which, in my mind, means that the guy must have done it around between the time that i left it, and 4:00 or thereabouts.

i asked around and i learned that the guy who tags things with “SEEDR1” is around 30 years old, and was a student at cornish until he was expelled because of a conflict with one of the instructors (big surprise). he is known for his “photo-realistic” grafitti art, but he also tags (which is likely one of the sources for the conflict with the instructors at cornish), and he was probably drunk when he did it (big surprise).

i don’t know who he is — yet — but i’m already closing in on his identity, and it hasn’t even been 6 hours yet. i’m pissed at this guy, because his drunken tag is going to cost me time and money to cover up, but also because tagging a car — any car — is really a lame, juvenile thing to do. if i ever find him, i don’t know what i would do, but i do know that i’m probably going to file a police report regarding it whether i find out his identity, or not, and if it’s possible to get reimbursed for it, by whatever means, from him, it would be an awesome thing.

grafittii’m going to get better pictures in the morning, when the light is better, but i really don’t understand why he did it… to my car doesn’t matter, i would wonder the same thing about such a tag on any car. the guy must have known that it wouldn’t last long, nobody would see it, and — especially because of the fact that it was on an art car to begin with — it is going to be covered up immediately, before i drive anywhere other than directly home.

and if the guy is an artist himself, what was going through his mind as he spray-painted his tag on my piece of artwork? how would he feel if i spray-painted a tag on one of his pieces of artwork? maybe, because of the fact that his artwork is mostly grafitti to begin with, he wouldn’t mind so much, but i would be willing to bet that if he created a work of art that wasn’t grafitti, and someone spray-painted on it, he would be offended at the very least, so why would he expect any less from me?

i’m not really surprised that someone grafittied my car, but what i am surprised about is why it has taken this long. i’ve been driving ganesha the car for 5 years, and this is the first time anyone has done anything nasty to it… and really, thinking about it, it isn’t really that nasty, except in a vile, putrid, disgusting sort of way. and the guy managed to paint on one of the few places on the car where i won’t have to repaint the actual artwork on the car in order to cover it up, so apart from being really lame and annoying, it’s not that bad.
i am writing in I, Anonymous about it, though, because i know a lot of people read it, and very likely the guy who did it will either find out about it personally, or from one of his friends.

and, by the way… the guy who tags SEEDR1 is an worse than an asshole. he’s an anal polyp and he deserves to be removed from society’s colon immediately. the guy i caught in the act of trying to rip a bumper sticker off of my car apologised and admitted that he was being an asshole, and he got forgiven by me, because he stood up, admitted what he was doing, and that he was an asshole. this guy is worse, and he is not getting forgiven. die in hell, scum!

blasphemy, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

death for xmas…

the way i see it, the possibility that uganda is not going to pass the “kill the gays” bill, and instead offer the option of “counseling and rehabilitation” will make it far more likely that the “christians” in the united states – who have been slapped in the face by the ex-gay ministry folks who have recently been forced to break ties with a guy who has been their affiliate for decades because of his “bizarre and unorthodox” therapies, and who are up against the psychologists associatiation saying that being gay is not a disease and not a choice, and who are also, ultimately, behind the “kill the gays” bill in the first place – will use the fact that uganda is saying that “counselling and rehabilitation” is “preferable” to their original plan is more justification that “counselling and rehabilitation” are effective “treatments” for this “disease”.

much as i hate to say it, i hope that uganda passes the “kill the gays” bill, so that it will be made plainly, blatantly, horrendously obvious to even the most uneducated “christian” on the planet exactly how “un-Christian” this legislation actually is. anything less will just give the “christians” more fodder, weak and meaningless as it is.

corruption, depression, hindu, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, jeezis, links, rants, the very big stupid, winter solstice, x-mas

the war on xmas

1 Comment

the closer we get to xmas, the more i am feeling like a jew at a nazi rally, and i am aware of the irony of such a statement a lot more accutely than those of you who may be shocked at the reference.

what i would really like, is to magically transport myself to somewhere where they don’t celebrate xmas for the month of december – and possibly the months of november and january as well – just to get away from the hype that is going on. the commercialism and the politics of the holiday are really starting to get to me, and i still have 10 days until it’s over for another year.

it’s not that i don’t celebrate xmas, and it’s not even that i don’t believe in the “christ” and “god” that are behind the current incarnation of the holiday so much (although that’s another part of the story). what is really disturbing to me is the combination of not being able to turn on the television or the radio without hearing either commercials for products that i know won’t work (like Windows 7), or seeing news reports of people complaining because the greeter at walmart said something, or didn’t say something that was offensive to them… or not… 😐

i was brought up in a family that celebrated the commercial aspects of xmas. we didn’t even have a regular church service that we went to that was on a day other than sunday, and the church services that we went to all the time were pretty ecuminical and inclusive of traditions and cultures that were not specifically “christian”, so when i grew up and learned that some people believed that xmas was for stuff other than getting loads of toys and candy, i didn’t quite understand, but i didn’t really notice that much when the checker at the grocery store wished me a “merry xmas”. as i developed more of a relationship with sanatanadharma (which is what “hinduism” is really called) i started noticing the discontinuity a lot more: the “peace on earth and good will toward men” compared to the war, hunger and poverty that exist in the world, the constant fighting between catholics and protestants, the constant fighting between the christians and the non-christians, and the growing furor over “the war on xmas” came much more to the forefront, and i find it quite distressing.

things like the reference to a woman who compared santa to a swastika take on a meaning that is not immediately obvious to people who believe the swastika is an evil symbol, for example. i can see how santa is a lot like a swastika, and i wouldn’t mind seeing both of them in more common usage, but if there’s going to be an uproar over whether or not to have a swastika in a public display, then there certainly should be just as much uproar over whether or not to have a public holiday that celebrates santa – even if santa is not the "reason for the season".

and, for that matter, if you think about it a little more than most "christians" have, jeezis himself is not the “reason for the season” either. people celebrated the winter solstice for a long time before jeezis showed up, and it’s really only been within the past 200 to 500 years that we’ve had anything at all like what is currently celebrated as xmas, so all of those "war on xmas" fanatics really don’t have a leg to stand on in the first place. but in general, i think that the hindus and jews and buddhists and muslims and animists and even athiests have gone out of their way to accommodate all of the fanatics who insist that they are to be greeted with the phrase "merry xmas" instead of the more ecuminical "happy holidays" in fact, the only reason we have been as accommodating as we have been is because the "christians" are a majority of our population and if we weren’t so willing to give up what we believe in order to make peace, most "christians" wouldn’t have the slightest problem killing us!

what would jesus do, indeed?

i keep feeling like i am totally alone in a society of people who would have no problem killing me if they happened to find out that i don’t believe the way they do, but at the same time, i feel compelled to inform these ignoramuses that they aren’t the only ones on the planet, and that other people – people who believe differently than they do – have just as much right to exist as they do, and what jesus would really do is get along with everyone… which is supposed to be "The Christmas Message" anyway.

bizarre, corruption, hybrid elephant, important things to remember, pictures, rants, the very big stupid

damn!

i have recently discovered that i have been ripped off by two different companies since december. the first one was the host servicie that i was so excited about a few months ago, 1&1 internet, who, i have since discovered, earned an "F" from the Better Business Bureau for “Number of complaints filed against business, Failure to respond to complaints filed against business, Number of complaints filed against business that were unresolved and Overall complaint history with BBB”. they “bait-and-switched” me into a contract for hosting services that ended up costing 12 times more than i would have agreed to, and then, in spite of the fact that their headquarters is in germany, they claimed to not understand when i told them that 4/10 didn’t mean the 10th of april, it meant the 4th of october…

the second company is Pipeline Data Processing, otherwise known as SecurePay, which also has an "F" from the BBB, has a reputation for holding funds, and charging you for things after you’ve already cancelled your account – like they did with me. and they said that it was all in the contract i signed, but i never signed a contract. the contract they sent me when i complained about the $300 withdrawal had a scan of my signature that could have been off a check or something… but i NEVER signed a contract. i was actually lead to believe that there wasn’t going to be any long-term contract.

the thing that pisses me off so much, though, is the fact that i would have learned about these rip-offs simply by typing the name of the company and the word “complaints” into google. instead, i figured that it was okay because the people sounded sincere, and signed up with both of them, and got ripped off. i am not immune to the very big stupid… 😡

i’m going to have to close my business account and open another one, because of pipeline data processing’s propensity for random charges well after my contract was cancelled, i’ve already got an investigation going at the bank, and the pipeline representative recommended that we file a police report for fraud, because they weren’t going to look into it otherwise.

banda gozona, brain injury, fremont sunday market, gripes, swastikas, the very big stupid

heiney

i did something to my back within the past three days that is causing me enormous pain when i stand or sit… currently i am under the influence of ibuprophen, which diminishes it from enormous pain to a nagging reminder, but at the same time, i think that loading, unloading and re-loading hybrid elephant at the FSM yesterday, and then unloading it again at home this afternoon was no help at all. at this point, i can hope that it goes away or fixes itself soon, because any further medical intervention is more than i can afford.

i made $70 at the FSM. not my best day, but not my worst, either. the next time i know i can go will be in three weeks, because i have a banda gozona gig (in mt. vernon?) in two weeks. also, since i redesigned the site, hybrid elephant has shot to the #1 position when you search for swastika button, which is especially cool since the #2 position is currently occupied by a white supremacist… 8) furthermore, i now occupy position #2 when you search for finest incense in the world, which is exactly what i was hoping would happen!

ned had to cancel, because he’s sick, and his son goes to one of the schools shut down by swine flu H1N1 (pronounced “heiney”). he says that he and his wife and kid have been sick for about a week, and while he doesn’t think he’s got H1N1, the fact that his kid goes to stevenson means that he doesn’t want to take any chances. another school that was shut down due to the overblown H1N1 scare is woodmont, where i went to first through third grade.

bizarre, depression, house stuff, rants, the very big stupid

garbage drama

back to mundane stuff…

they haven’t picked up our trash for two months, ever since we switched to once-a-month trash pickup, so i called to find out what was going on. it’s not that we haven’t paid, either, because we haven’t gotten a bill in two months as well. in fact, they sent the bill on the 14th, and it’s probably already been paid, but that’s beside the point. when i called to switch to once-a-month pickup, they told me that it would be on the first thursday of the month. so i put the trash out and they didn’t pick it up, so i called and they said that they had made a mistake, that they would pick it up on the last thursday of the month. so i waited for 3 weeks, put the trash out, and – they didn’t pick it up… 8/

so i decided on another tack, and put the trash out every week last month. they picked up our recycling (which is most of our waste these days, fortunately) on the second and fourth thursdays, just like they’re supposed to, but they didn’t pick up the trash! 8/

so i called them this morning. they told me that the pickup would be on the first thursday of the month, then they changed their minds and said that it would be on the last thursday of the month. then, realising that they had just given me conflicting information, they said that they would check it out and call me back. about a half-hour later, i talked with the dispatcher for the company that covers south king county waste management, who told me that the real pickup date was the thursday of the first full week of the month. not only that, but she said that, because of the fact that customer service was confused about our pickup dates, our address was not even included on the route list that they gave to the driver, which is why we haven’t had a pickup in two months.

that’s all very well and good, i said, but the fact is that our trash hasn’t been picked up in two months, and i’m running out of space. so the dispatcher for south king county says that she will request a “courtesy pickup” (“for no charge”), since there was a screwup on their end. a half-hour or so later, i heard the garbage truck backing up, and fifteen minutes or so after that, i get another call from the dispatcher, who says that they tried to pick up the trash, but the can was too heavy and their driver couldn’t lift it. we have our own, 33 gallon container, which has to be loaded by hand, rather than paying the county for a 35 gallon container that the truck can pick up, and the driver has a weight limit to spare him having to lift heavy trash bags into the truck, so if i wanted our trash picked up, i was going to have to go down and “portion it out” into chunks that were small enough for the driver to lift.

so i broke it down into three garbage bags and the remaining garbage in the can, and supposedly they’re supposed to come back tomorrow, and of course, now that we’re back on the route list, the next trash pickup is supposed to be next thursday… 8/

i’ll believe it when i see it. meanwhile, if i reckoned correctly, we just paid a bill for $60 for the past two months… when, because of a screwup on their part, we weren’t getting any service at all…

grumble, mutter… and they wonder why i get upset about things like this… 8/

brain injury, corruption, depression, hybrid elephant, i am a terrorist, ptsd, rants, the very big stupid

fucking cunt-shit on a gold-plated platter!!!

i decided to check my bank account. i have only had one order since i unveiled the new site, and i had around $200 the last time i checked, but i was shocked to discover that pipeline data processing – the company i thought was going to help me process credit cards, before they charged me $45 for a month’s worth of services that i didn’t use because my site wasn’t set up for it yet, and subsequently, on april 7th, cancelled the account without ever processing even one credit card through them – had withdrawn $300 from my bank account yesterday! of course, this left me with a -$100 balance, plus a $35 fee from the bank.

naturally, i called them up to find out what was screwy. i didn’t use their services, i hadn’t incorporated their services into my web site, i had been a customer of theirs for less than a month – i originally signed up for a merchant account on march 16th, and cancelled it on april 7th – and they were withdrawing $300 that i didn’t have from an account that, presumably, they didn’t have access to any longer.

they told me that the $300 was an “early termination fee” and that it was “in the contract you signed”.

i didn’t sign any contract.

the entire transaction went on over the phone, and through email, and they have no record of anything other than a typewritten signature, which was not written by me, on a mishmash of text that they said was a contract.

as you can probably imagine, i was not very happy. unfortunately, since my injury, instead of being able to discuss the reasons for my unhappiness in rational words that actually make sense to anyone (including myself) i raged and ranted and stuttered and drooled and made a complete fool of myself to at least 4 different “customer service” representatives, before i finally got fed up with attempting to find out why a company that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a day was, apparently, unable to waive a $300 “early termination fee” for services that had never been used, and hung up.

i called the bank and told them that $300 had been withdrawn from my account without my approval. they said that someone would be getting back to me “in writing” – read “by snailmail”. they also said that if my account remained in an overdrawn state for more than 10 days, it would be suspended.

$#%&*@$!!%&*@?##!!!%!?!!

bizarre, ganesha the car, imaginary pooperty, links, pictures, rants, the very big stupid

plagiarism

gah… i’ve been sicker than i have been in a long time over the past few days, which has left me in a fouler mood than normal, and it hasn’t been being helped at all by the person i mentioned in my last post. i’m on the uphill swing, at this point, but i’m still pretty sick, which is going to be interesting, since i have to take a five-mile walk to pick up Ganesha The Car from the shop this morning, and later on i have a fremont philharmonic rehearsal, which is probably not going to end up happening, because i’m so sick.

i was reviewing my web statistics a few days ago, and discovered that the person, a nandita prabhu who has several other blogs as well as the one linked in my previous post (which no longer exists), posted a new entry in one of her blogs called Plagiarism, where she outlines the process by which she gets artwork to post in her various blogs. she says things like:

People allow me to use these copyright images (I take their permission)

and

I think it is “Ok” for my readers to “borrow” the content of my blog but please ask me before you decide to do so.

and

To sum up, You want to borrow something that’s fine all you have to do is “ASK”.

not only that, but all of her blogs are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, but the images that she hotlinked from me, and the images from other sources that i checked on his “The Broken Tusk” blog (which is now deleted) all had very clear watermarks or other indications that they were actually copyright to other places, and there’s no indication, not only that she has permission to relicence the images, but that she has permission to use the images at all.

strangely, when i received email from her on friday, she said

i had no idea of this at all. Infact I have been doing this from so long and i had no idea its wrong. Is it a problem even if i say that the pic is from this website ( like source) ?

and other things that, if i hadn’t actually read her blogs – all of them – would make me believe that she has any idea that this is the wrong way to approach “borrowing” other peoples’ artwork.

normally i don’t give much credibility to any laws governing “intellectual property”, but in this case, she’s coming across to me as one thing, and she’s posting on her blogs something entirely the opposite, which makes me very suspicious indeed. it seems to me like she is trying to come across in her email as a clueless newbie, and in her blog as a person who has her shit together, which is not a way to gain my confidence in the least.

i commented on her blog, and have received several emails from her. i guess i’m going to have to wait to see how this all works out, but at this point, i don’t hold out much hope. i’m certainly not going to prosecute myself, but considering how many other web sites she “borrowed” artwork from (several of which replace the hotlinked graphics with ones that say things like “this image stolen from…” – i’d be willing to bet that someone else will, unless she gets her shit together.

brain injury, hybrid elephant, rants, spam, the very big stupid

brain injury, paypal, credit card accepting, spam and frustration – in that order

so, now that the moisture festival is over with for another year, i decided to get to work on the “accepting credit cards using some other service than paypal” part of my web site. they have been sending me two or three messages a day concerning different aspects of getting my site set up. i had told the guy initially when i signed up that i wasn’t actually going to be able even to look at email about the web site until after the moisture festival was over, so i was somewhat surprised when i got a statement in the email this morning, saying that my checking account had been billed $33. i called them up, and the customer service lady said that she couldn’t help me, and transferred my call to a sales representative, who, after some convincing, admitted that he had the email where i said that i wasn’t going to be able to start until april, but said he couldn’t help me, and transferred me back to customer service.

this is after i got an email, last week, in my “spam” folder (in other words, it was downloaded directly from the server into my “deleted items” mailbox, which gets deleted when i shut down the computer). the email contained a “From:” address at CheckCare.com – which i seem to recall them saying something about when i signed up with the credit card accepting place – but nothing else that indicated where it was from or who i should contact if i had any questions – which was the primary reason it ended up in the spam box. the email also contained a “Merchant” identification which was “SPAY60102”, which i considered rather odd, and a list of fees, most of which were $0, except for the last one, a “Gateway fee” for $11.85. i called the credit card accepting place and went through a couple of hours of being connected to people who reputedly were going to be able to help me, but finding out that they couldn’t help me and putting me on hold while they transferred me to someone who could. at one point i ended up being put on hold, which was answered by someone who not only doesn’t work for either of the companies in question, but works for one of their competitors. needless to say, i hung up and called in again. as it is, the whole process of getting set up to accept credit cards is way more irritating than a person with a brain injury – such as myself – can handle, and i certainly don’t want to be the focus of two competing companies attempts to get me to give their company money i don’t have to begin with. eventually, after two hours and calling the main number 3 times, a guy answered who, before i had the chance to regail him with the entire sordid story, said that he “was aware of the situation” that had caused me to have to call back three times, and he would figure it out and get back to me… and i’m still waiting to find out whether or not it was spam or an actual bill.

you would think that a company which presumably does hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business each day would be a little more lax about a $33 dollar refund, but no, the customer service rep that i was connected to said that i would have to talk with a manager if i wanted to complain about the sales representative’s misunderstanding. i said that if it was not resolved to my satisfaction, that i would gladly take my business to a service provider that cares about its customers, so she emailed me a (.doc file!!!) “Merchant Request to Cancel” – which has to be faxed or scanned and emailed back to them, but i don’t have either a fax machine or a working scanner.

they make it as difficult as possible – something which i don’t completely disagree with – to get an account in the first place, but once you have the account they start spamming you just like that was their business, and they make it even more difficult to cancel your account… it makes me wonder how any of these companies stay in business at all, especially with the economy the way it is these days.

blasphemy, crazy people, important things to remember, pictures, the very big stupid

God is real, despite what the athiests think

my ear

i subscribe to this blog, pharyngula, which is written by professor p. z. meyers. he is a prominent evolutionary biologist and athiest whose rantings about “christianity” and the anti-scientific are the primary reasons why i read his stuff, although i freely acknowledge that the only reason i find him amusing and not childishly disgusting is because he’s not making fun of me, and i have no doubt that he would make fun of me if he knew that i exist. nevertheless, his rants about chiropractors and acupuncturists have gotten to me on several occasions, and i was going to ask my acupuncturist about it when i saw him today, but before i even remembered to bring it up, he mentioned something that convinces me even more that amusing as p. z. meyers is, he doesn’t come close to knowing everything, and about “mystical” stuff he is hopelessly clueless and will likely remain so for the rest of his life.

nervous system in the ear

what he brought up is the fact that i have been expanding my right earlobe for the past year and a half (i actually stopped about 6 months ago because my wife doesn’t like it). he’s been studying auricular acupuncture recently, and has noticed that a lot of people self-treat with piercings and modifications without realising it. he then showed me this page from his auricular therapy manual. i may agree with p. z. meyers about the perils of “christianity” and “intelligent design”, but this, if nothing else, convinces me that there are a lot of things that science knows about and dismisses as unproven, that are just as real as things that you can hold in your hand. clarke’s law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

articles, big brother, corruption, crazy people, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid, torture

it’s worse than you ever imagined…

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.

Officials cite broad power for president in memos

Continue reading it’s worse than you ever imagined… →

big brother, bizarre, corruption, crazy people, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

i am a fucking terrorist, damn it!

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god damn it, it’s a fucking good thing i don’t live in south carolina, otherwise i’d be guilty of a fucking felony and face a fine of fucking five thousand dollars… i wonder what shit-for-brains asshole came up with that idea, and if they’ve ever read the fucking bill of rights before they accepted their fucking job… >8/

depression, i am a terrorist, links, malfunctioning computers, rants, the very big stupid, tina chopp

DRIZZLE!!!!

here is yet another reason why drizzle.com is not going to be my ISP much longer: they assumed that when i requested a change of host providers for hybridelephant.com, they automatically assumed that it also meant cancelling my internet service – which was wrong, and i took care of it last week. what i didn’t realise is that they also cancelled The Church of Tina Chopp, resulting in an interruption of service for several days. it’s on its way to being fixed at this point (i still have to wait the requisite 24 to 48 hours for the DNS changes to propagate), but that is yet another reason to get away from them as quickly as possible.

i should have listened more carefully when i was told last march that drizzle was incompetent. now it’s come back to bite me in the ass… 8/

bizarre, blasphemy, corruption, crazy people, depression, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, jeezis, links, rants, the very big stupid, winter solstice

happy VEWPRF

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i-love-satan.jpg

in the past, i’ve tried to go along with whatever holiday might be celebrated around me whether i “believed in it” or not, however in the past few years it’s gotten to the point where i’ve taken a long, hard look at the traditions, the history, and the meaning of several Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festivals (VEWPRFs) and tried as much as possible to separate myself from them, primarily because of the fact that i don’t “believe in them” in any conventional sense, and to me, the people that really do believe in them, particularly “christians” really make me wonder about the future of the human race. i’ve had the chance to go “caroling” with a bunch of other brass players, and while i appreciate the music very much, and would really like to get together with a bunch of people who all appreciate the music, and can play it well, i decided not to go – and not entirely because of the fact that “the weather outside was frightful” (although that was about ⅔ of the reason). the weather is also the reason we won’t be spending xmas (one of the VEWPRFs i was talking about) with the inlaws in portland this year – although we probably will be spending new years day with them (’cause i have the gig where i’m paid the most amount of money i have ever been paid for something EVER on new years eve – i’m being paid $100 an hour for an hour’s performance with snake suspenderz), and while it won’t exactly be the same as xmas with them, it will still very likely have the same history and meaning. with my in-laws particularly, i have learned that it’s a lot easier if i keep my mouth shut, because, if nothing else, they give good presents and don’t expect an awful lot other than to see that my wife is healthy and happy, which she seems to be taking care of all by herself.

dont-fuck-with-santa-claus.jpg

and when you look at xmas, from it’s beginnings all the way to today, you discover that it’s basically one lie after another with no apologies or attempts to hide them: jesus, if he ever even really existed, was more than likely born in the spring, and the fact that his birthday is celebrated when it is, is primarily because of the fact that the “christian” church took over pagan solstice celebrations of one kind or another, and in the process of making it basically illegal to have any other kind of celebration, at the same time it started pushing it’s own version of VEWPRF as a “legal substitute” so that the (formerly) pagan worshippers – who still continue to this day – wouldn’t rise up and overthrow their oppressors. and at this late date, there’s less of “jesus’ birth” and more commercialism and “santa claus”, to the point where jesus – the supposed “reason for the season” (which, in reality, can more be attributed to axial tilt than the birth of a supposed “saviour”) – is almost forgotten, even by supposed “christians” for whom this should be a time to remember their saviour. and that brings up the discussion: “saved from what?” saved from sin? who created sin? if it was God, then didn’t he have some reason for creating it? shouldn’t He expect us to sin, if He created it to begin with? if it wasn’t, then why do we have to be saved from it? how is jesus any more likely to save me than norm, down the street, or myself, for that matter? if it weren’t for the fact that i have experienced “the indwelling of the Holy Spirit” (which is nothing at all like the “christian” people would have you believe), i would deny that such a thing exists, simply because of the fact that the way the “christians” describe it is totally absurd. if it weren’t forced on them when they were children and unable to see how the adults were lying to them, “christianity” would have completely vanished ages ago.

and as far as my experience of the “indwelling of the Holy Spirit”, which happened many years ago (although it continues to this day), i am aware of the fact that it’s such a profound, personal experience, that any attempt i make to describe what it was like will sound equally absurd. i’m okay with that, and don’t blame you if you think i’m crazy, but like i said, it was so much different from what the “christians” say that comparing the two is a difficult thing. my impression is that “christians” only have about a quarter of the story, and instead of being inspired to learn about the ever expansive THING that they call God, they’ve decided that that’s all you ever need, and are afraid of anything that stretches beyond their comfort zone.

so, along with everything else, my views about both Christmas and xmas (similar to the difference between Christians and “christians”, for those of you who are keeping score) are skewed enough that celebrating it myself is kind of out of the question, despite my general tendency to celebrate whatever holiday “most of us” are celebrating. so you’ll pardon me while i wish everyone a happy VEWPRF and go off and hide somewhere until february so i don’t have to listen to another round of “Jingle Bell Rock”. 8/

corruption, crazy people, jeezis, the very big stupid

those “christians”… 8|

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caganer of barack obamathey keep coming up with more and more truly weird things that they do to appease their “god”. once i think i’ve seen the weirdest they have to offer, they come up with a new (or, in this case old) tradition that so totally blows away everything else i’ve learned about “christians” that it’s incredible.

apparently in the catalonia region of spain, catholic “christians” have a tradition of hiding “caganers” in nativity scenes and then challenging their friends to find them. what is a “caganer” you ask? it’s only a ceramic statuette of a well known person, like barack obama, or tennis player rafael nadal or the pope, in the act of defecation. “the figures symbolize fertilization, hope and prosperity for the coming year.”

i’m sorry but that’s just funny… and the fact that it’s associated with “christianity” makes me wonder how they think they can say anything against the “strange” traditions other religions practice.

bizarre, corruption, i am a terrorist, jeezis, links, rants, the very big stupid

“christian” =? child abuser

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this morning during my daily perusal of the RSS feeds, i learned that yet another young “christian” couple has been arrested in relation to the death of their two-year-old daughter. if my two-year-old child had died, i would be upset, to say the least, and if i had been arrested in connection with that child’s death it would definitely add several more layers of stress to the whole ordeal, but this couple were arrested because they – wait for it – allegedly

beat their child to death with a hammer, to “excorcise demons” from her.

now i’m not saying that child abuse is solely a “christian” thing (i was subjected to abuse myself, as a child, and my parents are agnostic as far as i know, and i’m not talking about this sort of thing, which could be seen as child abuse or a tasteless joke – pun intended) but things like this, especially when it comes to young couples who feel the need to “excorcise” whatever demonic spirits inhabit their child, is not only ridiculously common, but it appears to get “swept under the rug” by most of “normal” society – although how anyone could consider beating a child to death with a hammer for any reason “normal” is beyond me. and i’m sure that people who aren’t “christian” beat their children with hammers, and other things, far too frequently, which makes me wonder: why is it that, when something like this appears in the news media, the perpetrators aren’t specifically identified as “christians”? if they were even suspected of being wiccans, for example, there would be no hesitation to directly identify them as such, to further villify their religious beliefs. but i read two or three articles a week concerning “christians” who torture and/or kill their children, or “christian” leaders caught having sex with children, or that sort of thing, and while it is made obvious by the context of the article that the perpetrators are “christian”, there’s no direct mention of it.

furthermore, i wonder if any studies have been done on the percentages of different religions who abuse their children. i’d be willing to bet that “christianity” is right up there near the top of the heap…

articles, big brother, bizarre, corruption, crazy people, exploding things, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, links, rants, the very big stupid

I AM A TERRORIST IN SPITE OF THE GOVERNMENT! (and you should be too, if you know what’s good for you)

this is not supposed to happen: Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security

not here. not in MY country. not in the country founded on this document with these enumerated rights and this declaration of independence from state-mandated tyrrany signed by these men.

it’s time for action: it’s time to either leave the country, or start fomenting revolution or – preferrably – both. yes, the government has “changed”, but in spite of everything that has been said apparently it’s still just business as usual, and nobody seems to be taking the slightest bit of notice as the government is snatched away from “we the people” in bits and pieces right before our eyes!

the police and sherrifs are supposed to handle law enforcement. the national guard is supposed to handle civic emergency response. the military is for fighting wars. deploying the military on united states soil is declaring war against the inhabitants of that land.

That’s us, citizens.

and yes, i know they SAY it’s to bolster security against terrorism and national emergencies. just like the patriot act and FISA and no-fly lists were supposed to do. and yet, everyday citizens are being prosecuted or restricted based on discoveries from these “protective” mandates for non-terrorism or treasonous activity.

George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not a guidebook.

welcome to the U. S. S. A.

Continue reading I AM A TERRORIST IN SPITE OF THE GOVERNMENT! (and you should be too, if you know what’s good for you) →

bizarre, blasphemy, hindu, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, jeezis, links, rants, the very big stupid

VALIDATION!

if i needed more, here is yet more confirmation that hinduism is correct path for me, regardless of what the “christians” have to say about it: i emailed Rev. Evan Cockshaw, who is the genius behind "There Probably Is" and asked him why he hasn’t posted my "testimony” yet", and guess what?

he ignored me. of course…

it seems pretty typical for “christians” to ignore someone if they’re not immediately willing to accept the dreck they’re swimming in. on the other hand, as i’ve said before, the hindu teachers i have met – even the bogus ones – have taken delight in answering questions that would appear to be blasphemous to the normal “christian” mind. and even the bogus hindu teachers i’ve experienced are more entertaining than about 99% of the “christians” i have experienced.

also Societies worse off ‘when they have God on their side’

Continue reading VALIDATION! →

articles, corruption, dead people, depression, forward into the past, links, music, pictures, the very big stupid

Violence takes iconic Tuba Man

i knew tuba man, although i knew him as ed, the guy who talked like john wayne… he and i were in the seattle youth symphony together, and we attended pacific northwest music camp for several years before it became the marrowstone music festival. my favourite recollection of ed was one year at the SYSO auditions, ed had gone to the other end of the building and was warming up in the stairway, and the people giving auditions had to ask him to shut up because he was playing loud enough that you could hear him all over the building. this is a sad, sad day for seattle. 8(

—-

Ed McMichaels aka Tuba ManViolence takes iconic Tuba Man
November 4, 2008
By ROBERT L. JAMIESON JR.

OLD-TIMERS who have seen it all say this is the worst year for Seattle sports.

The Mariners finished in the cellar. The Huskies, winless on the gridiron, exemplify college football futility. The Seahawks are in a tailspin. And the Sonics split, leaving a hole where the heart of Seattle pro basketball once beat.

To this list I pass along another loss, perhaps the saddest: Seattle’s most visible, beloved and melodic sports fan — Tuba Man — is dead.

Seattle knew Edward McMichael by sight or sound, the bespectacled guy with the wispy beard and floppy Uncle Sam and Dr. Seuss hats. For decades he breathed life into his shiny brass instrument, outside city sports venues.

On Oct. 25, police say, McMichael, 53, was near a bus stop in the 500 block of Mercer Street when thugs attacked, beating and robbing him after midnight. He was taken to the hospital for head wounds and was home recovering. But he died sometime Sunday or early Monday.

“We believe his death was directly connected to the assault,” Seattle police spokesman Sean Whitcomb told me Monday night. Gang and homicide detectives were handling the case.

Two juvenile suspects were in custody, and detectives are looking for three other people. “This is tragic,” Whitcomb said. Police are seeking the public’s help.

“Ed passed away overnight,” Ronny Chesvick said Monday. Chesvick works at the Vermont Inn, where McMichael lived. “Ed was a great guy. Funny. Friendly. Easygoing. We all loved him.”

When the Mariners made a storied postseason run in 1995, McMichael played “Happy Days Are Here Again,” outside the Kingdome. After the Sonics collapsed in the NBA playoffs against the Denver Nuggets in ’94, he played a dirge to match the shock that fans — rumpled and morose — felt as they staggered away from Seattle Center.

When the Seahawks surprised the world by rumbling to the 2006 Super Bowl, Tuba Man filled the air outside Qwest Field with musical ecstasy. Sports Illustrated called him a “super fan.”

Hundreds of thousands of Seattleites have walked by McMichael outside sporting events — and local stages. He loved to play outside the opera and theater houses. To play the tuba, he told me, was to be alive.

A native of the Seattle area, McMichael graduated in the early 1970s from King’s Garden High School. He was in the band at North Seattle Community College. He later brought his talents to one local ensemble or another, from Seattle Youth Symphony to Bellevue Philharmonic to Cascade Symphony.

He could have made a living in a band but chose to play for tips outdoors. Even in the rain, he would set a bucket at his feet for tip money, right next to jugs of his favorite drink, either V8 or Sunny Delight. Then he would purse his lips to his contrabass tuba — “My baby,” he called it — and create low, noble sounds.

McMichael appreciated when people would stop and listen, or leave a buck or two. But for him just meeting folks was the biggest reward. “That’s what I value most,” he said when I caught up with him last year. “People.”

In recent days, people wondered where he had gone. They hadn’t seen him outside McCaw Hall — his usual spot on opera nights. He wasn’t outside the Seahawks game Sunday.

Police said the five toughs who set their sights on McMichael also robbed and attacked two teens around the same time, asking for $5 and to use their cell phone. When the teens said the battery was dead, the attackers jumped.

The thugs also seized McMichael, who was “on the ground in a fetal position trying to protect himself as the group was kicking and punching him on the ground,” wrote a police officer who pulled up to the scene and saw the attack.

Two of the lowlifes, both about 15 years old, were caught. Three fled.

A police report said a ring snatched from McMichael’s finger during the sickening, ruthless violence was recovered. I wondered if it was his beloved 1979 Sonics championship ring, which he wore on his left hand.

McMichael was admitted to the hospital for a couple of days. A brother flew in from Florida.

Neighbors last saw him Saturday at his apartment. He had a warm twinkle in his eye but was very groggy from pain medication.

On Monday morning, his brother went to the apartment to take him to a doctor’s appointment, but he wasn’t in the lobby. So a manager went to McMichael’s room. She opened the door and found him lying peacefully on his bed, surrounded by sports clippings and memorabilia.

He was gone.

“Ed touched so many people,” said Meuy Saelee, the manager at the Vermont Inn, who — like sports fans, friends and strangers, young and old — will never forget him.

This quirky artist, talented as he was memorable, brought sweet music to big-city life.

Our Tuba Man.

articles, bizarre, corruption, crazy people, exploding things, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

the very big stupid

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i’ve been increasingly disturbed to the point of disgusted revulsion by things like 17 Kids And Counting (don’t look for it if you haven’t already seen the show, it’s really not worth it) – a reality TV show about an ignorant “christian“ family (emphasis on the quotation marks) who doesn’t know when to quit having kids (at last count there were 18 kids, and no sign of slowing down), who are apparently a “pop culture phenomenon” because of (or in spite of, i haven’t been able to decide which yet) the fact that they encourage their kids to not even hold hands or kiss until they’re married because they want to save their “godly purity” for their spouses – do the parents not even kiss their own kids for fear of messing up their purity? it’s never revealed… – and another kid getting killed with a gun, only this time the kid had the gun with the permission of his parents, and it was an uzi, which overbalanced due to the recoil with the predictable result that the kid “receiv(ed) a round in his head”. the shooting was ruled accidental, because they followed all the rules (the parents gave consent and the kid was with a “qualified instructor”) but the result was something that any intelligent person could have predicted before the “self-inflicted accidental shooting” ever occurred.

on top of that, i have actual neighbours (as in more than one house within a mile of mine) who have not one, but three mccain-palin campaign signs in front of their houses – because one just isn’t enough. i’ve been astounded at the way the mccain-palin campaign is being so blatant about their waste of materials in their larger campaign signs: the large signs that i’ve seen, which are larger than the large signs that people put up in their yards, and actually require a framework and extra supports, are as big as four large yard signs, but only contain the words “McCain-Palin” surrounded by a field of blue. the words are strategically centered and small enough that most of the sign is blank. it is as though they are saying “we waste resources faster and better than anybody else”…

i read this in a blog written by The Progressive Curmudgeon®, with which i don’t entirely agree (religion doesn’t necessarily cause stupidity, although “christianity” is more apt to do it than any other religion on the face of the planet), but which i believe says a lot about why we’re in the current mess we’re in. unfortunately he, too, feels as though there’s still a very good chance that the GOP will steal the election despite the popular democratic vote. also, there’s a rumour going around that

John McCain isn’t losing the election, he’s throwing it. After the way they treated him in 2000, he’s getting his revenge by destroying the party. What we are seeing isn’t an old man who fumbled his change over 8 years. This is a angry, vengeful bastard who’s grown sick of the scumbags who have infested his party. He’s decided to burn the house down while they are all still in it. This is an 8 year long lead up to revenge.

which is a very interesting concept indeed, although not very likely, and not confirmable even if it is true. as stupid as people are, that doesn’t necessarily mean that john mccain is one of them, despite outward appearances, although the likelihood of this actually being the case is minuscule.

it’s people like the duggars, the parents of the kid who shot himself with an uzi, and john mccain that make me wish i had died when i had my brain injury… it’s really not very pleasant to continue to live in a world where this kind of person is a majority of the people around you.

Continue reading the very big stupid →

articles, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

politics and the news media

there has been an association made between barack obama and william ayers, which has been debunked and should be all over, but it keeps coming up in spite of all the facts that are currently available. for that matter, there has been a big furor made about barack obama’s middle name, which in spite of the fact that it, too, has been debunked pretty thoroughly, still seems to make people upset, even when the correct information comes from the guy who spread the misinformation to begin with.

which makes me wonder about what they’re going to do with the association between william timmons, recently named head of mccain’s transition team, and saddam hussein – yes, that saddam hussein.

i can see how making an association between a rival candidate and an admitted, but repentant domestic terrorist could have advantages for your campaign, but when the tables are turned, and an association is made between someone influential on your campaign and a known, unrepentant dictator who was executed…

it doesn’t surprise me that politicians and the news media do this to each other, because i know that, fundamentally, politicians and the news media are corrupt. what astounds (and frightens) me, is that there are so many people who buy into everything that the politicians and the news media tell them, without questioning a thing. they’re the ones we’re really gonna have to watch out for, if the election goes the wrong way. there’s no telling what they’re likely to do when the rug is snatched out from under them.

Continue reading politics and the news media →

bizarre, corruption, links, rants, the very big stupid

public service annoucement

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if you’ve watched any TV at all for the past month or so, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen advertisements for Riddex Plus™, which is supposed to be a thing that you plug in to the wall, that sends digital pulses through your electrical wiring and drives out bugs and rodents… except it doesn’t work!

and not only doesn’t it work, but apparently the people who are advertising it have known, not only that it doesn’t work, but that they aren’t supposed to advertise things that they know won’t work for five years!!

the fact that they are going against the government’s specific directive does not say much for the government’s specific directive, but it says less about the motivations of the people who manufacture this crap, that they think they can pull the wool over our eyes again, just because it’s been a few years since they were slapped on the hand for doing exactly the same thing, and it starts to be insulting when you get to the point of addressing the intellect of those who are actually going to watch the advertising… do they think that our attention span is so small that nobody will notice, or what??

my recommendations? first: DON’T BUY IT!

second: if you feel motivated to do so, contact the TV station and file a complaint, or contact the FTC and file a complaint… or just stop watching television all together…

articles, corruption, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, links, rants, the very big stupid

grumpy shit

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in spite of the fact that a lot of things have been happening recently, i haven’t felt motivated to post much, because… well… what difference does it make anyway? by way of an example, there’s this article from Key64, The End is Near (Don’t Sleep on This Shit!), which is another way to describe the doom-and-gloom future i have been anticipating considering the mix of environment and politics that we’ve chosen to go with, and also has a good chance of becoming reality, since those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it…

not that i think it would make an awful lot of difference these days, but we do have an alternative, although i admit that there’s a slim chance that we’ll actually pull it off, because it would require everyone to use their brains for something other than a spacer to keep their ears apart, which is not very likely.

Continue reading grumpy shit →

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this is why i’ve been staying away from public media… 8/

U.S. Bill of Rights Amendments

  • First Amendment – Establishment Clause, Free Exercise Clause; freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly; right to petition
    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
  • Second Amendment – Right to keep and bear arms.
    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
  • Third Amendment – Protection from quartering of troops.
    No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
  • Fourth Amendment – Protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
    The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
  • Fifth Amendment – due process, double jeopardy, self-incrimination, eminent domain.
    No person shall be held to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
  • Sixth Amendment – Trial by jury and rights of the accused; Confrontation Clause, speedy trial, public trial, right to counsel
    In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
  • Seventh Amendment – Civil trial by jury.
    In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
  • Eighth Amendment – Prohibition of excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment.
    Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
  • Ninth Amendment – Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
    The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
  • Tenth Amendment – Powers of states and people.
    The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Why I’m Not Patriotic

How dare they rip the Fourth Amendment?

U.S. interrogators were taught Chinese coercion techniques

Continue reading this is why i’ve been staying away from public media… 8/ →

big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, important things to remember, july 4th, the very big stupid, torture

WE ARE TERRORISTS!

INDEPENDENCE DAY
July 4, 1776 – 2008

When in the course of human events the government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the Right of the People to alter it and demand restoration of those Constitutional Principles that have so long assured their Liberty, Safety, and Happiness. Therefore, on the anniversary of our Independence, we offer this new declaration for our times.

The history of this president is one of arbitrary usurpations of power, the effect of which is to establish tyranny through false promises of greater security.

He has created a multitude of secret programs and sent swarms of petty officers to spy on Americans in a misguided effort to combat foreign terrorism. He has invested these agents with sweeping new powers to monitor our conversations and ransack our personal papers and effects without judicial supervision or any reason to believe — as the Constitution requires — that a crime has been committed.

He has further claimed the power to disregard legislation that Congress has passed.

He has suspended the laws and treaties against torture, authorized the kidnapping of mere suspects, and transported hundreds of prisoners beyond seas so that no independent judiciary could question the legality of their mistreatment.

He and his supporters in Congress have granted amnesty to the officials who unleashed torture and humiliation upon helpless prisoners, to the disgrace of our nation.

He has denied these prisoners access to attorneys, family, and friends and has claimed the right to try them before military tribunals specifically designed to disregard the most basic principles of law.

He has imprisoned thousands of lawful immigrants for months without charges, under brutal conditions, until his agents, rather than independent courts, decide that they posed no threat.

He has wrapped his usurpations of power and his deprivations of liberty in thick cloaks of secrecy, thereby showing contempt for the rule of law and the proper functions of Congress, the courts, and the press.

At every stage of these oppressions we have sought redress, but our petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

We, therefore, resolve to resist these usurpations by all lawful means at our disposal. We insist that the powers of our national government be shared by all branches of that government and not concentrated in one alone. And we call upon Congress, the courts, and the press to reassert their constitutional functions and restore the promise that is America.

To these ends, we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

Sign the pledge

happy “independence” day… 8/

the very big stupid

wow!

3 Comments

so i got a compound bow from freecycle. i know nothing about bows, so i looked on internet (what else) and discovered that what i recieved for free from some unknown person in tacoma is actually a 2006 Ben Pearson Spoiler Plus compound bow which retailed for $380 and currently sells on ebay for between $150 and $200… and i got it for free…

wow…

And More, big brother, corruption, drugs, hybrid elephant, i am a terrorist, links, malfunctioning computers, rants, siva, the very big stupid, videos, workshop

umph

i’ve got a tenor sax to work on. pictures as soon as they’re taken.

i’ve also got 600MB of And More music to work on, but that’s probably going to happen after i get a good start on the tenor sax, and i’ll have to clear off my keyboard, which is probably going to take an hour or so, since i just cleared off my workbench and most of the stuff has gone into the place where, if i cleared off my keyboard i’d put stuff, so there’s bound to be a certain amount of shuffling stuff, and finding new places to put stuff, and even a certain amount of throwing stuff away (gasp) before any of that happens.

so, what you get until there’s more artwork to look at and listen to is a link dump.

Worshipping Shivling at Home and Energisation of Rudrakhshas need to be reformatted and uploaded to ? ??? ?????

Page2RSS – i get the impression that this is sort of like FeedBurner, except that it works with any web page.

Sign up to be a part of Spencer Tunick’s upcoming art installations. there’s one in vienna, and one in ireland.

The Bongo Project – a project to see if it is possible to communicate with TCP/IP using bongo drums… it is… at 2 bps. remember the 14K modem days? remember 2400 baud modems? this makes even a 2400 bps modem look blindingly fast.

ever hear of Fusarium oxysporum, otherwise known as panama disease? there’s a good chance that you’re going to hear about it eventually, because the CIA has been using it as a way to control (which is to say, eliminate) the coca plants in south america… unfortunately, what they’ve succeeded in doing is wiping out bananas, instead. and this isn’t the first time! the banana that i grew up with, apparently, is banana 2.0, based on the vietnamese cavendish banana, which took over from the “Gros Michel” (“Fat Mike”) banana, a bigger and more creamy version, which was the world’s most popular fruit until the 1950s, when it, too, became extinct due to Fusarium oxysporum infestation. the whole sordid story is over at metafilter.

The Drug Test Consultant dot com – drug tests are a violation of our constitutional right to privacy and protection from self-incrimination (first and fourth ammendments to the U.S. constitution), they are no more than 75% accurate most of the time, and we’re currently in a war against drugs, while at the same time many states (like washington) have legalised medical cannabis. but this company has a franchise to sell people (for $10,000!!!) who are interested in getting started in the business of providing drug testing services to employers. if there was a more apt occasion for me to use the very big stupid category, i don’t know what it would be… 8/

A Kinder, Gentler Torture and America’s Democratic Collapse are reasons why, in spite of the fact that american society is founded on the idea that all men are created equal, it’s definitely not the case any longer… which sort of explains why the drug test consultant dot com folks aren’t so worried about whether or not their products are a violation of our constitutional rights. at the same time, they’re both very good reasons to flee the country while you still can.

articles, big brother, corruption, crazy people, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

I AM A TERRORIST! 8/

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
     — Hermann Goering, Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 1945

Bush is the New Hitler
by Red Baron
5/30/2008

Adolph Hitler in 1933 used the burning of a parliament building by a deranged Dutchman to declare a war on terrorism to legitimize his leadership because he did not win a majority in the previous election. He proclaimed in front of the burned out building, “you are now witnessing a new epic in history, this fire is the beginning!” he used the occasion to state this as a sign from “god” to begin an all out war on terror and its sponsor: A people who could be traced back to the middle-east and found their motivation in their evil deeds in their religion. Two months later the first terrorist prison was built and, in the name of safety and patriotism, he was able to change their constitution to allow spying and control free speech and privacy. Suspected terrorists could be jailed without council and be held indefinitely. People could enter a home and search it, if thought to be connected to terror. Using patriotism and safety he got the people to go for it and patriot flags and banners were everywhere.

Now check this out….

George Bush in 2001 used the attack on the towers by deranged middle-easterners to declare a war on terrorism to legitimize his leadership because he did not win a majority in the previous election. He proclaimed in front of the collapsed building, “you are now witnessing a new epic in history, this attack is the beginning!” he used the occasion to state this as a sign from “god” to begin an all out war on terror and it’s sponsor: A people who could be traced back to the middle-east and found their motivation in their evil deeds in their religion. Two months later the first terrorist prison was built and, in the name of safety and patriotism, he was able to change their constitution to allow spying and control free speech and privacy. Suspected terrorists could be jailed without council and be held indefinitely. People could enter a home and search it, if thought to be connected to terror. Using patriotism and safety he got the people to go for it and patriot flags and banners were everywhere.

articles, banda gozona, big brother, bizarre, bssb, corruption, drugs, i am a terrorist, imaginary pooperty, links, malfunctioning computers, music, rants, the very big stupid

elbow

2 Comments

i performed at folklife for most of yesterday. i did not get shot. in fact i didn’t hear about the people who got shot at folklife until after i got home. i suppose it’s one of the advantages of the the low-information diet i’ve been trying to adopt, but this agregator that is built in to my email client is making it really difficult, especially when i tell it what news i want or don’t want to read… 8/

meanwhile,

New Orphaned Works Act would limit copyright liability – this is a step in the right direction, but there’s still a long way to go before copyrights on intellectual property is fixed.

MusOpen – like this, for example… free, public-access music!

Does Constitution apply to enemy combatant on U.S. soil? – he may or may not be a terrorist, but the way he’s been being treated – as a legal and legitimate citizen of this country, where he lives – has implications for everyone. if the US government has its’ way, every single one of us could potentially be declared an enemy combattant and “disappeared”… i saw a guy wearing a t-shirt yesterday that said “THE LAND OF THE FREE* – *some exceptions may apply”

Could an Acid Trip Cure Your OCD?

Practicon Dental Supply

Continue reading elbow →

articles, big brother, bizarre, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid, torture

I AM A TERRORIST! 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.

Congratulations, America … Children are Being Tortured in Your Name – the US has imprisoned 2,500 children since 9/11 as “enemy combatants”, in violation of the Geneva Convention against classifying children as POWs… bad enough for ya’? if so, don’t read any further…

Government May Have Massive Surveillance Program for Use in “National Emergency”

Two Sick Stories – i don’t know which is worse: the government spying on americans at the RNC, or deaths because of lack of legal status for cannabis…

Audio Recording of McCain’s Political Endorser John Hagee Preaching Jews Are Cursed and Subhuman – people are still ranting meaningless drivel about obama and rev. wright, and nobody’s been paying attention to the real, scary shit mcain and rev. hagee have going on…

Bush IQ: Mild Mental Retardation – much as i would like to believe that this story is true (it would explain a lot), i don’t think it is.

Continue reading I AM A TERRORIST! 8/ →

bizarre, corruption, crazy people, evolution, existential negation, links, the very big stupid

hey, i know that guy!

PZ Meyers is a biologist who runs a blog called pharyngula which i follow pretty regularly because, among other things, he is really good at pushing the buttons of the anti-evolutionist whackos, and this is no exception… except this time he rips into a guy that i actually know, and debated with myself a few years ago. the first letter he tears into is by glen howard of north bend, one of the two owners of the vet clinic moe works at… glen howard has a doctors’ degree in veterinary medicine, which only goes to show that you don’t have to be smart enough to find your own butt with a map to get a doctors’ degree…

articles, bizarre, blasphemy, fremont sunday market, hybrid elephant, malfunctioning computers, music, rants, sex, the very big stupid, windoesn't

And Then So Clear

1 Comment

first business card for MIVC since 060315. that can’t be true, but i can find no business records for anything before that… although i had backups of a file called 070312-MIVC-BC.qxp, so i must have done a business card for them since 2006… but i can find no business records for them. bizarre.

being a professional computer geek for eddie, who is almost completely blind, and completely (utterly, hopelessly) computer-illiterate. i went over there today to get the “lay of the land” so to speak, in terms of where he was with computer hardware. he’s got Win98 2nd edition, and he was trying to run a HP all-in-one printer/fax/scanner (which gives me a non-standard warning message about not being compatible with something on the system, joy) and a HP flat-screen monitor that defaults to 640×480 and 16 colours in W98, and gives me a strange message when i try to boot gutsy from a live CD – something about re-setting the resolution to 1024×768, which i would have done if i could have remembered the arcane command that you type into the text-based interface – which is, in fact, dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg – which i knew was written in my linux grimoire, but not currently accessible to my memory. however, during my download and burning of the hardy CD i read the system requirements and figured that a 500mhz pentium III might not run something that modern anyway, so i dug around and located CDs of kubuntu 7.x and 6.x as well, so if i can’t get hardy working, i’ll have a couple of back ups. i figure i’ll go back tomorrow with a USB hub and a 4g flash stick and back up all the data, and then install whichever kubuntu will run. his internet is on a dial-up connection, and i’ve never had to deal with a modem and linux, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.

i downloaded 2g of YMO tracks, which is all of their studio albums and a whole pile of live stuff including a couple of rehearsals. i also downloaded a gig or so of sanskrit chants, which i’m going to burn to CD and take to FSM with me, so that i can have appropriate music in my booth.

Federal judge rules students can’t be barred from expressing support for gay people – a principal at a south florida high school testified that he “believed rainbows were “sexually suggestive” and would make students unable to study because they’d be picturing gay sex acts in their mind” – but, apparently wearing “other symbols many find controversial, such as the Confederate flag” was okay. the fact that the students had to get the ACLU and a federal court involved before their first amendment rights were restored says something about both the students and the society in which we live currently.

Will you marry me – temporarily? – this is coming from iran… why don’t we have such things in this country?

Childish superstition: Einstein’s letter makes view of religion relatively clear

Polar bear listed as threatened species – and just last night i was sitting next to an elderly lady who was ranting about the fact that there is no global warming, because we’ve been having unseasonably cool weather locally recently. hello? wake up and smell the coffee… kthxbye…

Musical SpongeBob™ Digital Thermometer – good for oral, underarm or rectal use, plays “SpongeBob SquarePants Theme” at the end of temperature taking… what every home shouldn’t be without.

Continue reading And Then So Clear →

articles, bizarre, links, pictures, sex, the very big stupid

MILFs?? boobies??

i just came across this, and it is SO bizarre…

Mom angered by racy books in clothes shop
May 5, 2008

LYNNWOOD, Wash (UPI) — A Washington mother with a teenage son said she was outraged to find books with sexual content on sale at the teen clothing store Urban Outfitters.

Marci Milfs of Lynnwood said she plans to file a complaint with the city of Lynnwood about the books, which she said do not belong in a clothing store aimed at children and teenagers, the Everett (Wash.) Herald reported Monday.

Milfs said she has already raised the issue of the books — which include “Pornogami: A Guide to the Ancient Art of Paper-Folding for Adults,” and “Porn for Women,” a book featuring pictures of men doing housework — with state Rep. Norma Smith, R-Clinton, and conservative non-profits including Morality in Media, Concerned Women of America and the American Family Association.

The mother said Urban Outfitters’ corporate office in Philadelphia refused her demand that the books be removed.

sweet breast pudding

“They said they are not sex books or pornography books, but that they are art books and their goals are to support artists,” Milfs said.

However, Milfs maintains the books should not be seen by children.

“It’s not freedom of speech,” she said. “It’s selling adult books to teenagers.”

this has got to be a joke, right? her name is “Marci MILFs”?!?

somebody at UPI is having a good laugh about this one… 8)

also, Bizarre Breast Puddings From Japan make me wonder why we’re not so open minded in this country…

articles, corruption, dead people, links, rants, sex, the very big stupid

another reason this country is going to hell

Mildred Loving, the woman whose name is on the lawsuit that made it legal for people of different races to marry each other, has died. oddly enough, although you may not think so, she was also in favour of same sex marriage, for exactly the same reasons as she was in favour of interracial marriage: LOVE.

at the same time, in “The City of Brotherly Love”, they are verging on banning same sex marriage. there is so much going on in this country that has far more importance than the homophobia of these yahoos. they have entirely too much time on their hands if this is all they can accomplish. how they got elected in the first place is beyond me… i mean they came to a decision on mildred loving’s case in 1967! why are they still arguing about this? it was establised by a unanimous decision fourty years ago!

let’s stop arguing about whether or not is okay for two people of the same sex to get married to each other and start worrying about things like global warming and alternative energy sources. the way things are going currently, the world can slowly disintigrate from the inside out, while we are arguing about whether or not it’s okay for two people to love one another. it’s time to change our minds before it’s too late! 8/

Continue reading another reason this country is going to hell →

bizarre, crazy people, depression, exploding things, links, rants, the very big stupid

more depressing stuff…

3 Comments

what is it with five-year-olds and guns?

Boy, 5, shoots himself; parents charged – and – Indiana boy, 5, shoots sister, 4, to death

now when i was five years old, my father owned a gun. i remember seeing it, once in my father’s closet. i’m fairly sure it wasn’t loaded, and even with nobody telling me what it was, i remember knowing that it was dangerous and i wasn’t to touch it, a sensibility that i have carried through to this very day – i went with a friend a couple of years ago when he was moving to los angeles and “needed a gun for protection” (from what? he never said), and i actually convinced myself to try target shooting with him. i still have one .45 auto round on the shelf in front of me at this very moment, but i don’t have anything to shoot it from, and while it is very dangerous to have a single bullet around, i’ve also got a bottle of lamp oil, a bottle of lighter fluid, a bottle of methyl alcohol and a bottle of paint thinner on the desk as well, and i don’t worry too much about them, either. a few years later, my father inherited an antique, single-barrelled shotgun from somewhere or another, and i got to “play” with that on several occasions, but it was so old that they didn’t make cartridges for it any longer, and someone had removed, and lost, the firing pin a long time ago, so it was more like the “broken gun beneath the bed” of the old jethro tull song than anything else.

but what i can’t figure out is why people who own guns keep them just lying around their house, in a loaded state, in a place where children are likely to pick them up and shoot people? i actually wrote “and accidentally shoot people”, but then i realised that if i didn’t know what a gun was, or if i did know what it was, but had the sensibilities of the normal five-year-old, the fact that i would shoot someone (including myself) is almost a given. the fact that parents would just leave a loaded gun in a place where unsupervised children could hope to find it seems so utterly moronic to me that i wonder why they were allowed to have children in the first place! you (theoretically) have to have a license to own a gun, you should also have to have a licence to have children, and in order to get that license, you should have to prove that you have more sense than a peanut… 8/

articles, banda gozona, bizarre, brain injury, corruption, depression, furries, i am a terrorist, links, moe, pictures, ptsd, rants, the very big stupid

blah… 8/

mother-in-law came to visit yesterday, which is a chore for everyone, as, although she drives, she apparently has this irrational fear of driving on the freeway… for long distances. i’ve never been able to get the complete story from anyone: she drives on the freeway in portland, but is too afraid to drive on the freeway to come visit her only daughter in seattle… and when her father (my grandfather-in-law, and as grumpy an old dude as that i have never met before) lived in chehalis, she would drive up on the freeway to visit him, but for some (as i said, it’s an irrational fear) reason, seattle is too far for her to drive, so she took the train.

i had a cinco de mayo performance with banda gozona yesterday, so i missed out on the prelude, but i had to drive her to the amtrak station this morning (moe had already left to go teach), which turned into a nightmare such that, once she arrived home in portland, she decided that she had to go directly to the hospital instead of going home first. i won’t go into all of what happened, but i never thought i would have occasion to be so intimate with my mother-in-law… and i’m glad she has a high tolerance for pain, because if it had been lower the probability that i would have been even more intimate with her is very high. she’s a hardy soul, though, and the fact that she will recover from whatever she did to herself in the bathroom this morning is practically assured. i was late to my rehearsal, however…

i have been really depressed for a while now, and part of it is because DVR has been stringing me along and then unceremoniously dumped me a couple of weeks ago. it may not be as bad as it sounds in the long run, but it’s pretty depressing at the moment. although i found a site where they built a building that could be used as a workshop very nicely, for about $1,000. it’s built entirely of rammed earth, which means that, properly built, it’s very stable and can handle massive weigh, which could mean that i could dig out a corner of our front yard, build a rammed-earth building, and put a flower garden or something like that on top.

other things that have been contributing to my depression include the state of the world, and the state of the country. while the entire country is up in arms about obama’s former pastor, nobody seems to be paying attention to the endorsement mccain got from “rev.” john hagee. i’ve been familiar with hagee since he was an unknown radio televangelist, and he scares me a lot more than a pissed-off black guy who used to be pastor to the guy who’s trying to become president. this writer, who claims to have smoked pot at woodstock, thinks that despite it’s gaining more acceptance in the “normal” world as time goes on, cannabis will not be legal in the forseeable future for five really stupid, but ultimately probably quite accurate reasons. while at exactly the same time, in canada(da) they’re pushing for legalisation, and, in arizona, cops make a $2.5 million pot bust when they pull over a commercial truck with an improperly displayed license plate… and they’re telling us to keep a lid on your emotions at work, because to show them is a "career limiting move" (as we used to call such things when i worked at micro$not).

there have been some things that are breaks in the depression, though – precious few, unfortunately – but they include dolphins playing with bubbles (courtesy of my friend kamalla), a seal fucking a penguin – which should disturb the “christians” and the anti-furries in the audience (who knows, there may actually be some), and a license plate that is not only displayed properly, but encourages cannabilism.

also, there has been a profusion of puppies in my life recently. here’s a picture.

4-week-old puppy
sleeping puppy

Continue reading blah… 8/ →

big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

it’s time… 8/

1 Comment
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.

Oh dear…

via Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court affirmed Wednesday that police have the power to conduct searches and seize evidence, even when done during an arrest that turns out to have violated state law.

The unanimous decision comes in a case from Portsmouth, Va., where city detectives seized crack cocaine from a motorist after arresting him for a traffic ticket offense.

David Lee Moore was pulled over for driving on a suspended license. The violation is a minor crime in Virginia and calls for police to issue a court summons and let the driver go.

Instead, city detectives arrested Moore and prosecutors say that drugs taken from him in a subsequent search can be used against him as evidence.

“We reaffirm against a novel challenge what we have signaled for half a century,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.

Scalia said that when officers have probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest and to search the suspect in order to safeguard evidence and ensure their own safety.

Moore was convicted on a drug charge and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.

Let’s review:

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But, Scalia’s SCOTUS has spoken. I don’t care if the guy was a crackhead– this wasn’t quite about just him. The SCOTUS just made WARRANTLESS SEARCH AND SEIZURE LEGAL.

On a related note: So, we have this new program being started in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, where Cops go door-to-door, and offer to Search the parent’s child’s room for illegal guns. The SCOTUS has now made it legal for those Cops to arrest and try anyone in the house for anything else that they might find in the house– even though the “warrant” is for guns in one specific bedroom. LA and DC had better quash that program toot-sweet.

Resist.

—
thanks to MonkeyFister

chalmers johnson is saying the same thing…

It’s Time to Flee the Country

big brother, brain injury, cannabis, corruption, depression, gripes, hybrid elephant, i am a terrorist, ptsd, the very big stupid, videos

happy 4/20

2 Comments

now that i’ve got that out of the way, i want to gripe about DVR again. they strung me along for 4 months after not even paying attention to me for almost 5 years, and then, yesterday, i got their notice in the mail that they won’t be doing anything for me anyway, which i could have told you if it weren’t for the fact that all the time between january, when i first met with them, and yesterday, they said they actually could do something for me. basically the notice i recieved yesterday told me a whole bunch of things that are wrong with my business, some of which i can actually change without any suggestions, and all of which can be changed fairly easily as long as i can find some helpful suggestions for what i can do instead. but then it said that, given the fact that my business was so fucked up, they won’t be able to help me, without a clue as to what i should do to change it, or what i should do next. great… even the print brokering, musical instrument repair and pipe-making are beyond the capability willingness of DVR to help me out. and with no suggestions for what i can do to change it, i’m basically right back where i started, not making an even remotely livable income and without the possibility of ever making a livable income in the future.

yes, i am fundamentally against work, but i figure, with my talents, there should be some way for me (and everybody else, if they want it) to make an acceptible income doing what i like to do, but with government agencies that are supposed to help people like me shooting me down every time i try to move forward, it’s getting really discouraging, and right now i don’t know what i’m going to do next. 8(

articles, bizarre, corruption, imaginary pooperty, links, the very big stupid

grr

Stop Making Movies About My Books
April 2, 2008
By Dr. Seuss

On the fourteenth of March, in towns nationwide,
In every cinema, multiplex, on every barnside,
Gleamed another adapting of one of my books,
CGI-ed and digitized by another sly crook.

Horton, my favorite—look how he’s been treated!
Stuffed with tinsels and tassels and promptly excreted!
The puns! And the filler! The script fees you must save!
While I tumble and grum-humble around in my grave.

Did you learn all but squat from The Cat In The Hat?
Please tell me you fired the prick who made that.
I would have stopped writing, maybe sold Goodyear tires.
If I knew one dark day I’d costar with Mike Myers.

And Oh!
Oh, dear! Oh!
My poor Grinch, what they’ve done!
They crammed in live-action and snuffed out all the fun!

It’s icky, it’s tacky, it’s awkward, it’s wrong.
The Whos look like ferrets, it’s an hour too long.
What a rotten idea to spend millions destroying
This masterful tale kids spent decades enjoying!

But still you keep making them!
Just how do you dare?
Sell my life’s work off piecemeal
To every Tom, Dick, and Har’.

Why it’s simply an outrage—a crime, you must judge!—
To crap on my books with this big-budget sludge.
My books are for children to learn ones and twos in,
Not commercialous slop for Jim Carrey to ruin.

Have you no respect for the gems of your youth?
To pervert them on screen from Taiwan to Duluth.
Even after you drag my last word through the dirt,
I know you, you pirates,
You’d cut out my heart for a “Thing 1” T-shirt.

For eighty-some years I held you vultures at bay,
knowing just how you’d franchise my good name some day.
Not yet cold in my grave before you starting shooting
the first of my classics you’d acquired for looting.

Mrs. Seuss, that old stoofus, began selling more rights
to Dreamworks, Universal—any hack in her sights.
First The Cat In The Hat and then this, that and Seussical
without a thought to be picky, selectish, or choosical.

So to Audrey, you whore, you sad sack of a wife:
Listen close. Pay attention, for once in your life.
You give Fox In Sox to those sharks who made Elf
And so help me, I’ll rise up and kill you myself.

No Sneetches by Sony—
No One Fish: On Ice—
Burn that Hop On Pop II script not one time but twice.
Don’t sex up my prose with Alyssa Milano…
And no Green Eggs And Ham with that one-note Romano!

This must stop! This must end! Don’t you see what you’re doing?
You’re defiling the work I spent ages accruing.
And when it’s dried up and you’ve sucked out your pay
There’ll be no going back to a simpler day,

When your mom would give Horton a voice extra deep,
And turn the last page as you drifted to sleep.
Instead you’ll have boxed sets, shit movies, and… well,
You’ll have plenty to watch while you’re burning in hell.

corruption, imaginary pooperty, links, rants, the very big stupid

“intellectual property”

UMG sues man for selling promo CDs

here is something else that really irritates me. ever since i worked in a radio station in the early 1980s i’ve seen music (records, tapes and CDs) marked with the warning “promotional use only, not for resale”. i’ve seen them in radio station libraries, recording studios, and used record/CD stores, and there doesn’t seem to be any hesitation to sell these to whomever wants to buy and has the money, regardless of whether or not the music is stamped with such a warning.

yet UMG sees fit to sue this guy for listing 26 CDs stamped with “promotional use only, not for resale” on ebay.

let’s look at this a different way. instead of music, let’s pretend that UMG is an automobile dealership. do you think that anyone would “buy” a car stamped with “promotional use only, not for resale”? do you think that UMG would last very long in the automobile industry if they “licenced” their cars, rather than selling them to people?

then why do they think that they can get away with pulling the same kind of shit in the music industry?

of course – to carry the analogy even further – if they did licence cars rather than selling the rights to them, does that mean that they would have to pay to fix things that went wrong with the car? my car is still broken (okay, it hasn’t even been 12 hours yet) and i’m stressing… 8/

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I AM A TERRORIST!

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.

i sincerely wonder why the revolution hasn’t started yet, and i despair for a country that can sit idly by while these kinds of things are perpetrated on us in the name of “protecting our freedoms”. really… bush has gone too far this time, and it’s time somebody did something about it. >8/

Bush Administration Memo Says Fourth Amendment Does Not Apply To Military Operations Within U.S.

Continue reading I AM A TERRORIST! →

articles, bizarre, cannabis, corruption, existential negation, hindu, i am a terrorist, jeezis, links, moe, moisture festival, multiple appendages, philharmonic, rants, sex, the very big stupid

moisture musings

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the 5th annual moisture festival is into it’s second week of performances, most of which feature the fremont philharmonic. we’re getting more into playing “other peoples'” music more, which is a good idea, i think. we’re also becoming “the” band for a number of performers like godfrey daniels, which is amusing since apart from the moisture festival, we’ve never performed with him as godfrey daniels. it’s much more mellow and laid-back backstage this year, but i think that part of that is because i am not responsible for the programs this year.

these are some of the links i’ve been perusing in the mean time:

Archbishop of Canterbury attacks Creationism – it’s getting pretty obvious that something is wrong with intelligent design when someone like the archbishop of canturbury comes down on the side of the evolutionists…

Hybrid embryos created in Britain – speaking of “intelligent” design…

Two-headed baby hailed as divine – and here’s how india deals with it. (NOTE: i am discounting the fact that this was published on 1 april by knowing that they don’t have april fools day in india. i may be wrong.)

Faeces hint at first Americans – new evidence further negates any “young earth” intelligent design explanations that i have heard…

Pregnant man tells Oprah: It’s a miracle – now this is something i’ve been reading about for a couple of weeks, and it is one of those rare instances when my wife and i disagree. i think it’s perfectly natural for a transgender man to want to have children, but my wife thinks… i’m not sure what she thinks. it’s “unnatural” or something is my guess. maybe she thinks the kid will grow up confused or something. but my point is that kids already grow up confused with “normal” parents, and both my wife and i are fine examples of that. if a kid has even an outside chance of having a relatively normal life, parents should be able to be parents without regard to what their genitals look like, and if, as in this case, the man is already pregnant they should be able to get medical care without having to go through nine doctors! my son is an excellent example of how someone with screwed up parents can have a much more “normal” life than either of their parents had.

The Hypocrisy Gospel: Get Rich for Jesus? – ever wonder why the religious conservatives adore the prosperity gospel so much?

finally,

Battle over Pot Possession in Alaska Is Back in the Courts – prohibitionists, once again, make some sort of lame excuse to overturn alaska’s legal home use of cannabis. they’re going to lose, of course, because their excuse is lame (“it’s not your father’s marijuana”, reefer-madness propaganda), but it’s got a lot of people upset in both camps.

Continue reading moisture musings →

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bizarre and funny

Why records DO all sound the same – No, it’s not you – records do all sound the same these days.

Sony BMG Sued for Software Piracy – Assets Seized – PointDev, a small software company, mandated a bailiff to raid one of Sony BMGs owned building in January this year. The raid revealed that four of the Sony BMGs owned servers contained the pirated software. This is too good to be true, but in fact, it is true. Now if it only makes a difference…

The coming financial collapse of the U.S. government: Fed papers reveal what’s in store for Americans

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe

Continue reading bizarre and funny →

articles, bizarre, corruption, crazy people, existential negation, links, spiritual, the very big stupid

grump!

okay, i’ve about had it with the “Athiest 1 – Magick 0” posts that i have been seeing around for the last couple of weeks, in regard to the athiest rationalist who challenged a “tantrik magician” to kill him on television. it’s wrong thinking from the start, and here are some of the reasons why.

by the way, with the exception of the first, all of these reasons assume a hypothetical person who is able to kill the rationalist by using “magic” powers without actually touching him in any way. whether such a person really exists or not is a subject for another discussion at some other time.

1: because of the fact that this took place on television, there’s a good chance that the station that broadcast it was legally liable if anybody died on their set, regardless of how they died. the probability is extremely high that both the rationalist and the “tantrik magician” knew this, even before accepting an appearance on the show. this was not a challenge, it was an entertainment event, and it was known ahead of time, exactly what the outcome would be.

2: the (hypothetical) person who actually has the power to kill the rationalist isn’t the person who is going to be widely known as a “tantrik magician”. such a person avoids fame, would not actively seek out the spotlight, and, when in the spotlight, would demonstrate that anyone could do the things that they do, and/or to give thanks to God (or whatever you may call it) for the abilities that are being ascribed to them. however, especially if they are widely known, such a person would also be very careful about the words that are used to describe them. any words – such as “tantrik magician” – that imply that their powers are in some way “super natural” will be avoided at all costs, and any violation of this would be swiftly and sternly dealt with.

in fact, just from knowing this much, i can tell you with absolute certainty that the “tantrik magician” failed to kill the rationalist, knowing no further information. by the way, if you haven’t already read the article, the “tantrik magician” – big suprise – failed to kill the rationalist.

3: the rationalist, in accepting a challenge from a “tantrik magician”, knew from the start that he would fail, so this wasn’t really a “challenge” at all. such people don’t know a real saint when they see one, because of their mindset that tells them that such people don’t exist. a real saint could perform any miracle, with as much documentation anybody could ask for, and such a person would find some way to prove that they didn’t actually do it.

4: the (hypothetical) person who actually has the power to kill the rationalist will not respond to challenges to “prove” their powers. such a person would consider the whole subject of responding to a challenge superficial, pointless, and actually deterimental to the actual reason why are on earth.

5: perhaps the most important point of all is that the (hypothetical) person who actually has the power to kill the rationalist will be known as a person of peace, and would never kill another conscious being for capricious reasons or to prove a point. this, if no other reason, is why all challenges like this will be met with silence from the people who could actually do it.

Continue reading grump! →

corruption, drugs, evolution, jeezis, links, the very big stupid

link dump

It’s Time to Kick Jesus Out of Politics – Is legislative prayer really necessary?

Satellite measures pollution from east Asia to North America – In a new NASA study, researchers taking advantage of improvements in satellite sensor capabilities offer the first measurement-based estimate of the amount of pollution from East Asian forest fires, urban exhaust, and industrial production that makes its way to western North America.

Legitimate LSD – The first government-approved psychotherapy study of LSD’s therapeutic benefits in human subjects in over thirty-five years is scheduled to proceed.

The Peace Drug – Post-traumatic stress disorder had destroyed Donna Kilgore’s life. Then experimental therapy with MDMA, a psychedelic drug better known as ecstasy, showed her a way out. Was it a fluke — or the future?

Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong – Let me get this straight: The company will side with petulant, unreasonable, angry, demanding customers, instead of with me, its loyal employee? And this is meant to lead to better customer service?

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oy… 8/

i’ve got to get this off my chest because it’s been really bothering me. about a week ago i posted about a lady i had seen doing psychic readings with a deck of cards that i designed, and i posted a picture that was clearly identifiable as the lady in question. however, i didn’t ask her permission before i posted it, and it very definitely was not okay with her that i had done so – don’t bother looking for the photo at my flickr gallery, because it’s not there either. i deleted it at her request. but the problem is that i may have irreparably broken any chances that i had to find out more about where she got the cards, or find out about her “psychic connection” with them, and even to get to know her and become friends with her. i did something, without thinking, which, if someone had done it to me, i might have taken exception, and that, if i had thought about it for two seconds, i probably would have done entirely differently. it’s not an excuse, but i’m not used to people paying attention to me on the web – it’s such a big place, and i’m just one person… apparently that doesn’t make any difference. in the words of the lady, i am “a dirt bag”, and at this point, i tend to agree with her, which is why i haven’t posted anything for a few days.

articles, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

more terrorism!

House Democrats reject telecom amnesty, warrantless surveillance – another strike for the “terrorists”, but didn’t bush say he would veto anything that doesn’t offer retroactive immunity for telecoms? it sounds like a tiny step in the right direction, but i’m going to wait until this actually passes into law before i start rejoicing… and that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to all of the other bush screwups we’re going to have to fix… 8/

Continue reading more terrorism! →

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guess what?

2 Comments

I AM A TERRORIST!

there are almost a million terrorists in the united states AT THIS VERY MOMENT!!!

are you afraid yet?

the U.S. government’s terrorist list has, as of this posting, 927,436 terrorists, and at the rate it’s increasing, over 20,000 records per month, there will be a million U.S. citizens on the list by july!

are you afraid yet?

and people wonder why i wear a button that says “I AM A TERRORIST!” 8/

articles, big brother, cannabis, drugs, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

guess what i’m thinking about today?

Forgotten man

The Wire’s War on the Drug War

Curing Addiction With Cannabis Medicines?

Cannabis Smoke Is Less Likely To Cause Cancer Than Tobacco Smoke

Get your cocaine from Superdrug

Phoenix Tears is a not for profit entity dedicated to the production of Hemp medicines and providing information about the use of natural Hemp oil, (not Hemp Seed oil) as an effective treatment for cancer and other serious illnesses.

Continue reading guess what i’m thinking about today? →

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o_0

2 Comments

suspects – either pornographers or journalists, i haven’t completely decided. if nothing else, it’s a good reason to avoid P2P software and to use DHCP… if there’s any doubt about your computer, try ShieldsUp which will tell you where the problems are, and make suggestions about what to do to fix them, hopefully before the police show up.

Child porn found on 20,000 computers in Virginia – "Using a national online system that enables them to remotely download incriminating images directly from a suspect’s computer"… waitaminute… somebody, somewhere has a software application that can discern incriminating photos from ones that are not incriminating on any computer, regardless of it’s operating system whether or not it is a server, and whether or not it is protected by a firewall, and that gives them the ability to download those images without leaving a trace in the target computer’s log files?

if they have the ability to download such images from computers regardless of their network presence or operating system, then why don’t they have the capability to replace the images, or shut down the computer, or introduce a virus, or block its network access? i can just see the shocked look on the pornographer’s face when he comes home one afternoon to discover that his entire hard disk has been wiped clean, or all of his pornography has been replaced by pictures of My Little Pony™.

maybe the reason why they are so confident of their numbers is because of the fact that they introduced the incriminating photos themselves. can you imagine a better way to get "potential terrorists" out of the way than to plant child pornography on their computers without their knowledge?

"using the nationwide software system, child pornography can easily be downloaded from the computer hard drives of individuals who utilize peer-to-peer file-sharing" so either they’re using P2P software themselves and have access only to the target hard disk’s "shared folders", or they’re using some "law-enforcement-only" software to access entire disks on P2P networks, not just the “shared folders”. i would think that people who had “incriminating” files on their computer, regardless of whether it was child-pornography, pirated music or plans to blow up the white house, would be smart enough not to put them in a place where they can be downloaded, willy-nilly, by just anyone. those criminals that aren’t that smart deserve what they get.

somehow i doubt that their investigation is actually happening that way, but you’ve got to think that a person whose job it is to write a newspaper article about computers would know enough about them to know.

Continue reading o_0 →

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Urine Palace

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Playing Politics With Intelligence – As President Bush and his aides reject the accusation that they are playing politics with matters of national intelligence, it’s worth noting that they have done precisely that many times. Bush and his top associates have a tradition of selectively disclosing intelligence findings that serve their political agenda — while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would tend to discredit them. Think the run-up to war in Iraq. Think Valerie Plame…

ANTI-SEMITES FOR OBAMA – the tennessee republican party issued this press release today, in the wake of barack obama’s hesitance to denounce, or reject, anti-semite louis farrakhan’s support in last night’s debate. of course they did – they’re republicans and they’re from tennessee, what did you expect?

Ever wonder where L. Ron Hubbard stole Scientology from? – apparently there was a book published in 1934, in german, by Dr. A. Nordenholz called “Scientology – The Science of the Constitution and Usefulness of Knowledge” – in german it’s “Scientologie – Wissenschaft von der Beschaffenheit und der Tauglichkeit des Wissens” – which bears a striking resemblance to L. Ron Hubbard’s “Scientology”. it makes me wonder what Anonymous and/or the RTC will have to say about it.

If you like mazes this should keep you busy for a while.

Doctors demolish myths on medical marijuana – New analysis shows feds are wrong on pot… as if we needed another group of scientists to tell us that…

Continue reading Urine Palace →

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how could it possibly be more clear?

Articles Of Faith: Ridiculing gay men is hateful way to preach – ken hutcherson, pastor of the antioch baptist church in kirkland, raises ire… much like bob “More Head” moorehead, pastor of the overlake christian church in bellevue did… will anybody else notice?

Gay Florida Teen Gunned Down in Fort Lauderdale – yep, somebody noticed… but in the wrong way… 8/

as i have said previously, this country, and this society has been getting more and more dysfunctional, and this is a prime example: people espousing hatred of gays results in their dehumanisation to the point where killing them is almost expected behaviour, and nobody says anything when it happens in their neighbourhood. things have got to change, and very, very soon, otherwise we’ll be right back in the middle of a world war over temporary and changing things like oil and beliefs. history has taught us nothing. 8/

Continue reading how could it possibly be more clear? →

big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

Bush and Big Brother

The Mad, Mad Middle Class – Large numbers of middle-class people are mad, really mad, about the damage Bush-league conservatism has done to the country. That’s what we get for electing not one, but two different presidents named “Bush”. I wondered how long it would be until that would come back to bite us… 8/

New Way To Store Information Via DNA Discovered – now the TSA and the DHS will have an excuse to search even your DNA for covert plans to blow up stuff or to foment revolution. you watch, it will happen… 8/

corruption, depression, i am a terrorist, links, sex, the very big stupid, torture

these people are terrorists, but it doesn’t make any difference

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The Water Cure – Debating torture and counterinsurgency — a century ago

Dare to Know – What is not taught in School, from the Islamic Homeschool blog.

McCain Torture Endorsement Lost Amid Media Sex Scandal Frenzy – The media missed a damning story that has actual implications for American democracy.

now, examples of reasons why this “terroristic” sentiment won’t make any difference at all, and will, in fact, be labeled “terroristic”, regardless of how valid it is:

In election 2008, don’t forget Angry White Man

Transformation Meditation Home Study Courses – another iteration of mahesh varma, but for a newer, more jaded generation.

cannabis, corruption, i am a terrorist, imaginary pooperty, links, spiritual, the very big stupid, tina chopp, torture

Black Light Trap

1 Comment

one step closer to having my ipod be able to play .FLAC and .OGG files, as well as .MP3s.

is it just me, or is this country getting more and more dysfunctional on a daily basis?

Feds admit waterboarding illegal

John McCain Sells His Soul: Backs Off on Torture Ban

U.S. Soldiers Kill Unarmed Iraqis and Afghanis

Bush Won’t Let Facts Stand in the Way of Regime Change in Iran

Surveillance Editorial Roundup

Detention camps at undisclosed locations in the US? Rule by Fear or Rule by Law?

but there are some good things… precious few of them, but here are some that are worth mentioning:

The Air Car -Coming Your Way

Supporting Research into the Therapeutic Role of Marijuana

Legal herb for Rastas?

ACLU, Rick Steves launch marijuana campaign – i played music for a party given by rick steves last year… 8)

articles, bizarre, blasphemy, brain injury, cannabis, corruption, depression, fnord, i am a terrorist, jeezis, links, the very big stupid, torture

happy valentines day lupercalia

2 Comments

Christian Right’s Emerging Deadly Worldview: Kill Muslims to Purify the Earth – eminentize the eschaton! more jeezis horseshit.

Latest Anti-Pot Quack Science: ‘Marijuana Makes Your Teeth Fall Out’ – more anti-cannabis horseshit

Scientists breed world’s first mentally ill mouse – schizophrenic mice… just what the world needs… 8/

Continue reading happy valentines day lupercalia →

big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

aarrgghh!!!

despite the ranting opposition and desperate pleas that have been going on for months, in regard to a more law abiding approach to the FISA fiasco, the senate has decided to pass the bill that will give telecoms retroactive immunity for their collusion with our corrupt administration’s flagrantly going through your private communications without a warrant, not to mention their violations of law and their customers’ trust.

i repeat: the government is spying on you, whether you’re a terrorist or not, and they have full cooperation, and soon will offer retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that handle all of your telephone calls and email communication. i don’t know about you, but given the government’s record for telling the truth about things, i don’t trust the government to do what is “right” with that information!

it is now even more important that YOUR representative recieves a call or email from you (yes, that means all of you who are american citizens of course… i don’t expect people who aren’t americans to be concerned with this) expressing your displeasure that they have been allowed to do this in the past, and that they are going to be allowed to do this in the future, without having to answer to you.

White House Admits that Defendants in Telecom Cases Assisted in Wiretapping Program

and, in case you’re interested, mccain voted to pass FISA with no amendment removing retroactive immunity, like he said he would, clinton said she was against it, but she was “too busy” to be there for the debate, and then she voted to pass it without the amendment anyway, and obama voted against it, like he said he would. obama is looking more and more like a candidate that i could, reluctantly, support in spite of everything.

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8P

Breaking the Drug Taboo: Group of Traumatized Veterans Get Experimental Ecstasy Treatment – we’ve got a country that seems bent on starting war, spending less and less money on medical care for injured soldiers, children and for everyone, and we’ve got a leader who, while he partook of illegal drugs in the past (and may still have at least one habit that we’re not supposed to know about), has basically said “no drugs for anyone”, and his henchmen are doing everything in their power to put as many “drug users” as possible into prison – the maximum pentalty for possession of a nuclear weapon is 12 years, but the maximum pentalty for posession of 3 pounds of cannabis is life, without the possiblility of parole – and yet there are still groups like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies pushing for things like this. i’m not sure whether or not i feel like this is a lost cause: part of me is very glad that there are groups like this out there changing perceptions of drugs and forcing their use in medicine, but part of me thinks that, with hypocrites like bush, governors like huckabee, and social leaders like james dobson, there is still much, much further to go before cannabis is legal again.

Continue reading 8P →

big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid, torture

email from Congressman Robert Wexler

Our Constitution is under threat and the most basic principle of checks and balances is being undermined. Not since Watergate has a president so openly disregarded the will of Congress.

During hearings in the Judiciary Committee yesterday, I told Attorney General Michael Mukasey that I called for impeachment hearings because of the stonewalling and blatant abuses of the Bush Administration. He responded by stating that he will NOT enforce a contempt of Congress citation against Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten for refusing to testify before Congress. The video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7M9sjRLCtQ

Alberto Gonzales may be long gone, but the Bush Administration continues its executive overreach with the new Attorney General.

We can debate the need for Impeachment hearings. We can argue its effects on the election or our agenda. But one thing is abundantly clear:

If Congress’ right to require testimony is undermined, then our country’s leaders – Democrat, Republican, or Independent – will be immune from accountability.

The power of the subpoena – to call officials before us – is one of the most fundamental safeguards in our system of government. To have it effectively discarded – by virtue of the President instructing Administration officials to ignore a congressional subpoenas and not even appear before Congress – is unprecedented. The idea that the Attorney General would willingly defend this position – despite Congress’ constitutional right to call such witnesses, is outrageous.

Impeachment hearings could render this moot: The President, Vice President, and all officials under them would no longer invoke executive privilege. There would be no more smokescreens.

In one week, I will be delivering my letter calling for impeachment hearings to Chairman John Conyers. Already, 16 Members of Congress have joined my call, including 3 Judiciary Committee members. I am hopeful for more in the coming days, but it is important for you to reach out to your representative in Congress to express how you feel. You can view the current list of signers, here: http://www.wexlerforcongress.com/news.asp?ItemID=230

I do not know how Congress will react, but I do know this: I will pursue this course aggressively. I will not compromise away the constitutional role of Congress. Your support is invaluable. Please know that I am working everyday to ensure that the Bush Administration is held accountable.
Please continue to support this movement at www.wexlerwantshearings.com.

Yours truly,
Congressman Robert Wexler

articles, big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid, torture

waterboarding

Waterboarding is legal, White House says – this is ridiculous! the former acting US attorney general said that waterboarding is torture, and he lost his job because of it… but at the same time, the US prides itself on “not torturing” it’s prisoners. this, in and of itself, should be enough to make the people who have the power to do so, stand up and take action against this administration, but instead they sit back and say “now that that’s dealt with, let’s get on to more important matters.” as Michael Varian Daly said, “If you oppress people long enough, they will kill you.” and, in my opinion, it couldn’t be soon enough for the health and well-being of this country. 8/

Continue reading waterboarding →

articles, big brother, bizarre, corruption, hindu, i am a terrorist, islam, links, rants, the very big stupid, torture

The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny

Speakers at Academy Said to Make False Claims – lemme see if i got this straight: three born muslim, converted to “christianity” middle-eastern men with “western” citizenship, who say that they have been involved with terrorist acts in the past, but are now “reformed”, get to travel around the country, including the US Air Force Academy, talking about their experiences… <yeah, that’s likely… 8/ >

If Mukasey Won’t Investigate Federal Crimes, He Should Resign – related links here, here and here.

Wikipedia ruled by ‘Lord of the Universe’ – hindus no longer have to worry about mahesh prasad varma so much, but there are still charlatans out there, and they own more than you think.

Continue reading The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny →

articles, big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

bush… dumb… surrender.

1 Comment

Bush threatens veto in surveillance laws– also – Will Congress Vote “Yes” to More Bush Spying? – bush is the terrorist…

Voters are told pen had ‘invisible ink’ – also – Election officials probe use of ‘magic’ invisible ink pens in 49th Ward – how dumb do you have to be to believe that?

The Surrender is Working: U.S. Cedes Town to ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’

Continue reading bush… dumb… surrender. →

articles, big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

8/ again

Your Time Is Up, Mr. President — the National Guard Is Coming Home – finally some people are standing up to this shit and telling those responsible to back off. let’s hope that they will be an example to the rest of us!

Bush’s Budget Proposal Would Cut Medicare Funding – how does cutting $196 million from healthcare stimulate our economy???

US: 9 Iraq civilians accidentally killed – oops. i was cleaning it and it went off…

Continue reading 8/ again →

articles, big brother, corruption, existential negation, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid, torture

corruption! >8/

1 Comment

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/ →

big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

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! – feed – more information – more information

Ask Al-Quaeda: Answers! – feed

Move Along, Nothing to See Here…

The Free Network Project
Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents

big brother, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid, torture

Public Service Announcement

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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!

corruption, depression, i am a terrorist, links, the very big stupid

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.

articles, brain injury, corruption, depression, gripes, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid, torture

rant + gripe

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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?

articles, blasphemy, corruption, depression, evolution, ganesha the car, i am a terrorist, imaginary pooperty, links, rants, the very big stupid

yep…

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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.

articles, bizarre, cannabis, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, pictures, the very big stupid

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 →

articles, bizarre, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

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 →

articles, bizarre, blasphemy, corruption, jeezis, links, rants, the very big stupid

wake up! pat robertston contradicts the bible!

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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! →

articles, corruption, i am a terrorist, links, rants, the very big stupid

i am a conservative?

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a few months ago, one of my friends told me that i work myself into a frenzy with all of this doom-and-gloom news reporting, and they were probably right. but at the same time, it is astounding to me how many of my fellow humans can be so selectively blind when it comes to issues that will affect the normal passage of their lives, and it’s even more astounding to me that i am posting something that i found on a conservative web site, considering that i am one of the most liberal radicals i know. it is also interestingly frightening to consider how many of these corrupt politicians are now candidates for the upcoming presidential elections…

Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for 2007

Continue reading i am a conservative? →

articles, i am a terrorist, links, malfunctioning computers, rants, spam, the very big stupid

“Reality mining” and spam… 8/

Reality mining and your cell phone – and people wonder why i am paranoid about cell phones and search engines… the only real advantage that i’ve been able to see to cell phones is that people no longer look at you as though you’re crazy when you walk down the street talking to yourself. 8/

SEATTLE SPAMMER INDICTED FOR MAIL AND WIRE FRAUD, AGGRAVATED IDENTITY THEFT AND MONEY LAUNDERING – i am a part of that lawsuit! and i hope he gets his balls ripped off, slowly, and fed to him in tiny bites! >8( really… even with the decrease in spam messages that i get in my inbox (which is around one or two a day, compared with the 75 to 100 messages i was getting last year), words cannot convey how intensely i despise the actions of this man. it’s getting to the point where i’m about ready to black-hole every IP address in asia, and about half of the IP addresses in europe, to prevent spammers from getting through. i have enough to worry about already without also having to deal with your noxious spew, and the fact that my name is a part of that lawsuit gives me a great deal of pride.

Continue reading “Reality mining” and spam… 8/ →