Newspeak continues...

New rules on licenses pit states against feds - CNN.com

"The last thing I want to do is punish citizens of a state who would love to have a REAL ID license but can't get one," Chertoff said. "But in the end, the rule is the rule as passed by Congress."

There are three implications in this statement there in one sentence.

1. There is an implicit assumption that the citizens love this big brother shit and want to have the DoHS blessed number of the beast card if it wasn't for their in-the-way stick-in-the-mud disloyal state governments. This is in my mind similar to the Soviet claim that the people of Prague wanted the invasion of Czechoslovakia to free them from their bourgeois heretic government.

2. There is an implicit assumption that the government has a right to force this on the states when in fact it in no way shape or form does, as it amounts to circumventing constitutional legal history not to mention American tradition by turning state driver's licenses into national ID cards.

3. Then there is the implicit threat of punishment of the people of the states if the states do not capitulate. Either overthrow your recalcitrant governments at the polls, or we will break you seems to be the long term message.

4. There's actually a fourth implication of extreme arrogance on Chertoff's part as it implies he believes he either has the right to punish the states, and the usual governmental cowardice of blaming congress.

It's like a wife beater saying to his wife as the blows land, "you made me do this! I didn't want to do this, but you made me! Why couldn't you just do what I told you!"

Of course, despite all this, systems, aka people, will continue to slip through their fingers. Despite massive security procedures, we and the Soviet Union freely spied on each other and compromised the allegiances of each others' citizens almost at will all through the worst times of the Cold War.

Do they really think that this will stop terrorists? No, because that is not the point. The point is that your rulers, the people you the lazy ass common people negligently put into power at the polls DO NOT TRUST YOU. They live in insecurity and rule by fear. They sell you hopelessness, you distribute it like crack dealers. They tell you can'ts and won'ts and you believe them. It's at the point you could have the secret truth of extraterrestrial life given to you by an Air Force defector and you'd simply not care. Similarly, you can see for yourself that your political class sells you solutions to nonexistent problems for no reason other than to entrench and reinforce their power.

If you want just and righteous rulers, you must first rule yourself. Stop running from the world people. Wake up and take control of yourselves. Before the global civil wars come. You're living a self-fulfilling prophecy which ends terribly. Please, stop. Come back to reality. The world isn't that bad, things aren't so negative, there's hope for you and yours. All you have to do is get a fucking grip.

AT&T and the rest of the Internet carriers JUST DON'T GET IT.

Maybe this will help:

 

"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

AT&T and Other I.S.P.s May Be Getting Ready to Filter - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Encrypted filed sharing systems immune to such packet filtering other than to block them because the ISP can't figure out what they are already exist and will continue to expand and evolve. Steganographic techniques to alleviate that problem by making them look like normal allowed traffic will be used. Encryption, deception, misdirection, and just plain shiftiness will become the average netizen's every day experience and modus operandi.

HOWEVER, the average American is totally unaware of how to do these things without goodly study online of the techniques now available, and the present complexities make it not worth while. So how do you reconcile the two facts? Simple. Just as Internet usage at the dawn of the transition from DARPANET to Internet was complex and required technical skill and no longer does, so too will the techie geeks conquer these usability issues and make it as easy as point, double-click, done.

Right now, use of encrypting hard drive controllers and boot loaders is a bit beyond even the otherwise very thorough terrorists of Al Queda. In a few years, thanks to the government and big business, politics and influence, and the paranoia which drives and governs them so often, such things will come with the machine when you buy it. Enter your set-up passwords and there you go. Everything encrypted in multiple layers making the ultimate breaking of captured data take longer than the Earth has left before the Sun enters its red giant phase.

EVERYONE WILL BY DEFAULT HAVE ALL DATA ENCRYPTED AT ALL TIMES WHETHER ON MEDIA OR TRANSMITTED ACROSS NETWORKS. THE VERY SOFTWARE VIEWERS THEY USE WILL NEVER LEAVE THE DATA IN ANY UNENCRYPTED FORMAT AT ALL WHERE IT CAN BE CAPTURED.

Just as the proliferation of viruses and spyware has resulted in a large industry of point and click anti-virus solutions causing computers to be vastly more secured today than they were in the past, so too will these continuing encroachments on the privacy of the populace drive a defensive response by the people towards embracing hiding their data no matter what it is.

If you think getting at hidden and encrypted data is hard for law enforcement now, wait till they can't tell a recipe from a communication to bomb a government facility. The very government which used fear of that very eventuality as an excuse to infringe our rights will be one third of the reason that in the future their problems become multiplied beyond exponentially.

The second third will be the cretins of AT&T, the RIAA and MPAA, and our law industry all of whom are either living in fear of lawsuits, or living in slathering anticipation of lawsuits.

The final third will be the people themselves who are simultaneously too stupid to realize what venal, dishonest, unprincipled, unethical, immoral weasels they've put in power in both government and business, and too stupid to stop them from passing whatever laws and colluding to create whatever agreements they feel best for their own selfish interests.

Never mind too stupid to stop selling themselves and each other crushing hopelessness that they seek to fill with never ending gluttony for senseless, mindless, vacuous shit that passes for entertainment.

On come the cyber wars and the static leveling.

Semi-daily weird ass round-up

Throw another relative on the fire!

I'm not sure I want to have a warmer feeling from the dearly departed than I got while they were alive.

 

We already do, it's called atheism.

There's G-d and there is not G-d. Good and light and all that, or... not. What do you see in the world today?

 

The kind of teacher most guys only wish they had.

Picture included though sadly not nude. Silly teacher, all she had to do was post on something like Imagefap and quietly give the link to the upload to him...

 

No, it's the Ed Grimley hair-do that clinches this story.

Well that was dumb I must say.

 

You only THINK it MAY infringe on civil rights?

Try KNOW it WILL. There. Fixed the conceptualization issue for you.

Rock-ets keep fallin on my head...

...but that doesn't mean by eyes will soon be turnin red, cryin's not for me, cause I'm never gonna stop the rockets by complainin... I'll use one of thee-ese... Nothins worryin me...

Okay, why is it we have to hear of Israel getting this junk shat on them over and over instead of one of these being deployed. I know for a fact being in the tech field that Israel has tech firms privately owned by Israeli citizens or Israeli investor backed groups that can put something like this together. Israel is not Rwanda. They can do this.

The question is, why don't they?

Also, calculating the most likely trajectory in reverse back to source is a piece of cake for today's computational systems. It may be rocket science, but the calculations are the sort young boys in America used to do fairly regularly in the field of model rocketry. Are we to believe no one can program a computer to automatically make a narrow range of assumptions based on sensor data as to what the rocket/missile was, and then extrapolate a path back to launch?

What do you do? You make a flying RPV that can be missile launched, and lob it back at them to then deploy in air and quickly get intelligence from the site, perhaps before the terrorists can leave.

Yeah, I know, you thought I'd say lob a missile. I'm being clever here and thinking ahead to the anti-Israeli crowd's reaction by making a lethal response a later choice instead of a fire and hope one up front which we all must admit is only giving Israel black eyes.

del.icio.us Tags: Israel,rockets,defense,Phalanx

And now a television...

...that will no doubt go to no better use than watching porn.

A statement reiterating what we who've worked in cable have known for years: the press is clueless and uninformed and does not do their homework

Comcast promising ultra-fast Internet - CNN.com

PRIZE WINNING PIECE RIGHT AT THE TOP OF THE ARTICLE, MY EMPHASIS...

Cable companies aren't known as nimble innovators, but Comcast Corp. is out to change that perception this year with ultra-high-speed Internet service, more high-definition content and gadgets that link video, phone and broadband services.

What is being rolled out?

Roberts is expected to demonstrate a technology that delivers up to 160 megabits of data per second: It will allow him to download a high-definition copy of "Batman Begins" in four minutes. The technology, DOCSIS 3.0, will start rolling out this year.

Okay, those of us in the know merely by paying attention to the industry trades and the vendor marketing materials already knew this a long long time ago.

But wait! There's more!

Cable systems largely enable download speeds up to 10 Mbps -- compared with up to 50 Mbps from Verizon's fiber-optic service FiOS.

"Cable looks like it will be able to keep up with the Joneses, thank you very much," Craig Moffett, senior analyst at Sanford Bernstein in New York, said of the new technology.

Just in case you weren't paying attention, speeds of cable in many Comcast markets will exceed what Verizon FiOS is currently offering but NOT what they can theoretically do. Re-read that sentence and understand what I just said.

First, they will exceed current FiOS speeds. One can bet that a business like Comcast doesn't get where they are by being stupid on the price and will price 160Mbps such that it is actually comparable to the price being charged for 50Mbps FiOS making the FIOS seem one bit per bit level thrice as expensive. Why not go for a service with triple the speed for the same cost?

Second, the FiOS speeds are CURRENT. NOT MAXIMUM. Fiber can carry much much faster speeds. This will have the effect of pushing Verizon to increase their speeds without increasing their costs (too much) exposing their claims of needs for a tiered Internet to be the bullshit that they are. Either they deliver triple the bandwidth with no degradation in service showing that they always could, or they don't.

Third, that increase in fiber speeds will as fiber continues to be successfully constructed across the nation spur the cable industry towards ever high speeds, pushing nodes deep into the neighborhoods, lowering the number of subscribers per node until at some point in the future your cable will be via fiber.

At that point multiple overlapping infrastructures allowing for competition will be in place.

That the news industry doesn't ever seem to pay attention and feels the need to trumpet this to the masses as if we were similarly dim is testament to the "hype sells, so why bother knowing the score" attitude of the media. Instead of calm balanced reporting based on a far ranging knowledge of the subject material and relative merits and drawbacks of every aspect, simply play up the showy.

Specific to the cable industry, this is why the media continues to portray the cable industry as if it was still 1983 and not twenty-four years later in 2007 and yet plays up DBS because the oooh and ahhh space age satellites and rockets aspect. Whoa, signals from space! When you've failed as many installs for no clear acceptable line of sight as I have, you know that it isn't such rocket science.

I got 15Mbps service on cable a while ago and faster speeds are coming. I don't actually use all that speed all the time and short of downloading the entire Internet I don't really have a need for that speed yet, but I am sure that as the cyber wars get under way in deadly earnest between a people who will not be chained and a government that cannot see the value of individual freedom we will need it.

del.icio.us Tags: FiOS,cable modem,DOCSIS,Comcast,media ignorance

Kittehs 1, Humans 0

Woman Drowns In Rain Barrel Rescuing Kitten - Albuquerque News Story - KOAT Albuquerque

Detectives said the kitten is alive, and most likely climbed out over Hill.

In the good old pen and paper days of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, there were these third-party books called Grimtooth's Traps wherein it was noted the propensity of humans to be stupid enough to stick their hands in vases. In this case, stupid enough to stick themselves into water filled barrels.

My heart goes out to the next of kin and I pray that kitten not be mistreated in vengeance. It just shows lateral thinking on the fly is not well taught these days and why when people see it in television or movies, they love it. It's actually a novel concept to NOT throw yourself into the barrel and let's say reach an arm down with something in hand the kitten can grab.

The Nokia Virus... not yet available on their phones...

The Nokia Virus: Finnish Town Faces Fecal Foul-up - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

The affair began six weeks ago when a municipal employee in Nokia unwittingly released thousands of gallons of sewage into the city's water supply last November, and over a month later authorities are still trying to clean up the water.

Yeah, I've had crappy cell service too. Not this crappy, but still...

Anne Frank, song and dance, Nazis and death... can't miss? Oh yes it can.

Anne Frank's diary to be made into a musical | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

The Anne Frank Foundation, which jealously guards the rights to the diary - it once turned down Steven Spielberg when he wanted to make a film - has given its support.

Yes, the same Steven "I shit blockbusters" Spielberg. Turned down. Spanish musical? Thumbs up.

Big Winner: the three letters W-T-F.

Yeah, a musical is so much more respectful to the late Ms. Frank's memory than a movie by Steven Spielberg.

ARGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

That's it! I am going to buy the rights to "Thus I Refute Beelzy" and sell them to a Japanese Hentai publisher and finish off my childhood literature list for good!

My next big project: house renovation

I've been at this one for a long time, and now am coming to where it cannot be put off any longer: straightening the structure of my house.

This is one of those textbook definitions of the exclamation: oy.

In some quarters merely adding to a structure in parallel with the existing structure is considered repair and not needing a permit. In others, not so much. It depends. You need to have an inspection.

Well, my house is an embarrassment of wrong. Previous deviations from zoning code which were allowed to be and did not stop occupancy permits from being given to the previous owner (which grandfathers them to me as I took possession as a former renter still living there continuously) have to be fixed. The house's structure is laid out in what can only be called an unfortunate way. Long from east to west you'd think that they'd run the joists from north to south to a long series of main beams down the centerline. Nope. They ran two beams inboard of the foundation walls splitting the house into uneven thirds, the longest span being the middle between the beams.

Over the years since its late 19th century construction it has received several layers of wiring of various qualities and been reworked from original plaster lathe to new plaster lathe to oh let's say the fuck with it sheetrock over plaster lathe or even ugly paneling over plaster lathe.

Then there's the pet damage. Cats have whizzed in corners and while that can be cleaned to a point and what stains refuse lifting from the wood can be painted over, there's the issue of what they'll do to anything new. Dogs have also made a hash of the kitchen flooring by ripping up the seamless linoleum and whizzing on the wood. They're paper trained but I wish they could be toilet trained.

First I need to safeguard the future so I intend to get this thing from the manufacturer:

This is the Cat Genie self-flushing cat box. You heard right, a FLUSHING cat box. This would be ideal as I go through between eighty and one hundred twenty pounds of clumping cat litter every month and while the clay came from the ground and to the ground it returns with the trash, it still doesn't seem right. It also of course costs way too much. There's no reason to be doing it with this. As a fortunate bonus, my upstairs used to be a second apartment and since I've wrecked out the old kitchen I still have a septic pipe and water supplies. So, in my ongoing redesign I've decided I'll put a janitorial closet in at that point on both floors one over the other and that will take care of the problem of routing wires and pipes to the second floor very cleanly.

This also eliminates smells and you don't need to let them do their business wherever indiscriminately to get this smell, just wait one hour too long to scoop boxes and you will get it. It gets into your clothes and whatnot. No smells to build at all with this. No smells to build around the scooped litter pending trashing it either since there's no litter.

As soon as tax refunds get here, this is a must get, a will be gotten in fact.

Okay, with that taken care of there's still the dogs and what the cats might do to new floors. Aha! New floors! Yes, but what...

I have decided to push that back just a little behind getting the base for the floors right. There's uneven sagging midspan even long after loads that may have previously been there are gone. Not enough to disqualify it from occupancy and nowhere near enough to be dangerous but definitely annoying and I dislike them.

Sure there are self-leveling poured compounds, but they don't address why the span sags much less fix it.

So I have read up quite a bit on the fine art of fine tuning floors with hydraulic jacks and gotten it across to myself that 1/8^th of an inch per day is the absolute maximum. You put screw jacks next to the hydraulic jacks and posts to hold the load once in place.

I also believe sistering to new joists can be effective in the way of stiffening them and will likely do that where necessary. However, that can only be a part of it.

In the same way composites engineering makes use of basic geometric principles used in construction to give better strength on the small scale such that overall a material is better, so too can we use composites engineering techniques to make a house better.

First, in a well done house of old the floors would have a first layer of flooring laid on a bias to the joists, that is, forty-five degrees to the joists. The finish layer would then go above it perpendicular to the joists and the nails passing through both layers to unite those layers, and nails going to the joists to hold them relative to the joists.

Well, those floor sections are strips of wood and can laterally slide against each other. Not much, but more than you really want. The nails also are a vastly more than imperfect solution to bonding. They can bend and shift a bit over time more than you want.

It would have been nice if back in the 1890s people had the construction adhesives of today but they didn't so bet your ass there aren't any beads thereof on your joists under that wood. The entire layer of the floor deck is more free than you think to move against the joists. Unfortunately for most of us, we can't just move elsewhere for a time and rebuild the house. We have to do it in situ.

Plywood is the most familiar composite material you know other than perhaps your own bones which grow in layers somewhat like trees grow in layers. Plywood doesn't slip against itself. Bonded under heat and pressure with layers of fibers laid in specific ways, it is engineered for high tensile strength, good resistance to breaking under various loads, and not to break the way a single piece of wood... would.

My house has one layer of slats. That's it. So I look at the slats, and I look at the plywood and I think of how the slats aren't bonded to the joists and how they aren't bonded to each other... Make them part of a larger composite structure...

Okay, first the beams need to be exposed hence plaster and/or sheetrock ceiling sections need to be removed. Then with the joists exposed they can be jacked into place... No, wait, we need the sistering members up. Okay, we tack nail the sistering joists next to the originals just to keep them up where we want them and then jack up the existing joists. Once in place over the span of a week or so which includes slow 1/16 to 1/8 per day increases and a day between for settling under active load (people living on it, temperature variations of the day, etc.) we then undo the tack nails and run construction adhesive along the side of each joist where the existing floorboards above meet it. This is not as good as one bead along the top of the joist under but with a bead on each side it is a miniscule fraction less.

Then the sister joists are glued along their faces to the beams they will help support, and nailed and/or screwed their entire length to the existing members. The nails/screws are to both provide bonding AND to act as a clamp to keep the wood together during the adhesive bonding and curing process. They use this kind of adhesive in new prefab houses that will stand up to hurricanes by the way.

Between the joists need go dividers. They keep the joists from twisting and deflecting to either side and are very necessary to the overall strength. Got wires and plumbing? The important parts are the tops and bottoms. Slip the top above the wiring and the bottom below and let the wiring pass between where it is.

With the next sistering joists in place, the temporary jacks... can not be removed yet. The floors aren't done. Why? Well, you've bonded whatever sections of whatever slats have crossed any given joist at those points which is a lot, but the joists and subfloor have too much ability to move. They aren't rigid and load-sharing yet.

The next step is a sanding of the existing floors. Cover paint, whatever, comes off. Now my floors have been somewhat finished and refinished over time but still some adhesion can be gotten. Some is better than none, so sanding needs be done to the newly leveled floor.

Once that is done, the floors need to be spread with construction adhesive. Surface spread, not beads. They have this stuff, you can look it up. Immediately over each 4x8 section goes the 1/2 inch plywood to which it will be bonded, and a small bead along the edge to butt to the next piece. Screws through to the slats, long nails through to the existing joists NOT the sistering joists and definitely not both. They will be too close together and the rule of not putting seams between two pieces of wood at the point of greatest stress applies.

Allow to set and cure.

After a week of time, the screw jacks can be knocked loose and removed. I'll now have a new floor and supports bonded to the original and only adding a marginal amount of weight to do it. A few hundred pounds spread and connected evenly across several hundred square feet in a way that my more than two hundred pound body isn't.

What has to be remembered is the the original beams sagged under load and stayed that way. They won't spring naturally into place and by now are so old and solidified they won't want to go straight which means in addition to any loads, the system has to resist the now natural desire of the wood to bend back to where it had sagged to. That's another reason for the glue, nail, screw method. Spread the stresses out. For one thing to move, it must move something else. A solid box structure is better than one that's...not.

Well, you can't really make a box short of putting plywood under the joists and while you could do that, make a floor section by section prefab with conduits and so on inside between the layers and insulation and so on... it's not feasible really in an already long ago built house.

The preceding description shows the next best option.

So what will keep the cats and dogs from destroying the new floor? 12 by 12 ceramic tiles which you can get on sale more or less all the time from various outlets, and you can get them over time and irregularly such that instead of a continuous design, you can vary the colors and designs on purpose for a much more personal and eclectic result.

Well, that's what's ahead of me to say nothing of the new (non-load-bearing) partition walls and painting and insulation and wiring... Should be fun and it will be blogged right here.

Let's see if this familiar to you

FANTASTIC START: You agree during an interview for a job to XYZ in terms of workload, delivery times, levels of quality, and so on.

HORRID END: All of that changes almost immediately to your detriment and their advantage.

 

GREAT IDEA: You get a pay rate and a job where you don't have to struggle as much as say, construction, and decent lunch and break opportunities.

MORONIC EXECUTION: Your pay doesn't increase one penny during the aforementioned unilateral increase of your work requirements, and the cost of living increases by between 50% and 100% concurrently. Your lunch opportunities become nil and you are made to feel guilty if you take a break.

 

EXCELLENT WAY IT SHOULD BE: Recognizing the "human component", the company leadership strives to maintain an excellent work atmosphere, above industry average compensation, high quality insurance and related benefits, and attention to motivation and morale.

ACTUAL WAY OF THE ANYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY WORLD: Oblivious to the entire idea that humans aren't robots without self-awareness, the company leadership strives to maintain a soul-crushing work atmosphere, below industry compensation to pinch every penny, the lowest quality insurance the labor laws will let them get away with, and total ignorance of the word morale while defining motivation as fear of being fired.

 

Yes, this is my world. Welcome to it. I work through 95% of all breaks, 25% of all lunches, and continue work that begins before the end of my shift until it is complete, no matter how late that is. My reward? To be threatened with disciplinary action for averaging 1.5 minutes late to work every day.

In a fair world, none of this would happen. In a fair but idiotic world if it happened, I could trade in all the HOURS they owe me for those MINUTES and they'd still owe me HOURS of time and or money.

The days of leather couches, pool tables, video games, rollerblades, and so forth are over. We the high spirited non-conformist geeks revitalized an industry that was in total collapse, we gave a vibrant Internet to the world, and the money people who profited in the billions of dollars off of our toilings as usual killed the golden goose by re-entrenching the noncompetitive, anti-prosperity, pro-assimilation, greedy mindset of the corporate world.

So when I am now tasked with doing the work of the technicians of an entirely separate department with no compensation or benefit, or even temporary title and prestige that goes with it, why is management so dim as to not understand why one would have a problem with that?

The difference between your dream job and ugly reality is sometimes as little as waking up... into a nightmare. Made more ugly and horrid precisely because you can see the potential of that company and all the people you work with, but no one can seem to let oxygen molecule one reach their brains and make use of that potential.

Who is more loyal to a company? Someone who works 110% and tries over and over and never gives up, or those who do whatever they can minimally get away with but never makes waves? Someone who is there all the time whenever they are needed, or those who try not to be available even to their own subordinates they are ostensibly responsible for the training, equipment, and management of?

Nevertheless, I don't give up. I do it for the money. Which means my heart isn't in it. Therefore neither is the quality that comes with passion. It becomes rote, robotic, done under protest, grudgingly. My hope is being slowly taken away.

So, you didn't think I had any idea of what it is to embrace the spirit of the fanatic and though proven wrong about my dream job, persevere with redoubled effort, if only to keep pay. Now you know different.

It is sadistic evil to do your best to frustrate other people in the tasks you set for them and completely insane.

Welcome to the business world.

Hoax nuke blast seen on TV weather - CNN.com

Now these guys are creative...

In December, the project was awarded the NG 333 prize for young artists by Prague's National Gallery together with a cash prize of 333,000

I say give them a grant. Priceless pic there too.

Another musical recommendation of the moment: The Question by Familiar 48

Lyrics here.

Found here on Yahoo Launchcast.

Rumors of MSIE killing Netscape were not wrong, merely mistimed...

by let's say ten frigging years!

NEW YORK (AP) Netscape Navigator, the world's first commercial Web browser and the launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 after a 13-year run.

In other related news Scott McNealy, Marc Andreessen, and Larry Ellison were revealed to have been brain-dead and on life support themselves for many many years, but that life support would continue for them despite it being fairly evident that their failure to carpe diem way back when against a demonstrably screwed up Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 95 constituted a professional and intellectual blue screen of death.

Nevertheless, well wishers are advised to send condolence gifts to the not-yet-deceased by buying their products and services out of sympathy to the stockholders unfortunately still burdened by their dubious leadership.

A blog comment list that sparked me

It was this post at Lakewood Shmuck. If you read the first five comments, mine would have been six. Mine was six actually, but here's what I would have posted had I not said, "hmmm... maybe it belongs in my blog..."

Which party is selling more lies, more despair, and less hope? Hands down, that's the Democrats. They're the party of selfishness, think only of yourself, talk big about multiculturalism but in reality look down on them, etc.

The Dems are the ones who cozy up to people who throw stones at organized religion when it is Christians and then in the same breath defend Christians, but damn them with mealy-mouth backhanded praise, and mostly those that send them money. Hypocrites have no better model than them.

You think those same people won't eventually pillory Jews and Muslims too? They already patronize them, and encourage their youth to abscond away from the faiths, ridicule is coming. The average liberal thinks you're stupid to believe in G-d. Well, subconsciously that's because it profits them more to get you to believe in them. I was raised in poverty and take it from me, they aren't selling help, they're selling desperate dependency.

On the other hand you have the Republicans who are like your refrigerator contents through a blender for five minutes and don't know what they want to be and have had anything they had good to sell hijacked by Bush's neocons and sullied... Even the high lord of Democratic politics, JFK, was in favor of low taxes and low spending, and less government. Now he's been rewritten into a socialist. However, those ideas work when not sabotaged by one side or another. Bush's biggest failure is precisely his lack of taking charge and letting slimy leeches run the show.

Bah. Like the Aliens Versus Predator poster went, Whoever Wins, We Lose.

I wish Connecticut's governor Jodi Rell was running. Or Joseph Lieberman. Someone I respect or can at least tolerate. I wonder if they'll have a "None of the Above" entry this year...

BTW, America first sort of feelings were what delayed the US entry into WWII more than anything else. If it wasn't for the US entering at all, Nazi Germany would have taken England within a few more months, established a solid presence, and become a fact of life in the world too late to go to war to erase without greater loss than had they done it earlier. AND the horrors of the holocaust would have been buried and erased if they'd been given more time.

Lastly, liberalism of today is NOT what it was many decades ago. It is a hellish pot of reeking sewage of socialism, leftist theorizing, and above all else, empowering someone other than you. Anyone who'd try to convince an American that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights aren't pre-existing natural if not G-d given rights and NOT privileges handed out by a benevolent state is selling lies.

Put another way, how would you like a movement that tried to sell young Jews the idea that their life and all the goodness in it wasn't something courtesy of a benevolent and loving G-d, but actually privileged good times courtesy of the government?

Man did that comment chain rankle. Here's my comment I put in.

Whoever Wins, We Lose. So sayeth the Aliens Versus Predator poster of great wisdom.

Remember the first rule of politics and worthiness: no one who would accept the job deserves it and those who actively seek it doubly so.

Also before anyone gets their knickers in a twist over the Repos, the Dems are the party that wants you to believe the Bill of Rights is a Bill of Privileges Thanks to a Benevolent State. Side with them, and your freedom of religion will be sooner or later history as the religion of liberals is politics and the gods of it themselves and they cannot abide or suffer competition.
Refer to line one.

NEVER make the mistake of thinking that liberalism is okay or can be reformed. It CAN'T as long as it pretends to be what it isn't and that's kind, generous, good, loving, holy, understanding, equitable, egalitarian, enlightened, etc.

This is EXACTLY why you should look askance at rabbis and priests who in response to your questions either infer or tell you directly that you should shut up and accept their wisdom. G-d's power needs no fear, needs no defense by mere mortals against it. In a world of primitive superstition and fear, of bloody human and other sacrifices did spring up the idea that there was one G-d, and that G-d was paying attention, and being good and righteous mattered. So powerful was He, that His word pushed through the grime and blood of our primitive ancestors' world.

SO, never fear to explore, question, and learn for yourself. G-d doesn't fear that, neither should you. You think Orthodoxy seems questionable sometimes? Liberalism is Orthodoxy Ultra Unleaded. You don't want to trade one for another. Especially one that transfers the ultimate position of power from your free will governed by your conscience under G-d to the proven wrong political imaginings of self-aggrandizing faithless fools.

My musical recommendation of the moment: Black Stone Cherry

Home page.

Wikipedia entry.

Currently available on Yahoo Launchcast.

This band's work rocks, rocks hard, and in a way you thought was dead and buried. It has the soul and strength that sounds of those with true passion for the moment of the song. In acting some actors are so good at what they do, for the time of the play they ARE that character. In music, the analogue is what we get with Black Stone Cherry.

So far my two favorites are Tired of the Rain and Hell and High Water.

I'm really happy with their work and looking forward to more. With the recent resurgence of adult contemporary alternative music, with the continued post-Audioslave work of Chris Cornell as well as the Foo Fighters still performing, I think the market could be ripe for them.

Enjoy.

del.icio.us Tags: Black Stone Cherry,modern rock,alternative rock,hard rock

Making a Martyr of Bhutto - Yahoo! News

Bhutto is dead. Why why why..?

Haqqani, now a professor at Boston University, isn't sure what the latest bloodshed means for his country. "Will the Pakistani military realize that this is going to tear the fabric of the nation apart, and so really get serious about securing the country and about getting serious in dealing with the extremist jihadis?" he wondered. But he made clear he feels the best chance for such a policy has just evaporated. "She did show courage, and she was the only person who spoke out against terrorism," he said.

"She was let down by those in Washington who think that sucking up to bad governments around the world is their best policy option.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Amen Haqqani. Amen.

A customer service reminder...

...if you bend over for your customers, then the only customers you will have are those who want you to bend over. If bending over is your whole raison d'etre, hey, more power to you. If not, then how is it serving you? How is it serving them?

There's a difference between going the extra mile for someone, and going down on someone.

Report: Hoover had plan for mass arrests - Yahoo! News

Why am I seeing V for Vendetta in my head?

The plan called for the FBI to apprehend all potentially dangerous individuals whose names were on a list Hoover had been compiling for years.

"The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States," Hoover wrote in the now-declassified document. "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the writ of habeas corpus.

If you thought Hoover was just a simple nutjob who abused his office and the Constitution of the United States of America to fulfill his petty kinkiness, oh no... He was a complex and farsighted nutjob who abused his office and the Constitution of the United States of America to fulfill his petty kinkiness and threaten the fabric of the public life altogether.

Remember America, NO ONE and I mean NO ONE makes world class kooks and nutjobs like we do. Al Queda should just give up now. We are able to destroy ourselves any time we want to.

Bali climate conference enters final day - Yahoo! News

Notice that they held it in a very warm place?

The negotiating agenda set at Bali, and the results of two years of negotiations to follow, will help determine for decades how well the world can hold down its rising temperatures.

It can't. Again, people are missing simple logic. There are ice ages. By simple inferences there must be other ages that are NOT ice by contrast or there's no point in call an age an ice age because there would be no other age type to give it definition.

If there's light, there must be something we call... dark.

So if we're coming out of an ice age into a not-ice age, why all the consternation? It's not science, it's do-it-yourself religion dressed up as science. Like the paganism extolled from supposed spell books at Borders Books in the wake of every Harry Potter film, it's a pop fad.

Only a few decades ago, they told us we were headed back into an ice age. Scientifically, I'll tell you that is most likely from the Vostok ice cores. The graph of temperature variations recorded there shows that as the world warms at the end of an interglacial, the warming rate increases. It's not a simple flat line or a graceful sin(x) curve.

So if you're not a toadstool or rutabaga, it might occur to you that it sounds like it is self-enhancing somehow. That the warmer it gets, the easier it gets to get warmer. Yes, it is. Why? Because a bigger contributor to greenhouse warming than mankind is all around you every day: plant life.

No, I don't mean that plants put out CO2 directly in massive amounts, though they do to some degree. I mean the aftermath of plant life. Mulch.

When plant life decays, a plethora of microbes and simple cellular life feeds upon the matter and each other and each other's dead forms. This incestuous little world of everything feeding on everything else is what we call decomposition. Happens to animal remains like yours when you die, happens to dead grass blades, dead insects, etc.

One of the outputs is CO2. Another is methane which is an even better greenhouse gas than CO2. These processes are constant. As the Earth warms, ice melts, the line of green growing things moves north and south (depending on the side of the equator) and uphill towards the mountain tops.

More plants, more mulch, more greenhouse gases. Soon it gets to a critical point and the world heads towards cold again.

Back to the story. They held it someplace warm. Bali. Hmmm... How warm is Bali? This is how warm Bali is. That's about 80° F for those not on the metric system. Where will they hold it next?

The Europeans and others showed little enthusiasm for this "voluntary" approach, and environmentalists denounced it as an effort to subvert the U.N. climate treaty process. It remains to be seen whether EU countries will attend the next meeting, in Honolulu in late January.

Honolulu has these average temperatures. Of course holding a global warming conference in Buffalo, NY in January would just not have the same effect, would it? They might actually start thinking that not everywhere on Earth is warm or warm year round. Yes, there are seasons, variations... What else might people learn if they asked questions?