tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-232636162024-03-07T17:46:00.055-05:00Numinous Ubiquity<a href="http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/101904.html">A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community</a>General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.comBlogger253125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-26577853732292879482013-03-11T18:30:00.000-04:002013-03-14T03:59:45.711-04:00please sign petition to pardon "bob" dobbsthere is a petition i started to pardon j. r. "bob" dobbs. <a href="http://wh.gov/AUOq">sign it here!</a> also please retweet <a href="https://twitter.com/yetisyny/status/311230247091699712">this tweet about it</a> if you are on the twitter. to sign a petition on the white house website you just need to give an email address, it's not that hard. anyway, 150 signatures are needed to make the petition viewable and searchable by the public (and not just through social media). then, 100,000 signatures are needed to get an official response from the obama administration. with your help, we can easily meet the 150 signature threshold, but the 100,000 signature threshold is probably impossible to meet within less than a month. anyway you have to sign this thing by april 10th, 30 days from now. get to it and get everyone you know to sign it too!
<b>update</b>: my petition has been removed by the moderators at the white house website for some insane reason, even though much more bizarre petitions are still on that site, like a bunch of ones in all caps that say to "STOP WHITE GENOCIDE" and are full of offensive, racist nonsense. yet my sensible, well-written petition was apparently removed for some ridiculous reason. perhaps someone at the white house who monitors the petitions did a google search on j. r. "bob" dobbs and realized the whole thing was one big joke. that is most likely what happened. however, the fact that they removed this shows that they can't take a joke. and the subgenius motto is "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke". my petition did manage to get 24 signatures within just 2 days of being posted before the moderators removed it, so with 12 signatures per day it would have easily reached the 150 signature threshold within 30 days to permanently be visible on the white house website. even 5 signatures per day is enough to reach that 150 signature threshold in 30 days and i had more than double that rate. obviously the people with no sense of humor at the white house petitions website don't want anything funny allowed. but they do allow ridiculous petitions about stopping so-called "WHITE GENOCIDE" in all caps, or petitions about states seceding from the union, or other things that are blatantly racist or offensive in other ways. my petition was not offensive in any way at all. so their removal of it made no sense at all, especially considering all the awful petitions that they DON'T remove. very puzzling...General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-77703292257784766912011-03-17T11:38:00.004-04:002011-03-17T11:53:21.654-04:00streaming news video about japan & middle easthopefully you can watch news about japan or the middle east from these video streams, let’s see if they work...<br /><br />nhk world tv (for news about japan):<br /><br /><object width="480" height="386" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"><br /> <param name="flashvars" value="cid=7497266&autoplay=false"/><br /> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><br /> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><br /> <param name="src" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/viewer.swf"/><br /> <embed flashvars="cid=7497266&autoplay=false" width="480" height="386" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/viewer.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed><br /></object><br /><br /><a href="http://www.ustream.tv/" style="padding: 2px 0px 4px; width: 400px; background: #ffffff; display: block; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10px; text-decoration: underline; text-align: center;" target="_blank">Live Broadcast by Ustream.TV</a><br /><br />al jazeera english (for news about middle east):<br /><br />apparently i can’t embed it, they only allow you to link to it. oh well. <a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/">you can watch al jazeera english here.</a>General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-63516238938603040032010-11-11T23:40:00.002-05:002010-11-12T00:45:44.896-05:00recall announcementhowdy, everyone! i haven’t posted here in awhile, and hey, what’s all this gross stuff growing on my blog? mold or bacteria or viruses or something? aak, i seem to be coming down with some sort of blog-related illness...<br /><br />IMPORTANT ALL CAPS SAFETY RECALL ANNOUNCEMENT: THIS BLOG IS BEING TEMPORARILY RECALLED DUE TO SAFETY CONCERNS. THE MOST RECENT BLOG POST PRIOR TO THIS IS FAR PAST ITS EXPIRATION DATE, AND READING IT MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO ONE’S HEALTH. IF YOU HAVE PURCHASED A COPY OF THIS BLOG, PLEASE RETURN THIS PRODUCT TO <A HREF="HTTP://WWW.SUBGENIUS.COM/">THE MANUFACTURER</A> AND YOU WILL RECEIVE A FULL REFUND AND 50% OFF ON THE NEXT BLOG POST POSTED HERE. OFFER NOT VALID IN ANY STATES. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED, WHICH INCLUDES EVERY LOCATION IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE. - THE MGT.<br /><br />...what was that? anyway, umm, not much is going on, i’m kind of low on money right now, need some sort of job or some means of making money or something of that general nature, my puppy is still really awesome, oh, and, umm, apparently there’s some kind of safety recall affecting my blog and it appears to have made me sick. please don’t read any more of this, as the disease is highly contagious. anyway, i heard there was some sort of an election or something, and some party called the “republicans” or “democrats” or something like that may have won or lost or tied or something. not really sure about that. whatever happened, i’m sure it makes sense to somebody. i kinda forgot i had this blog thingie here. anyway folks, i don’t really have all that much to say, to be honest. maybe i’ll post some more stuff up here on this blog thing one of these days. still, blogs are soooooo 2006. so just remember, i need money, so send me all the money you have. and don’t pay any attention to that stupid safety warning you read earlier, that all caps nonsense. they post the same nonsense on cigarette packets but 21% of americans are still sensible enough to smoke cigarettes anyway despite the dire warnings on every packet. if you have read this far and ignored all the safety warnings and recall announcements, you are probably one of those people, and my hat would be off to you if i had a hat in the first place, but it seems i already had it off for somebody else and they are wearing it now. i’m just not so fond of the idea of blogging anymore with the internet being so devoid of anonymity and nobody having any privacy. so ok, just send me all your money or give me a job, and you are looking at this you probably already know my name, address, home phone number, cell phone number, email address, social security number, credit card number, blood type, physical body measurements, weight, my innermost thoughts that i am not posting here or anywhere else online, and of course the “permanent record” they kept on me in the public schools. so you will know exactly what bank routing number and account number to do a direct deposit into already. if you do not have access to all of this information, then i am afraid i cannot accept your offer to “phear” your “leet skillz”. good night and good luck, as keith olbermann would say, if he hadn’t been suspended from television and then un-suspended thanks to people like me who wrote angry emails to msnbc threatening to boycott their network unless he got put back on television. yes, it is all because of me. now give me a job, keith olbermann... i helped you get yours back. or at least donate some money to me, SIR. i joke, i joke. i wish i could have gone to that “rally to restore sanity and/or fear” hosted by jon stewart and stephen colbert, but unfortunately i am dirt poor, except without any money, and so paying for transportation and such is rather a ludicrous waste of money for one such as myself. and yes, i did vote for the democrats, or rather, for the <a href="http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/">working families party</a> line. and almost everyone i voted for won, except for congressman michael arcuri, soon-to-be a former congressman. but he is a blue dog democrat, not a progressive, so it’s no big loss... he is no maurice hinchey. luckily we still have maurice hinchey representing the southern half of the county. anyway, it’s most unfortunate that the teabaggers now control the house of representatives, and they will ruin our nation if they are not stopped from enacting their radical, extreme agenda. luckily, democrats still control the u.s. senate and of course the presidency, although barack obama will probably cave into whatever the republicans want him to do from now on. politics in the last few years has gotten increasingly insane, with the right-wingers having nothing positive to run on, just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories and opposition to everything positive being done by democrats to help our nation. so yeah, i am rather sick of it. and i know this isn’t the message jon stewart said in his rally to restore sanity and/or fear, but whatever. sometimes fear is the correct path, and dare i say the sane one. but right now i need to focus on the basics: making money, getting a job, finding a source of income, and obtaining access to a revenue stream. since jobs appear to be in very short supply, with only 1 job opening per 5 people who are seeking jobs, it is probably more likely that someone will give me lots of money for free than that i will actually be able to find a real job, so please, just give me free money, since you and i both know there just aren’t enough jobs out there for me to be able to find one, and i have been unemployed since june and am basically broke. since nobody ever reads this blog, obviously nobody will send me money, but it feels good to ask for it anyway. well not really. anyway, i can’t believe you read all this! didn’t you read the recall announcement, about how reading this article is hazardous for your health? don’t blame me when your eyeballs explode 10 seconds from now.<br /><br />...<br /><br />seriously? you are suing me because you blame me for your eyeballs exploding? you have no case. the recall announcement clearly takes me off the hook legally. go sue someone else who actually has money instead, if you want to keep wasting your time on frivolous lawsuits. as the judge in this case, i hereby dismiss all charges against myself and convict you of contempt of court. there will be a fine you will have to pay me. hey, don’t just walk out of my courtroom, where do you think you’re going? guards! attack! hey, stop laughing at the fact that i only have one guard, who is a cute little 7 pound puppy! it’s not funny! now attack that big scary human, puppy, and i’ll give you this dog treat! good dog!General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-64235615398102851232010-06-11T20:57:00.002-04:002010-06-11T21:00:35.188-04:00not funwell losing a job after almost 4 years is no fun. oh well. i’ll find another one. at least i have a girlfriend (my 2nd one, dating her since late march). i hope to get a dog, and of course another job, but i like dogs better. wish me luck everyone!General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-19413087247385130102010-05-01T04:08:00.003-04:002010-05-01T04:15:51.559-04:00oh hi therehey everybody! i didn't notice you were gone. or was i gone? anyway i'm still here. yeah. i just haven't felt like blogging in awhile, you know? sometimes you just don't feel like blogging, like you have other things you'd rather do instead, since blogging used to be fun but it just isn't as fun anymore, know what i mean? so things have been going alright, i have a new girlfriend, different from the one i had last year. oh, what else? not really anything else happened. oh, i guess obama passed his healthcare bill into law awhile ago. that was nice, although a single-payer system would've been better, but i guess that makes me a socialist (even though even canada and britain's conservative parties would never dare get rid of their single-payer systems). hmm... i guess sometimes us bloggers get a bit tired of blogging and stop doing it, ya know? anyway, i'm still here. somewhere around here, anyway. and still using lowercase. lowercase is fun. it requires less shift and caps lock. you should try it sometime, random person reading this. anyway, that's all for now.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-27409098024062783002009-12-31T16:06:00.002-05:002009-12-31T18:47:20.591-05:00the futurethis post was written in the future. do you remember when that happened? yes, friends, i am writing to you (or have written, or will write) from the distant future. the book “1984” by george orwell is about a dystopian future, and who can forget the prince song “party like it's 1999” about an even more distant future, or the stanley kubrick movie “2001: a space odyssey” even further in the future? and who can forget about all the prophecies concerning how the world <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Day_%28Church_of_the_SubGenius%29">WILL END</a> on july 5, 1998. yes, all of that happens in the world of the future. <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7200374813151075996">let’s visit the world of the future</a> is perhaps the best-known documentary film about the future, because it was filmed even deeper in the future than where i am, and sent back in time to a young filmmaker in 1973 who pretended to have made the movie himself... what a buffoonish liar! i am currently quite far into the future but not as far as that last movie, since i am right at the end of 2009, and 2010 will start in a few hours, which is even FURTHER into the future, making me even closer to the events of that documentary. now, for those of you reading this, in the distant past, it must seem strange to be reading this. in fact, back in your time, things like what i am writing, which are known as “blogs”, did not exist, nor did this thing known as “the internet”, which is the place where i put all these words that i wrote in the future. yes, you are living back in a time where the device i used to type this, “the computer”, had not been invented yet. however, you are quite lucky to be living in the past and not in the future like me, dear reader. to-day, we have things known as “nuclear bombs”, and for awhile there was a great and powerful nation known as “soviet russia” that threatened to dominate the whole world with “communism”. of course, back in your time, nuclear bombs, soviet russia, and communism do not yet exist, so it would be hard to explain. well, ok, russia does exist back in your era, if my records are correct. however, it appears to not be a terribly powerful nation, and is ruled by the czarist monarchy, with the vast majority of the population as poor landless peasants. hmm... it appears from my temporal displacement chronometer that in your time, dear reader, you do not yet even have access to the movie about 2001, the song about 1999, or the book about 1984. oh, wait... i was misreading the instrumentation... i was looking at it upside down. yes, yes, it appears the current year is 1953. by jove! that means that the book “1984”, soviet russia, communism, nuclear bombs, and primitive computers actually do exist in your time! all right then... it must be strange for you reading this on a piece of paper back in 1953. you see, i had to “post” what i am writing on “the internet” on my “blog” so that i could “run” an “app” on my “blackberry” that uses a “flux capacitor” to send messages back in time. ok, so back in your era, you have the telephone. my “blackberry” is actually a telephone just like the ones you have back in 1953, except it does not have wires connecting it to the wall, and instead the phone company sends and receives data using towers made of wire, similar to radio broadcast towers. it can also do other things besides telephone calls, such as sending messages into the past or future, if you install the right “app”, and some of these apps cost money and others are free. i actually wrote this one for time travel myself, and it requires a flux capacitor to be installed in the device, although normally flux capacitors are not in phones. so, ok... hmm... now that you are in the past, and have this message, i ought to have you do something to change history, and thereby warp the space-time continuum, allowing me to access all the 11 dimensions of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory">“M-theory”</a>. hmm... what can i think of that would enable this? ahh yes... your name is john robert dobbs, is it not... but people call you “bob”? you must build an amateur television set, but i cannot send you the design for it. you have to design it yourself! yes, “bob”, you must build an amateur television set of your own design by the end of this year, 1953! if you succeed, it will set in motion a chain of events that will result in the alteration of this article i typed in the future, and this article will make reference to things that didn’t exist the first time i wrote it. if you do not succeed, this article will likely end up making reference to silly things that do not exist. that is how i will know if you succeeded or not, “bob”! if you get this message and decide not to do that whole making an amateur television of your own design thing, please do not start a new religion that you keep as a secret society until you hire a few random nobodies to make the whole thing public, in the year 1979. that would make this all end up QUITE silly and i would be very embarrassed. also, if this flux capacitor does not work correctly (if it fails to store up quantum flux and then discharge it when the wave function is collapsed) you will not get this message at all, and then history will not be altered, leaving me unable to freely navigate 8 of the 11 dimensions. so please do something to alter history! also, i realize that, in the process of posting this on my blog, prior to sending this message back in time, other people who are not “bob” may come across this blog post on the internet, not in the past but in the future, but for any of you who find this on the internet, you will be in the present and me writing this will be in the past, even though right now, me writing this is in the present and you reading it is in the future. please go on about your normal activities and do not pay any attention to the odd unexplainable changes you may notice around you, as you live your daily life in the space-time continuum. there is actually nothing weird going on at all, internet blog-readers. move along now, nothing to see here. okay, you are probably gone by now... phew... close call! “bob”, are you the one reading this, back in 1953? please follow the instructions i gave earlier. if you have any questions, write them lower down on this sheet of paper, and my blackberry app will use the flux capacitor to post them as comments on this blog entry. if you are not “bob”, please do not leave any comments on this blog entry, or you will disrupt communications between me and someone who is actually in the past, which is very rude and inconsiderate, not to mention the fact that it would automatically trigger my doomsday device and start the countdown to the destruction of earth. if that happens, i will probably find some sort of scheme to save us all, like switching earth and mars around so the doomsday device gets confused and we all end up fine afterwords. but please do not do that, for those of you in the year 2009 or later. flux capacitors, you see, can change the past, and if you are not careful, the disruptions in the space-time continuum can destroy the entire universe, possibly even the multiverse! i have a carefully planned scheme that would disrupt the space-time continuum in a positive way, so that we have complete access to all 11 dimensions of space-time and can move around freely (well actually only i would have this ability at first, but i could mass-produce the device and sell you one). anyway, those of you in 2009 or later, wouldn’t you like to be able to buy such a device? yes, of course, exactly. so please don’t ruin my scheme. now as for why only the planet earth would be destroyed... well if someone here in the future posted a comment on this blog entry, this would create a time paradox capable of destroying the entire time-space continuum due to the setup i have here, since your message would be sent back in time to 1953 and “bob” would read it, and he would probably do whatever you say, thereby changing history, but you would not have it carefully thought out, and the resulting paradox could destroy the entire multiverse. however, i have built a doomsday device which catches time paradoxes before they happen. my doomsday device was built billions of years in the past, or rather, i built it and sent it back in time billions of years, and it resides inside the inner core of the earth, right in the center of this planet, where it has been for billions of years, protected by a hard outer shell made from dark matter that is impervious to harm. anyway, any time paradox that occurs on the planet earth while the doomsday device is operational will result in the doomsday device preemptively destroying the planet earth before the paradox ever occurs, thus saving not only this universe but the entire multiverse and space-time continuum. it is a paradox-prevention mechanism that prevents anything paradoxical from occurring through preemptive warfare against chaos. in fact, this doomsday device is responsible for why scientific experiments and logic have been so successful at understanding our universe, but the nature of things such as dark matter will never be discovered by humanity because that would make the hard outer shell of the doomsday device vulnerable, and then allow for paradoxes to occur. the reason my seemingly illogical plan to alter history and give us (or rather me) access to all 11 dimensions would not trigger this device is that i built into it a bypass mechanism, a secret code that you need to use in order to change the past and create potential time paradoxes without triggering the destruction of earth. also, if the device is triggered, it would detonate... about 4 and a half billion years ago or so, preemptively. the results of such a detonation would be catastrophic and likely result in the planet earth blowing up, with most of the debris eventually coalescing back into a smaller planet earth, while the farther out debris would orbit this new earth and eventually coalesce into a moon. but, as everyone knows, earth does not have any moons, unlike most planets. hmm... i wonder if humanity would still be able to evolve if this device detonated and blew up the earth. if that happened, and we still had wikipedia, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon">the moon article</a> would not talk about what moons are and about the moons on other planets and how earth doesn’t have a moon, but would talk about whatever sort of moon this new earth would have. hmm... i doubt someone such as “bob” dobbs would exist on such an earth, if the doomsday device went off. he would probably be removed from history to undo the paradox, and some sort of cargo cult would form around the nonexistent “bob” dobbs and the events that happened in a parallel universe where he is real. ok, “bob” dobbs, sorry you had to read that, but you have to know the importance of your mission. if you fail to do this, if you slack off, you will not exist... you will probably just end up as a cartoon image, a joke, an imaginary character, with your actual self erased from history. plus, earth will end up with a moon, which will be weird. according to my studies, the presence of a moon would create “tidal forces” which would create disturbances in the ocean here on earth. this could give rise to all sorts of unpredictable phenomena, and make it so that the weather can no longer be predicted with absolute certainty days in advance... it is hard to imagine all the things that would be different if my doomsday device were set off. or things could be even worse... and require me to switch earth, the fourth planet from the sun, around with mars, the third planet from the sun. this would save those of us here on earth, but mars would end up a cold, lifeless planet, red and barren, with hardly any atmosphere, no liquid water, no hot martian girls with their green skin. yes, the martians are a warlike people and it is only through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty">the outer space treaty</a> that we finally stopped mars from fighting its incessant wars with us. but just imagine the carnage, the horror, if i were forced to switch our planets around! sure, i could save earth, and we would end up with a moon, but all the martians would not only be dead, but they would have been killed off about 4 and a half billion years ago, resulting in mars being smaller rather than larger than earth, and the debris would create a huge asteroid belt between where earth is now (the place mars would end up) and the gas giant jupiter. it would truly be tragic if i were forced to do that to mars. then again, the martians have never been particularly friendly to our planet, and i am not especially fond of them personally, but it would still be tragic to kill them all through preemptive warfare! and i doubt any moon that would form around earth would be capable of supporting life, either... so we would end up with a solar system in which the only planets that support life would be earth and planet x. maybe not even planet x... it might be removed from history entirely due to another paradox that would be triggered. anyway, please make an amateur television of your own design before the end of 1953, “bob”. if you fail, the only life in the solar system will probably be on earth... and that is if i switch mars and earth around by sending the correct code back in time to my doomsday device. the best i will probably be able to manage is for it to half-blow up each of the planets, but to do more damage to mars than earth. it is good i know how to avoid creating the type of time paradoxes that destroy the entire universe or multiverse. but there will likely be a plethora of parallel universes created by this, and so people will have all sorts of legends about things such as mars, planet x, and even “bob” dobbs. anyway, “bob”, don’t slack off! slacking off is bad! you need to get to work on designing and building that amateur TV! if you succeed, “bob”, i can promise you that you will be able to get whatever you want, and once you are done working on the tv, you can slack off all you want and get things for free. you will be legendary! able to make a million dollars every time you make a mistake! imagine that, “bob”. oh, and get used to people calling you “bob” with quotes around it. you will be needed in 1998. please don’t get killed before then, or if you do, we will have to find some way to resurrect you in time, before july 5, 1998 when planet x will send its x-ist armada of pleasure saucers to destroy the planet earth once and for all. only you can save us from that destruction. or perhaps we will end up in some parallel universe where planet x and its inhabitants are erased from history, and never existed in the first place, as a result of my doomsday device and its machinations. the doomsday device has a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence system built into it, and unless i send the correct code back in time, it will do whatever it sees fit to eliminate paradoxes from the universe and keep us all confined to 3 spatial dimensions to move around in, stuck as time continues to go by, unable to move in that dimension, or 7 other dimensions. indeed, the a.i. on the doomsday device may decide to make time travel impossible for anyone or anything except it and whatever it wants to do. it may even take advantage of the fact that our brains make decisions based on quantum fluctuations of electrochemical impulses sent between neurons, and use its quantum flux capacitor to effectively mind-control all life-forms that have brains, all throughout history, the present, and the future. i doubt it would go that far, however, because i did not program it to do that, but the a.i. may become self-aware and decide to dominate everything for itself. i really doubt it would do that though. i guess the martians might get destroyed by it though, since my personal bias against martians no doubt influenced me somewhat when i was writing the code for its a.i., and the doomsday device prioritizes saving all life on earth to saving life anywhere else. it is ironic that the only way for it to save things is by blowing things up. or i suppose it might do the mind-control thing, but i did not teach the a.i. how to do that... i doubt it would figure it out, even if it tried for billions of years. the brain is just too complicated. most likely, it would only be able to cause mental disturbances in people, so that the fictional ailment of “insanity” that is in many works of fiction would actually exist in reality, and there would be a whole new type of illness called “mental illness”, all caused by the interference of this device in its attempts to mind-control everyone who has a brain. luckily, “bob”, you are the only man in history born without any brain who managed to survive, and that is why only you are capable of doing this mission, since only you cannot be controlled or influenced by this device i have built. if you do not carry out your mission as printed on this long note you are reading back in 1953, i suspect you will be removed from history as well, since the dastardly device i built won’t want anyone around that it can’t control. that is why it is of the utmost importance that i send the code back in time to control the device... oh wait... my sister is coming to visit along with her little daughter! i guess that means i won’t send any coded message to the doomsday device, and it will operate on its own. please carry out your mission, “bob”, or else earth will be the only planet in this solar system with life on it, and there will be countless other changes to our universe. nobody else should interfere, since you probably will be under some negative influence, if not outright mind control, by my doomsday device. and if mental illness comes into existence, retroactively, then in 1953 someone else may fill the void created by the destruction of “bob”, and create some odd religion based around opposition to the psychiatrists that would exist in such a world where there is mental illness, and this crazy person’s evil cult would probably recruit a number of hollywood celebrities and make a lot of money. that cult would probably have a stupid name like “scientology” or something. and then some group would eventually form in opposition to this cult, with an even sillier name, like maybe “anonymous”. it would all be extremely silly. hopefully you can prevent all of that, “bob”. oh crap... you don’t have a brain. i doubt this will work. sorry everybody! anyway my sister and her daughter are here now, so i am going to hang out with my family now. happy new year everyone!General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-86760896500153015652009-10-18T22:53:00.002-04:002009-10-18T22:59:46.154-04:00retrylast night i was quite upset and wrote my first blog post in months, telling all about everything, and it was quite long. now i’ve deleted that post and will summarize the parts that i have not declared classified information. my girlfriend broke up with me earlier this month and i am rather upset about a lot of things, including that, but also other things. my emotions are not terribly positive these days. also, this is an anonymous blog and i do not want my identity revealed on it. ok that is all.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-4261431923312573412009-07-21T03:01:00.003-04:002009-07-21T03:18:07.783-04:00my girlfriendrecently i got a new girlfriend. actually, a few weeks ago, back in late june of this year (2009). so that, among other reasons, is part of why i haven’t posted anything to this blog lately. she is not only my new girlfriend, but the first girlfriend i have ever had in my entire life, so i am rather proud of this new accomplishment. if you have been reading this blog in the past you are no doubt familiar with how i have never dated anyone before. well that long period of epic fail in my life is now ancient history. now i will find new and more epic ways to fail, probably. lol. anyway this is an anonymous blog so i am not saying what my girlfriend’s name is, and actually for privacy reasons i won’t really say anything else about her on this blog, for the time being at least, except for one thing: we both like each other a lot. ok that is enough information for you. there are many, many details, none of which you will find out about on this blog. bwahahahahaha! enjoy your ignorance on this subject. you will probably find many other subjects to be ignorant in as well, such as the grand unified field theory of physics, the easy way to become a billionaire fast, or the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-42768833585880402912009-06-10T03:26:00.002-04:002009-06-10T06:28:31.757-04:002 corrupt politicians switch parties in desperate attempt to avoid going to jail2 extremely corrupt politicians, new york state senator pedro espada of bronx and new york state senator hiram monserrate of queens, have switched their allegiance from democrat to republican in order to avoid criminal prosecution. the 2 gentlemen were bribed into doing this by tom golisano, an insane billionaire from rochester who has run for governor many times and always lost badly, and who announced he was moving to florida a few weeks ago because he hates taxes. both of these men, who are now loyal to the republicans but claim to be democrats, are puerto rican-americans, and they are part of a group called the “gang of 3” that was publicly considering supporting the republicans in the state senate several months ago because they dislike the leader of the new york state senate democrats, senator malcolm smith of queens. the coup d’etat took place on monday, carried out by none other than republican state senator tom libous of binghamton, who happens to represent ME. he can go fuck himself. anyway, the new york state senate has gone from a 32-30 democratic majority to a 32-30 republican majority, but the 2 democrats who joined with the republicans, pedro espada and hiram monserrate, are both criminals who will probably end up in jail. the districts that those 2 democrats represent are VERY heavily democratic, in terms of the voters. neither of those 2 state senators have more than an ice cube’s chance in hell of surviving when they are up for re-election in 2010, if they manage to avoid going to jail before the next election. of course, new york state politics is famously the most corrupt in the nation. former illinois governor rod blagojevich was nowhere near as corrupt as a typical new york state senator. and tom libous of binghamton would not be the #2 ranking republican in the state senate unless he were highly corrupt, because to rise to the top ranks in this state, you need to be corrupt. joe bruno, the former republican state senate majority leader who ruled the state senate with an iron fist for many years, is now in jail, because he is one of the few corrupt politicians that actually got caught and had to pay for his crimes. he only left office last year. so now we have the corrupt joe-bruno-style state senate republicans, joined by 2 new LITERAL “partners in crime”, democrats pedro espada and hiram monserrate, in what basically amounts to a new majority coalition for the state senate, a bipartisan coalition of criminals who belong in jail. governor david paterson rightly condemned this, but david paterson himself was once the leader of the state senate democrats, just a few years ago. now some say that this coup was illegal, but i think that is silliness. politicans change parties all the time, and every so often it switches the majority in a legislative body. it happened in the united states senate in the spring of 2001, for instance, and that was perfectly legal. but this is new york. this is where tammany hall was. this is where the mafia crime families all had their headquarters, and still do. until recently, new york city had one of the highest crime rates in the nation. political corruption has always been standard practice in this state. now a coalition of corrupt politicians has conspired to overthrow the will of the people, who elected democrats to a majority in the state senate for the first time in 40 years, a remarkable feat given the gerrymandering of the state senate districts to heavily favor the republicans (which is part of the bipartisan package deal, along with gerrymandering of the state assembly districts to heavily favor the democrats). <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/09/gops-senate-coup-paralyze_n_213346.html">here is a huffington post article</a> about what has happened, <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/6/9/740313/-What,-and-who,-is-behind-the-New-York-Senate-coup">here is a daily kos post</a> with more scandalous revelations, and for continuing coverage, follow the news at <a href="http://www.thealbanyproject.com/">the albany project</a>. there is even video footage somewhere on the internet of binghamton’s own tom libous carrying out the coup d’etat on the floor of the state senate. before he did this i actually thought tom libous wasn’t all that bad (although i still disliked him), and had actually been at an event where he spoke and after he gave a speech i actually clapped along with the other people, since it was an event to promote hiring people with disabilities and he didn’t really say anything i disagreed with in that speech. never again will i clap if i am at a tom libous speech, no matter what he says. he has proven himself to be a complete scumbag, albeit nowhere near as bad as these 2 former democrats from new york city who switched parties to try to avoid ending up in jail. given the fact that their districts are so full of loyal democrats, and the democratic party establishment is now 100% completely opposed to these 2 gentlemen, they have no chance of re-election, like i said. tom libous, on the other hand, will continue getting re-elected until he decides to retire, or until he gets so old that he dies. there is no way anybody could ever possibly defeat tom libous in an election for his state senate seat. typically some random nobody who happens to be a democrat decides to run against him, and easily wins the democratic nomination since nobody else wants the embarrassment of being creamed in a general election, and then the random nobody is creamed in the general election and never heard from again in the public media. most of these elections to the state legislature are such foregone conclusions that it is probably a waste of taxpayer money to even hold the elections in the first place, since it is always obvious that the incumbent wins no matter what. in these troubled times for the state budget, with our legislators abandoning any pretense of democracy in their mad and corrupt lust for more power, we might as well completely stop having elections to the state legislature, and just have the state democratic party chairman appoint every single member of the state assembly, and the state republican party chairman appoint every single member of the state senate, and call it a deal. it would not be much different from the current system; it would just be more obvious that the system is undemocratic. i encourage state attorney general andrew cuomo to prosecute as many state legislators as possible, gather as much evidence as possible, charge them with as many crimes as possible, and seek the maximum possible sentence for each of the state legislators that the attorney general can dig up some dirt on. hopefully the judges and juries will be unsympathetic to the state legislators and adopt an attitude of “lock ’em up and throw away the key”. it is time to put an end to the rampant corruption once and for all, and i doubt anyone can do this except possibly state attorney general andrew cuomo. then again, i have heard him referred to as a member of the “cuomo crime family”, referring to how his dad mario cuomo was governor and alleged misdeeds of an unspecified nature. but our state needs a knight in shining armor to purge the halls of power of those who have become corrupt and done illegal things while in office. we need our own version of gotham city’s district attorney harvey “twoface” dent, preferably without the twoface part. eliot spitzer was the real-life version of harvey dent, after being our knight in shining armor as attorney general but then getting caught in multiple scandals as governor and forced to resign after being found having sex with prostitutes. so perhaps instead of harvey dent, we should look for someone to be more like batman, the dark knight. i suppose governor paterson would do. after all, he is unpopular, just like batman is at the end of the movie the dark knight, and yet governor david paterson has continually done the right thing during his short career as governor, even when doing the right thing means that it will make him less popular. as for eliot spitzer, he has been rehabilitated by the media and is now on a new crusade to fix what is wrong with wall street, which will take forever because everything is wrong with wall street, and it is as corrupt as the state government if not more so. eliot spitzer will also take forever to do this because he is not state attorney general or governor, but a mere slate.com columnist who occasionally appears on television and has no actual power anymore, plus his reputation is permanently damaged by the prostitution scandal. it seems new york state might, for the time being, be in the unfortunate state of being dominated by billionaires like tom golisano and mike bloomberg. but hey, unlike tom golisano, at least mike bloomberg actually holds elected office. mike bloomberg also needs to be removed from office in the next election... the way he buys elections with his own money reminds me of italy’s current dictator, sergio berlusconi, who in turn reminds me of benito mussolini since both of them are right-wing italian dictators. of course italy is technically a democracy, but billionaire sergio berlusconi, completely corrupt and a criminal, owns all of the media outlets in that country, so everybody votes for him because the people on tv tell them to. corruption runs rampant on this planet, in pretty much every country, from the poorest nation to the most wealthy nation of all. typically corruption is actually the worst in very poor nations such as afghanistan or the nations of africa. in a wealthy state like new york in a democracy like the united states, it is possible for people to tackle and even defeat corruption, throwing the perpetrators in jail. the only problem is, most of the perpetrators are still out there, and are actually the people who are in charge of everything. if only the rule of law were applied, our laws were enforced, and both the wealthy and powerful and the poor and powerless were treated equally by our judicial system, according to our constitution. it seems much of government itself has, over the years, become a criminal conspiracy, violating many of the laws that that same government passed into law in the first place. by conspiracy, i am using the legal definition, of course, which means when 2 or more people secretly decide to commit illegal acts. under that definition, of course, virtually everything is a conspiracy, and in fact i and everyone else i know am part of multiple conspiracies. but, whatever... people in high public office ought to be held to a higher standard than ordinary citizens. my state senator tom libous spends plenty of taxpayer dollars campaigning for himself, and i bet most of it is probably legal, since people like him write all the laws. there are all sorts of local events that in the credits always thank tom libous and say they are sponsored by tom libous, such as summer musical festivals paid for by him. well not with his money, of course. with the taxpayer dollars of new york state, instead. and everyone who goes to a tom libous-sponsored event like one of his summer music festivals (such as my parents and i) gets plenty of pro-tom libous propaganda there, all taxpayer-funded. it is probably legal, too. this greatly saddens me. tom libous has much of the local populace brainwashed. i do not doubt that the other state legislators are all doing similar things. and as for the mayoral election this year in binghamton... don’t even get me started. i don’t even live inside city limits. but i do support the re-election of mayor matt ryan, although i doubt he will win again. the people of binghamton are very upset, and naturally, since he is mayor, people blame everything that is going wrong on him. i would suggest that the people of binghamton realize the state government is screwing us over, and the bread and circuses of tom libous such as the summer music festivals will not solve any of our underlying issues such as the local economy here that has been in the toilet for decades. an event where musicians perform to the general public for free that is organized and paid for by the government does not solve our economic troubles. such things are mere distractions to our problems, although they do have a positive effect on the mood of the populace, which might possibly make people more optimistic about things such as the economy. anyway, new york state government is so corrupt i fear it is beyond redemption. perhaps we should simply adopt anarchy as a form of government, as somalia did... just look at how well it turned out for them! now somalia is full of pirates, and pirates are awesome. i am joking of course; somalia is one of the poorest nations in the world and has incredibly high rates of violence, and is not a good role model for anybody. perhaps mussolini, who i mentioned earlier, would be a better role model: at least he was able to make the trains run on time, as everybody said. for that matter, how about stalin, who turned the soviet union from a poor agrarian society into an industrial behemoth and global nuclear-armed superpower? the downfall of the soviet union was caused by them finally having a decent human being as their dictator, once mikhail gorbachev took over in the early 80s. his incremental reforms from totalitarian towards a more free society resulted in the complete downfall of the entire soviet empire, and the overthrow of communist governments in all nations except for china, vietnam, laos, cuba, and north korea. in fact, one of the many communist governments to fall as a result of mikhail gorbachev being a pacifist was the last-ever government of somalia, and another was the government of afghanistan. look how well those countries are doing now. so, doing the right thing does not always yield good results, and doing the evil thing sometimes is much more effective. perhaps that in some way justifies the current state of affairs in new york state. by being evil, our government officials might actually be doing us a favor, in some perverse sense. it is true that most if not all of the formerly communist nations of central and eastern europe are now much better off as capitalist democracies than they were under soviet control. i do believe that capitalist democracies have been proven empirically to be better than any other system. after all, what communism replaced in russia was czarist dictatorship and economic feudalism, not democracy and capitalism. but i do not believe in the extreme form of unbridled, unregulated, free-market capitalism, but rather the more moderate type of capitalism practiced in western europe and scandinavia, which some people call socialism. and i do not believe in corrupt gerrymandered systems of “democracy” where the results of any given election are a fait accompli, but rather true representative democracy where the people in power actually represent their constituents, rather than acting out of their own selfish lust for power and corruptly serving their wealthy and powerful donors who make sure they get re-elected every time. of course, the united states congress is also full of representatives whose districts were gerrymandered, and the federal government has some problems of its own, but they all pale in comparison to the problems faced by new york state. in high school when i was a senior, i once spent a day “career shadowing” someone who worked for a state government program to bribe corporations to either create new jobs in new york state or not leave new york state. this person’s boss was bob moppert, the republican politician who on multiple occasions had lost congressional elections to the ultra-liberal democrat maurice hinchey, who is still binghamton’s righteous and noble congressman, perhaps the second-greatest congressman in all of america, second only to dennis kucinich. anyway, bob moppert was in charge of the local office of this state government agency, in charge of economic development for the southern tier, appointed to that position by former republican governor george pataki (who is a hungarian like my mom, george soros, nicolas sarkozy, and many other people). so bob moppert had this staff of people working for him, and i was sitting there at a meeting with his staff, where he called up the people who ran various corporations on the telephone, to talk to them about either creating jobs in this region of upstate new york, or just keeping the jobs they already provided here. it was obvious that he was dealing with a bunch of liars and crooks who just wanted free government money, and he knew that. i could see that he was frustrated with it. but he did his job and gave out corporate welfare to the fat cats anyway, doing exactly what this government program was supposed to do, except for the fact that the companies were only required to keep the jobs here for a certain amount of time (i think it was 3 years) and then they either immediately left the state, laying off everyone, or came back to the government, demanding and getting more money. in fact, it appeared that part of his job was to negotiate how much money to bribe each company not to leave the area. this government program was finally cut from the state budget this year, i believe. probably many businesses will leave town for good, which was going to happen anyway, and all this program did was bribe them to put off the inevitable. i do not believe that program should have even existed in the first place, because it is exactly the sort of corruption involving the government and corporations getting too closely intertwined that needs to be avoided at all costs. instead of spending taxpayer money on music festivals that hire cheap local musicians and charge no admission fee, all to improve the public image of certain state legislators, or spending it on pork barrel corrupt corporate welfare to bribe corporations not to lay off all their workers, i have a far better idea. stop wasting the fucking money on stupid crap in the first place, focus on important spending priorities, and lower state taxes to a reasonable level. that is the exact agenda that governor david paterson articulates in most of his speeches, but the recalcitrant state legislature is too corrupt and unaccountable to the people to give a damn about anybody except themselves, and so his opponents there, as well as special interest groups that benefit from the status quo, have been attacking him relentlessly, steadily driving his approval ratings lower and lower, because he is one of the few people trying to do the right thing. so, i propose having david paterson dissolve the state legislature and declare himself dictator of the state, and having him write all the laws from now on. that would immediately end all gridlock, and he could easily balance the state budget just by typing a few numbers in an excel spreadsheet, hitting print, and signing it into law. oh, and the governor would still be an elected position, so if the people don’t like what david paterson does, they could elect someone else next time there is an election (if there is ever another election once he is made dictator). to quote george w. bush, “if this were a dictatorship it’d be a heckuva lot easier.” maybe just a temporary dictatorship, for a month or something, and then after a month is over, the governor would go back to not being able to write his own laws, and the legislature would regain its powers again. under the current system of so-called “democracy”, what can we expect? the state of new york is headed towards financial ruin, nobody will have a job, and everyone will end up on welfare until the state goes bankrupt and all welfare programs are ended, along with all the state universities, community colleges, public radio stations, and all sorts of other things... everything except the police and prisons. ok, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is the direction in which we are headed, especially in areas like greater binghamton. i propose we tax the hell out of wealthy people. they all live down in the new york city area, and all that money could end up here, in the upstate region, and make the people here wealthy instead. all i am saying is, i want money. and so does everyone else. so do all the crooked politicians and special interest groups. and that is the problem, because so many of the crooked people get exactly what they want: money. which means less money for ordinary people like me. the republican party ought to do this nation a public service and dissolve itself, and have all republican politicians resign from office. then some third parties would come in to fill the vacuum caused by the final end of the republican party, and they would have fresh new ideas on how to improve things and win a lot of elections. the republicans are wrong about pretty much every issue, they are incapable of competent governance, and they are faith-based ideologues who are completely out of touch with reality. while they have the right to exist, that does not mean that it is right for them to continue existing in their present form, as the party of bigotry, hate, big business, fundamentalist wackos, and other extremists. they are dead wrong about pretty much everything and deserve to fade away into obscurity. and we need some third parties to shake things up and break the two-party stranglehold on our political system, to end all the cronyism and corruption that is so pervasive. i may be a registered democrat, but i vote the <a href="http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/">working families party</a> line, because the working families party of new york state best reflects my values and who i support. yes, the politicians it supports are the democrats, but voting for that party sends a signal that i am pissed off with politics as usual and want change: not just any change, but POSITIVE change. just <a href="http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/2009/06/wfp-response-to-change-in-senate-leadership/">look at their statement</a> on what the state senate did, or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk--VjKoeDY">the rally they had against it</a>. and if enough people voted for the working families party, it would become even bigger than the democrats or the republicans. that would be a very good thing. i am a registered democrat, though. after all, how else can i vote in democratic primaries, such as how i voted last year to help barack obama defeat hillary clinton? it should be obvious to everyone by now that hillary clinton is a centrist and barack obama is more progressive (or liberal, if you prefer). i have to be a registered democrat to be able to help people like barack obama get elected, and prevent the joe liebermans of the world from winning primaries (note to right-wingers: substitute "arlen specters" for "joe liebermans" and you will understand what i meant). anyway, to hell with binghamton, i am leaving this dump at the end of july, and going to europe. ok, ok, i come back from europe in late august, but i think i will be proving a point with my temporary absence, namely that binghamton sucks and that europe is way cooler. yeah, ok, the united states of america is still the greatest nation on earth, bla bla bla, but it sure as hell is nice to travel to other countries and get away from here for a bit. then when you get back it is a nice relief to find that people speak english and you can use dollars as money again. i have been told that my trip to europe will actually include a stay at a resort in croatia, of all places. that is sure to be interesting. apparently resorts in the former yugoslavia are much cheaper than resorts in wealthier nations. i hope nobody starts any wars in the countries i visit while i am there. that would suck. i know this girl who was visiting thailand about 2 or 3 years ago when it had a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government. apparently it wasn’t really that big of a deal, life as usual continued for virtually everybody, and most people were pretty glad the military coup happened. i guess democracy isn’t as popular as it used to be. living in new york state, it is easy to see why.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-39797406821780723732009-05-13T04:18:00.004-04:002009-05-13T05:10:49.738-04:00my internet is brokeni don’t know what the hell is going on here... some websites and things work and others don’t, but the internet is not working the way it normally does most days. a few hours ago, the internet was completely offline in the house where i live for about an hour, since apparently the cable modem could not communicate with the dhcp server run by the broadband internet service provider. half the websites on the internet come up with error messages, or the text loads but the images don’t show up, and they are very slow. but some websites still work 100% perfectly (at least when i am online and the internet isn’t completely off). all the computers in the house are configured perfectly for the internet and nothing has been changed on them, and these problems occur no matter what web browser is used. it is not just the web (hypertext transfer protocol) but stuff over other internet protocols is also effected. it seems the problem is certain servers either do not respond, respond slowly, or cannot be contacted in the first place for some reason. i think the dns servers are probably working but i dunno. i am pretty sure this is the internet service provider’s fault. the cable modem actually has lights on it to show whether it is connected, and when the whole internet was offline, you can guess what was going on with the lights: they were all indicating that there was a problem and it could not connect. i think perhaps the internet service provider (which, to be more open about things, happens to be time warner cable’s roadrunner service) might be a bit overloaded with its bandwidth. as ted stevens would say, the tubes are clogged. now obviously i am able to access blogger.com right now to post this; it is one of the sites that happens to be working. but there are sooooooo many websites that are down right now, at least when i try to connect to them. this is just getting really annoying. broadband internet access is not supposed to be this crappy. half of all the news websites i try to connect to do not work, and i am not talking about newspapers that are out of business, but news websites that are popular and updated very often. how am i supposed to know what the news is when i can’t even access half the news websites for some strange reason? i could watch news on tv, read a newspaper, or listen to news on the radio, and i suppose even my cell phone has a service that lets me read news and other websites (that costs an extra $5 a month so i am not subscribed to it). but... seriously... none of those news sources is anywhere near as good as the internet. on the internet i can look at like 20 different news sites or whatever i want instead of getting it all from 1 source and having to assume that the 1 source is correct on everything and will fully inform me on everything i need to know about what’s going on. at least that is how the internet USUALLY works. currently, the internet JUST BARELY works. now, if you are connecting to the internet and your connection works fine, and you can access any website you want, ok great. i am just complaining that my internet connection is a bit iffy. we have actually had this same internet service provider for about 10 years. they are the only broadband provider in the area. so there isn’t really anywhere else to go. every once in a while over the years we have had problems with our internet connection, and sometimes they fix the problem really well, and other times the problem is something more pervasive, like they replace your cable modem with another identical model and you continue to have the same problem, or they look at the wires in your basement and do some stuff with some tools and tell you everything is ok, and stuff is still the same afterwards. sometimes you can just call them on the phone and some guy in india just presses a button and it fixes everything with the connection between the cable modem and the internet service provider, at least temporarily. sometimes they say silly things like that maybe the router is broken or something, even though the router and cable modem have different ip addresses and i can access either one in my web browser to look at their status and configuration web pages, and both of them have plenty of indicator lights. and there is a firewall after all, so hackers and such are not a problem. anyway i am pretty disappointed by the internet connection failing like this. it is just not cool. i just want the internet to work. maybe there is some kind of virus or worm or something that has hijacked a bunch of computers with the same internet service provider as me, and those computers are using up all the bandwidth. that is a feasible explanation for the current phenomena, based on how the tcp/ip protocol operates. in any event, i am hopeful that this problem will clear itself up soon and the internet will go back to working normally again.<br /><br />update immediately after i first posted this and then tried out some websites: the internet seems to work now. i guess that it was just a temporary problem. things like this just piss me off though. why can’t the internet just work 100% of the time like it is supposed to? i think perhaps a number of websites i was trying to look at have scheduled server downtime in the middle of the night, and perhaps i was trying to connect during their server downtime. that makes more sense than there being a ton of bandwidth being used in the middle of the night. still, i wonder what is wrong with the dhcp server that assigns my cable modem its ip address, and why it wasn’t working for an hour, keeping all the computers in the house offline for that time. all of the websites that i remember not working before now work perfectly and come up very fast, so it seems the broadband internet connection is now working perfectly again. i just wonder what happened to make it temporarily not function correctly. it is too late to find out now, since now everything works perfectly. i could print out the log from the cable modem of all the error messages it had when it couldn’t connect to the internet, indicating that the dhcp server did not respond. it is all rather puzzling. despite all my technical knowledge, i cannot really explain what happened, and now it all seems to have resolved itself automatically. i am not very satisfied with that situation. i want to understand everything, understand how things work and why they work that way, and understand what goes wrong when something goes wrong, and why it went wrong. however, this does not seem to have been much or even any of a learning experience for me. as someone with a degree in computer science who is a+ certified in computer repair, it really frustrates me when i encounter computer problems that are beyond my expertise. this is actually a networking problem though, not a computer problem per se, and there are a number of separate certification programs for people who want to be experts in computer networking so they can set up and fix computer networks. it would be nice, though, if i already knew everything and were basically omniscient. or if the internet just WORKED and never had any problems, which would mean nobody would have to know anything about it. whatever... who cares... it works now... meh. i need to sleep now... bye bye... i had pretty bad insomnia last night... hope it doesn’t happen again tonight... who knows... i sure as hell won’t be on my computer posting to my blog, i will either be asleep or trying to sleep... good night.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-82466322354467925682009-04-16T01:22:00.002-04:002009-04-16T03:56:40.865-04:00the mad teabagging partyok, so <a href="http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/%E2%80%9Ctea-bagging%E2%80%9D-seen-through-community-organizers-lens">the mad teabagging party</a> was held yesterday on april 15th. meanwhile, responsible citizens like me, instead of having teabagging parties, actually paid our taxes. and you know what? this year, i actually got money back from the state and federal governments, whereas in past years, i have always had to pay them money. the teabaggers claim to, among other things, be protesting high taxes, but didn’t barack obama just lower taxes for 95% of americans? seriously. unless you are part of the top 5%, you already got a tax cut. what are they protesting, the bailouts? well guess what? if the bailouts hadn’t happened, their precious private sector and large corporations would have all gone bankrupt by now, and we really would have socialism. the wingnuts and paultards keep crying socialism all the time, like the boy who cried wolf, and it is getting kind of ridiculous. if they actually saw socialism they wouldn’t recognize it. so this astroturf operation by the republicans, the teabagging parties across the nation, was originally started by the paultards, which is what everybody who is not a ron paul supporter calls wacko ron paul supporters when we want to make fun of them. remember the paultards also celebrated “v for vendetta” and its anti-hero who wore a guy fawkes mask with a “money bomb” of large numbers of contributions to ron paul’s presidential campaign on guy fawkes day. the anti-hero of v for vendetta was a terrorist, and so was guy fawkes, who tried to blow up the british parliament several hundred years ago. now the internet hacker/activist group “anonymous”, like the paultards, also is into guy fawkes masks, even more so, but anonymous is into them in an ironic way. the first member of anonymous to wear a guy fawkes mask was a stick figure cartoon character known as <a href="http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Epic_Fail_Guy">epic fail guy</a>. similarly, the ron paul campaign was nothing but epic fail. basically, this teabagging thing was first started by paultards (and after all paultards are republicans, since you had to be a registered republican to vote for ron paul in most of the primaries or caucuses). then some republican bloggers and national republican organizations started to take notice and became official supporters of the teabagging parties, and soon republican fox news and republican talk radio were full of stuff promoting the teabagging parties. they renamed them “tea parties” from the original idea of “teabagging”, since the republicans did not want to be associated with oral sex, although current republican senator david vitter has publicly admitted to be totally into prostitutes... and now he is into teabagging parties. you know what is funny? according to the local newspaper, there were actually 3 of these teabagging parties here in broome county in upstate new york. today when i was going to work someone actually asked me for directions to this place, and i gave him directions, and after i got home and looked at the newspaper, i realized that the guy who asked me for directions was going to one of the teabagging parties. and i gave him the correct directions for how to get there, too! then later that night one of the radio hosts on the student-run radio station from binghamton university gave an on-the-air speech in favor of the teabagging parties and expressing regret that he had been too busy with his classes that day to attend the teabagging party that was held at binghamton university. i heard the dj’s speech live on the air and it actually seemed to make some sense. the dj was mostly concerned with government spending and deficits getting out of control, and said how great america is. and he, like the republican leaders, referred to these protests as “tea parties”, not using the original term that the paultards had called it back when they first got the idea of “teabagging” all the politicians in washington, d.c. yes, originally it was called teabagging, because it involved sending actual teabags in the mail to members of congress, and congress is always unpopular. the people who came up with the idea of teabagging knew exactly what it meant, and the whole thing was a big joke while at the same time having a serious message... the paultards felt tired of being screwed by the government so they decided to screw the government symbolically, with teabags sent in the mail representing the sexual practice of teabagging, while at the same time having some kind of connection to the boston tea party back when the american colonists were protesting british taxes. i don’t quite understand the whole thing and how it developed, but apparently when rick santelli on cnbc went into a sick rant and it became a viral video, this helped build momentum for this teabagging idea. or should i say, joementum, in tribute to joe lieberman and his myriad failings as a senator. obviously joe lieberman was not involved in this, except as one of the victims who received teabags in the mail along with everyone else in congress. i just like saying joementum, just like i prefer calling them teabagging parties to tea parties. so apparently the teabagging parties were not big gay orgies, despite being called teabagging parties. fox news and other right-wing media are portraying this as if it is the first great populist grassroots movement since... since what? since the great populist movement of the pumas last year, remember? the p.u.m.a. movement stood for “party unity my ass” and was another republican astroturf operation that targeted hillary clinton supporters and tried to get them to vote for john mccain in the general election. originally there were just a few pumas and they actually were democrats who supported hillary clinton, but once the republicans found out they created lots of puma websites and started trying to spread puma propaganda, and republicans effectively took over leadership of the puma movement, which petered out after hillary conceded the election to barack obama and endorsed him, turning out to not be much of a movement at all. some of the pumas called barack obama a dangerous left-wing socialist and said we needed sensible centrist leadership like hillary clinton or john mccain. other pumas called barack obama a right-wing neocon in disguise and said that electing him would be like 4 more years of bush so john mccain would be better since after those 4 years hillary clinton could come back as the great liberal savior who would finally end right-wing misrule. yes, some people actually thought obama was a right-wing neocon, just like some people think he is a left-wing socialist. the pumas never had a coherent message other than hillary clinton good, barack obama bad. the message of the newer astroturf movement, the teabaggers, is even more incoherent, since some of them want to throw out all the bums in washington in both parties, and others are partisan republicans who support republican politicians and oppose democratic ones. basically the teabaggers are against taxes, government spending, bailouts, big government, barack obama, the democrats, and liberalism. after years and years of liberals doing public protests and conservatives just supporting george w. bush and the republicans but never doing any protests or activism outside party politics, now the right-wingers seem to be actually doing protests for the first time in a long time. well, ok, the anti-abortion people have been doing protests all these years, but most republicans are not that into protests and think it is some liberal hippie silliness that no sensible person would ever be involved in. protests are usually full of silliness, but now all the silliness is at right-wing protests. those of us on the left still have protests (i think)... for instance lots of pacifist groups keep holding peace vigils and protesting the wars, even now that barack obama is the commander-in-chief and many of them voted for him. protests sure are silly, but these teabagging ones take the cake, except maybe when compared to the pumas last year, since the pumas were really quite ridiculous, especially harriet christian, the most famous of them, or lady lynn forester de rothschild, an ultra-wealthy banking heiress from european nobility who called barack obama an elitist.<br /><br />on to more serious news, the obama family has a new dog named bo. it is a gift from ted kennedy and is a portuguese water dog, the same type he has as pets, and it is related to the dogs ted kennedy has, from the same breeder, and trained by the same professional dog trainer. this is possibly one of ted kennedy’s last major public acts, since after all he is dying of brain cancer, and probably has just months to live. if dying of brain cancer is not serious business, i don’t know what is. also, dogs might act silly, but they are our friends, they help cheer us up, and when we lose a dog, it feels just as sad and tragic as when a human being dies. getting a new puppy is sort of like getting a new baby, except babies grow up to become regular boring adult humans, while puppies grow up to become dogs that are almost as silly as puppies.<br /><br />on to even more serious news... pirates! they keep kidnapping people, ships, and cargo off the coast of somalia. somalia is the only country in the world whose form of government for over a decade has been anarchy. some anarchist theorists actually claim that economic growth under anarchy in somalia has been better than it was during the years when somalia had a functioning government. and some even more crazy people sometimes claim that somalia actually has a government... what it actually has are a bunch of people who pretend to be a government but do not even control their own capital city, let alone any other territory. whenever someone mentions “the government of somalia” you know they are full of bullshit. that is like referring to the one world government. similar to the government of somalia, the one world government is pure fiction and does not exist. so according to market anarchists (who are like libertarian paultards except they take libertarian principles to their logical extremes), somalia’s anarchy is totally awesome and causes all sorts of innovation in the private sector, and things that ought to be legalized are legal in somalia because under anarchy there are no laws, which is exactly what anarchists want. anyway, one of the innovations that the people in somalia’s private sector have come up with, one that would be illegal in any other country, is hi-tech, 21st century piracy. yes, these pirates are hi-tech. they have machine guns, speed boats, and satellite phones that work out in the middle of the ocean. their operations are extremely profitable, and the pirates in charge of things stay put on land, keeping in contact with the pirates at sea by phone. it is basically somewhat similar to the mafia, drug cartels, or street gangs, except they do this stuff out in the ocean. while somalia is one of the poorest countries in the world, it is near the suez canal, where a large portion of the goods that supply europe go thru all the time, coming from asia. as for europe exporting stuff back to asia... well not as much, but i am sure they export at least a bit, and it probably mostly goes thru the suez canal. everything that goes thru that canal goes by the coast of somalia, and the pirates can easily attack any ship they want. under maritime and international law, non-military ships are not allowed to have things like machine guns, so it is illegal for the merchants shipping goods through the suez canal to carry weapons onboard the ships that are as powerful as the weapons carried by the pirates onboard their speedboats. shipping companies almost all have pursued strategies of negotiating with the pirates, giving them ransom, and letting them keep it and get off free, and now the pirate leaders of somalia are very wealthy, especially compared to everyone else in somalia. any would-be government of somalia that ever tried to form would not stand a chance against the pirates, who would be able to use their money to buy weapons for and hire as mercenaries large enough armies to crush anyone else in somalia who dared to oppose them. the only forces that are powerful enough to fight the pirates are forces from outside somalia, such as the united states military, or, believe it or not, the french military. yes, both we, the americans, as well as the french, have killed somali pirates in recent days to end hostage standoffs. i think all the non-pirates behaved heroically. however, the pirates are resolved to continue their piracy, and for good reason: they are making money hand over fist, it is the only way they have to make money, and they live in a country that has not had a functioning government for many years, filled with extreme poverty, starvation, and lots of violence and collapse of social order. islamists tried to take control of somalia awhile ago, but since they were loosely allied with al qaeda, the united states paid ethiopia money to invade and occupy somalia and support a fake somali government, which was toppled soon after ethiopia decided to withdraw its troops. now, to be honest, there are different parts of somalia that are controlled by different “governments”, each claiming to be legitimate, and some of these parts are more stable than others. after the ethiopian withdrawal, the islamists have gained control of more territory once again, for example. however, these “governments” are mostly just warring factions fighting over territory, and are not like real governments. the pirates in somalia are closely allied to one of the “governments” that controls a bit of territory along the coastline. it is easy for the pirates to ally with one of the warring factions that controls some territory, since the pirates are the ones with all the money they got as ransom payments for the ships, hostages, and cargo. everyone else in that country is dirt poor so the pirates can easily bribe the leaders of a faction into supporting them. the united states has been involved in somalia too, of course, but we have been supporting a bunch of losers, namely the so-called central government that is incredibly weak and does not control any territory, rather than supporting a rival faction that has a better chance at winning control of the country. that is why we had to pay ethiopia to invade somalia on our behalf, using the entire ethiopian military as a mercenary-for-hire proxy fighting service because the united states military was too busy fighting other wars. that mission did not exactly go as planned, although early on the ethiopians easily defeated every foe they faced. the ethiopians got tired of fighting on our behalf, and we were not paying them enough to make them continue, so they withdrew. we americans could easily conquer somalia if we wanted, but then we would face the same problem as in iraq and afghanistan: invading and occupying a foreign country, doing nation-building, putting in place a puppet government, and fighting an insurgency. the amount of money that such a military endeavor would cost is probably far more than the amount of money the pirates are making, so a more fiscally responsible policy would be to just pay the pirates the money they ask for, after talking them down to a reasonable sum of money. we are in enough wars already. maybe if some other country wants to fight the pirates, we could offer them some kind of support, but our military has enough other problems to deal with. by the way, according to market anarchists, having a government-run military is evil socialism, and gives the government a monopoly on the use of force to impose its will on others, and is therefore horribly oppressive. market anarchists believe in having privately owned militias that people pay money to in order to have protection. so, for all the teabaggers protesting so-called socialism, do you realize that the biggest socialist institution in the entire world is the united states military? why don't you send the military some of your teabags? oh yeah, no gays in the military, how could i forget. if there is ever a draft, i hope the no-gays rule is still in place, because i will need some way to avoid being forced against my will to fight for a cause i do not believe in, and if pretending to be gay is the only way to avoid having to serve in some unjustified war like the one in iraq, then that is what it takes. back in world war 2, i think men up to their early 40s were drafted, so i am not out of the woods yet at my age, since i am still in my 20s. just like the former hippies holding weekly peace vigils, i am pretty much a pacifist opposed to all war, so i could never in good conscience ever serve in a war. and if i were a soldier, my anxiety disorder would mean that either i would be a nervous wreck, too nervous to shoot straight or function properly, or i would be drugged up on anti-anxiety pills, too drugged up to shoot straight or function properly. even if i believed in the mission and wanted to fight, i would not be capable, because of my emotional disorder of panic attacks. anyone who wanted me as a soldier would have to be crazy, since besides that problem, i was always the worst person at every sport i played in school, and i would just totally suck at being a soldier. maybe they could have me clean latrines or cook food for the actual soldiers, or do some other menial task. i dunno. maybe they might even decide to put my ivy-league education, high intelligence, and math and computer background to good use, and have me actually use my skills. naw. nobody would ever give me a job where i actually use my skills. hasn’t happened yet. that’s why the economy sucks, because nobody is behaving rationally. just look at all the teabagging parties... can you honestly name 1 person who is behaving rationally? and no, you can’t name yourself, since you are biased in your own favor, probably. the fact is, we people are never rational, since it is biologically impossible for us to achieve rationality. our brains are just not wired that way. now think about this: is it rational for someone to give himself up as a hostage and put his own life on the line to help save his ship’s crew? very brave and heroic, but not exactly rational. is it rational to give orders to shoot the pirates on a lifeboat with that very hostage, if just 1 missed shot means that the hostage will either be killed by you or by the pirate that is not killed instantly by a bullet, and if your mission is to save the hostage, not kill him? if you really think about it, nobody in this pirate debacle behaved rationally at all, not the pirates or anybody else. the only thing everybody had in common was irrationality. now computers are perfectly rational, so if we built robots to do stuff, the robots would be rational too if they had computer chips functioning in the same role as our human brains. imagine robot pirates taking a robot ship captain hostage, and then a navy of robots is sent to rescue the robot captain from the robot pirates. the whole thing sounds utterly absurd! robots would never behave in such a silly fashion! they are far too sophisticated... instead, the robots would all be having parties to celebrate how logical they are, and only the most rational robots would get invited. the less rational robots would just sit there and rust in self-pity, feeling an irrational sense of loneliness that does not make any sense for robots to have, since robots are not supposed to have any emotions. now, as for the pirate situation, the nation hardest hit by the piracy is of course egypt, since the pirate attacks are causing less and less merchants to ship cargo thru the suez canal, cutting into the egyptian government’s main source of revenue. so logically, egypt has a stronger direct interest in putting a stop to somali piracy than any other nation. if other nations like the united states encourage egypt to take care of this problem, perhaps the great pharaoh will be moved by our pleas and let our people go from the pirates who take them hostage. well ok, egypt has a president now, instead of a pharaoh, but he still needs to let our people go... not just let them go from the pirates, but how about letting us go thru the suez canal without paying him a toll? no, just kidding, of course egypt gets a toll, otherwise there is no incentive for them to crack down on the pirates. another idea is, maybe if we let the islamists take over somalia, the islamists would put an end to the piracy because it violates shariah law? who knows? the taliban is apparently profiting off the trade of afghan heroin, so i don’t think we can count on islamists to not want to make money off lucrative money-making opportunities such as somali piracy. or we could just ask our best friends, the israelis, to launch some of their nuclear weapons, and have the weapons aimed all over the coastal areas of somalia. then afterwards we would claim we had nothing to do with the nuclear attack by the israelis, and join the rest of the world in condemning their actions. what an incredibly stupid idea. we should probably just do absolutely nothing, and wait for the egyptians or someone else to solve this problem for us. besides, the suez canal is not used to supply the united states with goods; it is used for trade between europe and asia. if egypt does not deal with this, perhaps the europeans or asians will, but it does not really affect the united states that much at all. perhaps we just need to periodically make a show of force to demonstrate we are the world’s only superpower, and that is why we killed those somali pirates in a daring rescue of the captain. we have been paying out so much in bailouts, we could have easily afforded the ransom and not had to kill anyone, and it would have cost less than this naval expedition. or we could have just nuked the pirates ourselves. what is the point of having nuclear weapons if you never get to use them? i am just kidding. we need to eliminate all nuclear weapons from this planet because they are too dangerous. being nuked is almost as bad as being teabagged. ALMOST.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-25006491393694503362009-04-13T00:30:00.003-04:002009-04-13T00:34:27.899-04:00glenn beck is crazythis glenn beck guy is seriously off his meds and needs to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital:<br /><br /><embed type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://foxnews1.a.mms.mavenapps.net/mms/rt/1/site/foxnews1-foxnews-pub01-live/current/videolandingpage/fncLargePlayer/client/embedded/embedded.swf' id='mediumFlashEmbedded' pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer' bgcolor='#000000' allowScriptAccess='always' allowFullScreen='true' quality='high' name='FOX News' play='false' scale='scale' menu='false' salign='LT' scriptAccess='always' wmode='false' height='550' width='610' flashvars='playerId=videolandingpage&playerTemplateId=fncLargePlayer&categoryTitle=undefined&referralObject=4282619'></embed><br /><br />time for the men in white coats to take him to the loony bin...General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-27010453834225266942009-04-03T18:08:00.002-04:002009-04-03T18:11:36.068-04:00oh greatoh great, some jackass murdered a bunch of people here in binghamton. this is so messed up... nothing like this has ever happened here before. goddamn murderer. at least the guy who did it is dead. we have always had so little crime in this small tight-knit community before today. a very sad day for everyone. i am glad i was not at the civic center today. my job is just across the chenango river from that place.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-92084804803901066882009-04-03T07:42:00.002-04:002009-04-03T10:42:47.988-04:00right-wing stupidityi often come across stupid comments right-wingers leave on the internet. today i truly found a gem: an entire thread full of comments by them denouncing the new york times and proclaiming how happy they are that it is going out of business. it actually isn’t going out of business, but these conservative lunatics have a very tenuous hold on reality, and as they make clear in their comments, they wish that the only media that existed were conservative propaganda outlets like fox news, right-wing rags like the new york post, washington times, and wall street journal, and right-wing talk radio (rush limbaugh, sean hannity, mike savage, etc.). <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/0409/Keller_Times_will_be_left_standing_after_the_deluge_.html">ok, so here it is, take a look!</a> just read the comments there, and you will see a huge number of incredibly idiotic comments by right-wing loonies, and a few sensible comments by people who are not right-wing lunatics. when i was in college at cornell i read every issue of the cornell review that was published during that time. it is the ultra-right-wing student newspaper written by complete lunatics at cornell, and it was founded by ann coulter when she was a student at cornell. anyway, reading the cornell review was a form of entertainment for me and many other cornell students, and the vast majority of us who read it found it to be full of nonsensical articles that are completely without merit written by people who seemingly inhabit some parallel universe where creationism is factually true, any sexual intercourse outside of a heterosexual marriage is an evil sin, unregulated free-market capitalism is the only economic system that works, the war in iraq is perfectly justified because saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and evil godless liberals (who are all communists in disguise) were somehow ruining the country even at a time when conservative republicans controlled all 3 branches of government. so anyway, i have long observed that conservative republicans are completely disconnected from reality because they are so indoctrinated by their absurd ideology, and this seems to hold true both when they are in power and when they are out of power. they seem to think, for example, that ad hominem attacks against al gore for his personal energy usage disprove the scientific theory of global warming. the beautiful part about all this is, pretty much every republican politician out there calls themselves a conservative, and lots of democrats do too, but hardly any politicians are willing to be associated with the term liberal, because they are all scaredy cats when it comes to being associated with liberalism. this is because foaming-at-the-mouth rabid conservatives have spread their infection to much of the public, making people think that liberalism is somehow bad, and thus only a small percentage of people have the guts to actually call themselves liberals. i am a liberal, of course, because i am not some dumbass coward afraid of the ramifications of admitting the truth. now let me discuss the merits of the arguments the conservatives were making in this thread at politico.com. many of them were saying “who cares about darfur?”, admitting to the public that they do not really care about the suffering of other people, even if the other people are innocent victims of a genocidal campaign of terror by a brutal dictator, namely sudanese president bashir who has been indicted for crimes against humanity. of course, i have always known that conservatism is based on selfishness and liberalism is based on actually caring about other people, and statements like this by conservatives only confirm this truism. i also read many comments rejoicing in the downfall of the new york times, claiming that it was full of liberal bias. i suppose that conservatives don’t care about facts, like the fact that the new york times helped lead the way in cheerleading for bush’s war in iraq before the war started, or that the new york times always has at least 2 staunch conservatives among its small group of paid opinion columnists, and whenever 1 of them leaves, they find another staunch conservative to replace them. if you look at a conservative newspaper such as the wall street journal or the washington times, you will find that every single opinion columnist is a diehard conservative, and no dissent from the party line is allowed. the new york times regularly criticizes both republicans and democrats, but republican publications such as the wall street journal and washington times are completely 1-sided on their opinion pages. the news pages of the wall street journal are respectable, but the news pages of the washington times are just as full of right-wing bias as the editorials, which is not surprising, given the fact that the washington times is owned by korean cult leader rev. sun myung moon, who served time in federal prison in the united states before he managed to use his political connections to become a free man once again. sometimes conservatives even accuse the washington post of being a democratic paper, which is far more ridiculous than saying that of the new york times, since the washington post is a centrist paper that usually favors the conservatives, not the liberals. the conservatives who comment on threads like the one i linked to get almost all their information from conservative propaganda outlets, except these internet conservatives tend to get most of it from conservative websites on the internet, not television, radio, or newspapers. i get news from the internet, television, radio, and newspapers... from all of them... even news-magazines like time magazine too. conservatism is insane because it is a form of fundamentalism that applies to all issues. conservatives are fundamentalist about religion, fundamentalist about free markets, and fundamentalist about pretty much everything, which means that they all have 1 point of view that they all agree on, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, and they stick to that point of view no matter what. being liberal, as a dictionary will tell you, has <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/liberal">among its definitions</a> being open-minded. as for conservative, <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conservative">the first definition</a> is “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.” the first definition for liberal is “favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.” another definition for liberal is “favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.” another definition for liberal is “of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.” and liberal is also defined as “open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.” in other words, liberalism means that people are open-minded and do not stubbornly stick to old ideas that don’t work and have been proven wrong, while conservatism means either wanting to preserve the status quo and avoid change, or to go back to a previous status quo that was traditionally followed in the past until recently. now, there are several arguments that could be made against these dictionary definitions, such as saying that the dictionaries are written by a bunch of liberals, or that liberal and conservative no longer mean what they traditionally meant several decades ago, but i am not going to get into a debate over that. i would just like to say that the definitions you get at dictionary.com are fairly accurate in my opinion, and they seem to portray liberalism very positively and conservatism more negatively. perhaps the most obvious flaw of conservatism is that conservatives often find themselves debating scientists, and saying that science is wrong. this glaring flaw in conservatism is why i think it is a form of lunacy. science is what has brought us all of the modern technology we take for granted nowadays. the scientific theories underlying many of the advances in technology are the very theories conservatives claim are incorrect, yet conservatives use the same technological devices as liberals all the time. for example, much of modern medicine is based on the theories of evolution, and most conservatives are not so wacky that they refuse medical care and seek out faith healers or witch doctors instead. most conservatives are at least sane enough to accept modern medicine and allow it to be used on them. they just disagree with the primary theory underlying the very scientific advances in medicine that save their lives, the theory of evolution. evolution, for instance, explains why bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, something that cannot be explained by so-called “creation science” or “intelligent design”. another atrocious thing about conservatives besides their complete disregard for science or logic in favor of ancient superstitions is the fact that they only seem to care about people who are very wealthy, and always try to change the laws to help out people who have much more money than they know what to do with, at the expense of everyone else. they even engage in blatant corruption like the awarding of no-bid contracts to halliburton, the company dick cheney was ceo of before becoming vice president, and they nakedly do this corruption in front of everyone, and have no remorse or shame about it. it is hard for me to find any redeeming qualities in conservatism, but i am liberal and open-minded enough to find at least two. first of all, if there is some old tradition that liberals want to change, and the tradition is actually good and the proposed change would actually be bad, then in this case the mindless impulse of conservatives to always want to preserve old traditions actually turns out to be the correct course of action. a stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say. secondly, we liberals want to fix problems, and often our open-minded thinking leads to bold proposals, but these bold proposals are not always correct. it is necessary to have somebody arguing the opposite from what we argue, arguing that our proposals are wrong, so that if we do come up with flawed proposals, the flaws in the proposals are made known and debated, and then hopefully the flawed proposals are either fixed or discarded. but in general, liberals do want to fix problems and conservatives want to leave them unfixed. that is just the general mindset of both groups, and conservatives do occasionally realize that a problem needs to be solved. usually, though, when conservatives want to solve a “problem”, the “problem” is just liberal policies that they disagree with, and not an actual problem. for instance, in the case of the new york times, conservatives view its existence as a problem, because the new york times generally favors liberal points of view over conservative ones, and despite the fact that there are far more conservative media outlets than liberal ones, conservatives cannot stand the existence of even one liberal media outlet. conservatives would like to shut out all debate and have their opinions be the only opinions allowed, which they make very clear in the comments thread i linked to above. they are really an undemocratic group of people, but luckily they have not ended democracy in our country yet, probably because democracy is a tradition and they feel bound by traditions. now i may come off as biased, and of course i am quite biased, obviously, but i do often wonder about whether there are intelligent, thoughtful, open-minded conservatives who are capable of considering other opinions and defending their own opinions in a logical manner without resorting to absurd arguments or arguments based on claiming the factual authority of things like the bible. there are a few conservative columnists and pundits that occasionally seem to be sentient beings, but just when i start to have faith in humanity and think that maybe conservatives aren’t all bad, my new favorite conservative always has to go back to spouting absurdities without logical justification, and i have to stop liking them, since the whole basis of me liking them was that they seemed to be logical and make sense and not be total wackos. as for liberal commentators, there are many that i like. for instance, i like paul krugman of the new york times, which you may find surprising, given that paul krugman has said that barack obama’s economic plan will not work and that i also like barack obama a great deal. i also like the columnists at <a href="http://www.thenation.com/">the nation magazine</a> a great deal. my main news sources that i look at each day on the internet are the huffington post, cnn.com, and the drudge report. yes, i know, the drudge report is conservative, but, i am a liberal and we are open-minded. my mind is always open to new ideas, even now. for instance, when it comes to things like bailouts, i am not sure whether they are a good idea or a bad idea. i do not trust the government or large corporations, but the government is far more trustworthy than corporations since at least it is accountable to voters. corporations are supposedly accountable to shareholders who own common stock and can vote, but in practice, this does not work at all, and corporate leaders are basically not accountable to anyone except the government, and only sometimes, because there is selective enforcement and double standards. bernie madoff was the former chairman of the nasdaq stock exchange, the 2nd largest stock exchange on wall street, the one where most of the tech stocks are, and he pulled off the biggest ponzi scheme in history. the person in charge of the stock exchange is the highest level you can get to in wall street, so the corruption in wall street goes all the way up to the top, bernie madoff being proof of this. and of course the government cannot be trusted, since after all, we have gone through 8 years of having george w. bush run the government, and it is still full of many conservatives he put there, some of whom are bound to sabotage things that the obama administration tries to accomplish. ok, that is just one of many reasons not to trust the government. another more obvious one is that governments can never be trusted under any circumstances, which is obvious if you look at history and see how all the governments have been untrustworthy in the past. any large enough institution becomes to some extent a malicious entity that strikes out against those who oppose it and tries to suppress information that makes it look bad, regardless of whether it is a public or private institution. part of being liberal and open-minded is being skeptical and not believing in things 100% unless you have absolute proof, so a true liberal, even if they think obama is great, is still somewhat skeptical, since you can never be too sure about any politician. if you are not skeptical about your own opinions, and you are a bit of a fundamentalist about them, then you are really just like the conservatives. you have to at least think twice about things, consider other points of view, and have some doubts about your own opinions, or else you are not truly a sentient being, but merely an overrated animal that knows how to walk and talk but not how to think. yes, humans are animals, unless you think it is better to categorize us as plants, fungi, bacteria, or something else, but of course calling humans animals is controversial to many conservatives, despite it being a scientific fact. to me, anything that conflicts with science conflicts with reality itself, and has zero credibility. science, logic, and mathematics are the foundation of all human understanding of reality, and any understanding of reality that is not based on them has no real justification at all. for years, conservatives have argued that if you cut taxes on the wealthy, this can actually increase government revenue. that is an example of something that completely violates all mathematics and logic and has basically zero validity whatsoever. pretty much everything conservatism is based on is fundamentally illogical and nonsensical, which is why the end result is the same. garbage in, garbage out. it is much more popular for people to call themselves conservatives than liberals only because conservatives are masters of sticking to the party line and staying on message, creating a vast echo chamber of conservatives who all agree with each other and spread the message to other people who are not conservatives. also, since conservatives favor the wealthy, the wealthy have a natural interest in favoring conservatives, which means conservatives have a major source of campaign contributions as well as people who own media conglomerates that will spread the conservative message for them. liberals favor the poor and middle class, who are not really in charge of anything, despite the fact that the vast majority of people are poor or middle class. this means lots of potential voters, but those potential voters can easily be won over to the other side through the ubiquitous conservative misinformation coming from so many media outlets. and the conservatives want to silence the few media outlets that do not treat their ideas as equal to or better than liberal ideas. now think about this: many major cities, such as washington, d.c. or new york city, have very liberal populations, but their newspapers and other local news organizations do not share the same views as the public in those areas. new york city does have the new york times, but more people read the new york post, a conservative paper, since it is cheaper and has a tabloid format aimed for mass appeal, and there is also the wall street journal, another conservative paper that is quite popular. in washington, d.c., neither the washington post nor the washington times is liberal, although the residents of the city are incredibly and overwhelmingly liberal. the washington post is centrist and the washington times is very conservative, neither of them reflecting the views of the people of washington, d.c. i think this fundamentally indicates the cozy relationship between wealthy media barons and conservative politicians whose policies benefit the wealthy. for anyone who still believes the myth that the media has a liberal bias, i highly recommend the excellent book <a href="http://www.whatliberalmedia.com/">what liberal media?</a> by eric alterman, which thoroughly debunks that myth. it turns out that even the new york times is not as liberal as people think it is, and it only seems liberal because all the other news outlets are so conservative. of course, the <span style="font-style:italic;">book what liberal media?</span> was written prior to msnbc deciding to become a liberal network, but its thesis and many examples documenting how the media is actually conservative are still valid in my opinion. msnbc, for instance, is owned by a large corporation, general electric, and while its evening lineup may feature the liberals keith olbermann and rachel maddow, the warmup act, chris matthews, is a centrist who used to be a supporter of george w. bush, although nowadays he pretends that never happened. msnbc prominently features pat buchanan and other conservatives, and it gives hours of airtime every morning to conservative joe scarborough. in the past, msnbc gave shows to mike savage, tucker carlson, and don imus, among others, helping to spread the conservative message. the mike savage show, which was called savage nation, was especially awful. as for cnn, until recently they had glenn beck, and they still have lou dobbs. it is hard to make the case that cnn is liberal, and in fact they have a bias towards conservatives that is documented in the book by eric alterman. anyway, my point is, conservatism is basically an extension of fundamentalist religion, and arguing with a conservative is not really a political argument but a theological dispute, even if you do not even believe in their religion, because to them it is a theological dispute. it is pretty much a form of mental illness, one that is contagious, and one for which there is no known cure. most people who suffer from conservatism will have it for the rest of their lives. i hope that someday we can find a cure for this dreadful form of mental illness. the once great republican party, whose first president, the great liberal abraham lincoln, freed the slaves, has over about 150 years steadily gotten more and more conservative, and is now worse and more malignant than ever before, when the republican party was originally a source for good in our country. it is quite a sad tale how conservatives came to dominate the republicans, and when all the dixiecrats left the democratic party to become republicans, along with “reagam democrats”, the republicans successfully peeled away almost all the conservative democratic voters, and later most of the liberals who had voted republican in the past (such as for nixon or reagan) switched to voting for democrats like bill clinton. every 4 years, each presidential election seems to have the ideological split between the 2 parties become more rigid than ever, and there are always a number of former members of one party who “see the light” and switch parties, changing all their beliefs too. this gradual process has purified the essence of the democratic and republican parties so that both parties are now dominated by bases of voters whose views do not agree with the views of the majority of the public. the republican party, however, is much more strongly dominated by its conservative base than the democratic party is dominated by its liberal base. the democrats do not really have to do much to appease us liberals, and they can often govern as centrists and get away with it. republicans, on the other hand, have to be staunch conservatives, or else they will find ultra-conservatives running against them in primary elections the next time they are up for re-election, and they will be replaced by ultra-conservative radicals. this is why republicans in congress are so staunchly conservative and in lockstep with fox news and right-wing talk radio on everything. they have eliminated dissent from within the ranks of their party, and they have proven that they do not really have any governing philosophy other than victory at all costs and trying to pander to the base as much as possible without alienating moderates. they seem just like a fanatical cult of brainwashed zombies, except they have no leader, which has thrown them into chaos recently. at least they can agree on one thing: opposing liberalism and democrats, and trying to obstruct everything that liberal democrats try to do. perhaps i should feel sorry for them, but i cannot feel sorry for such intolerant, hateful people who think everyone who had different beliefs from them will end up in hell for all eternity, yet who do not even care about the genocide in darfur. i don’t think they would want my pity either, but that is all the more reason to give it to them: because it would piss them off, and they deserve it, after giving us 8 years of hell under george w. bush. conservatives make the most absurd arguments, like back before obama was even elected, back in october, some of them were already blaming the economic recession on obama, claiming that the stock market went down in anticipation of obama winning the election, and that businesses were already laying off workers and cutting production in anticipation of a future obama win and future tax increases on them. to prove this point, these republican commenters claimed to own businesses themselves and be laying off workers and cutting production in anticipation of a future obama win that they thought would mean higher taxes on small business. this proves the depths to which the republicans have fallen. they have seemingly hit rock bottom, so perhaps the only direction they can go from here is up. and that is what frightens me. that is not to say that i am not also frightened by what is going on in our country, right now, even with my fellow democrats in charge. these bailouts are quite disturbing, and i also have a lot of problems with other aspects of the economic policy, such as the large deficits, even though i know that large deficits are supposedly a necessary evil when you have a recession, according to most mainstream economists. having taken 4 semesters of economics in college, i do not consider economics to be an actual science. it is a “social science”, or in more realistic terms, economics is a form of applied mathematics used to advance ideological points of view by making dishonest oversimplifications and assumptions about reality in order to lie by using statistics. even economists who want to tell the truth and think they are telling the truth cannot really do so, in my opinion, because the field of economics itself is fatally flawed. we saw evidence of how it is fatally flawed with alan greenspan’s reaction to the current recession: he was completely shocked and had not predicted it at all. billionaire hedge fund manager george soros, who also happens to be the biggest donor to the democrats, did predict it, and made a lot of money because his predictions turned out to be true, and <a href="http://www.georgesoros.com/crisis-and-what-to-do110608">you can read his theories about it here</a>. you should take it with a grain of salt, though: he might just be trying to advance policies that would benefit his hedge fund, although i think that is unlikely and he seems sincere. the other reason to take it with a grain of salt is that economics is basically bullshit, even when it makes a correct prediction. it is like trying to predict the weather. we have theories to explain the weather and scientific models, but we still cannot predict weather, and disasters like hurricane katrina can catch us unprepared. economics is far less of a science than meteorology, since economics has become part of politics, economists are divided ideologically, and the scientific method is not the basis for this so-called “science”. it is impossible to do a controlled experiment in economics, and controlled experiments are necessary for doing real science. so in the absence of facts, opinions prevail, to the detriment of everyone, since everyone is part of the economy and everyone suffers because of failures in the economy. there is really no way economics could ever be fixed, other than simply having several hundred more years of human history in advanced technological societies during which economic data is monitored and kept for future generations to study. in each generation, conservatives argue in favor of the world being like what liberals in the previous generation argued in favor of. that is human progress. and liberals never want to go back to the old ways. we always want to achieve greater things than have ever been achieved before, rather than going back to the dark ages, the 1800s, the 1950s, or any other time in the past. the fundamental basis for conservatism is being stuck in the past and wanting to keep everyone else stuck back in the past with you. i suppose it is natural for people to be afraid of change and want to stick with the old ways of doing things that they are comfortable with, so there will always be plenty of conservatives, regardless of how irrational conservatism is. i know the failures of conservatism much better than most people, because in my personal life i am afraid of change and i stick with the old ways of doing things that i have always done before, and i have found that this does not lead to any progress in life, yet i am unable to summon the courage to change things in my life. this is the problem with conservatism, except instead of feeling that way over their personal lives, people feel that way over government policy. and i know firsthand that it just won’t work, period. like they say, doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, and that is why conservatives are insane. of course, that is not the dictionary definition of insanity, so if you want to be picky about it, conservatives are not necessarily insane any more than anybody else would be insane, but that is only if you are obsessed with going by the dictionary definitions of things, which means you are obsessive and therefore insane. as i have shown by my earlier obsessive use of dictionary definitions in this post, i am likewise insane, so you should take everything i say with a grain of salt. therefore, conservatism is 100% true. just kidding, belated april fool’s joke. being obsessive is not a form of insanity either, technically. it is a natural personality variation, just like being right-wing or being stupid.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-38743604522938287652009-03-27T07:49:00.003-04:002009-03-27T10:31:10.242-04:00demonizing autisticsmy <a href="http://numinousubiquity.blogspot.com/2009/03/interesting-lifestyle-choice.html">last post</a> was about a very strange woman who has autism. today, i bring you a different case of autism, one far more sinister. the son of salon.com regular contributor ann bauer has autism, and while she has written several articles about other subjects, about half of her articles for salon.com have been about her autistic son, whose name is andrew. <a href="http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/03/26/bauer_autism/">her latest article</a> is where to start, describing how he has turned into a violent “monster”. it is the fifth article about her autistic son andrew. here are the previous articles (read them after the fifth one if you are actually interested, but the fifth-one is the only must-read out of them all): <a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/07/19/fargo/index.html">first</a>, <a href="http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/05/18/autism_misdiagnosis/index.html">second</a>, <a href="http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/06/19/electroshock/index.html">third</a>, and <a href="http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/03/22/ann_bauer/index.html">fourth</a>. now i found her latest article to be incredibly shocking and disturbing, as i have asperger’s syndrome myself, and asperger’s syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder and is often thought to be the same as high-functioning autism. she even says that her son has high-functioning autism. then i started reading all of the many, many <a href="http://letters.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/03/26/bauer_autism/view/?show=all">responses to her latest post</a>, and some of them made me feel even more upset. ann bauer is blaming her son’s autism for him being violent, but plenty of men (and women too) who do not have any autism whatsoever are also violent. most people with autism spectrum disorders, such as me for instance, are not violent. while her latest article is quite personal and i am sure accurate (ann bauer even admits that she has been stockpiling lots of sleeping pills and planning on committing suicide if her son ever kills anyone), i think that it sends a dangerous and misleading message about autism spectrum disorders (which are sometimes also called pervasive developmental disorders, a less explanatory name). the most dangerous form of mental illness is, in case you didn’t know, antisocial personality disorder. anyone who has antisocial personality disorder is pretty much guaranteed to be a criminal, and very likely a violent one, since people with it have no morals, do not care about anyone except themselves, refuse to follow any authority or rules, and are impulsive, often in violent ways. as for my asperger’s syndrome, i think my case of asperger’s is quite mild, and mostly it is just social anxiety disorder (that later worsened into panic disorder when i started having panic attacks in college), combined with avoidant personality disorder. i am not 100% sure whether i actually have or don’t have asperger’s syndrome or avoidant personality disorder, but what i can be 100% sure of is that i have panic disorder, since i sure as hell have had some nasty panic attacks. panic attacks are caused by the “fight or flight response”, which, in the case of panic, is the flight response (wanting to escape from a scary situation). sudden violent outbursts are the other side of the “fight or flight response” coin: they are the fight response. my brain seems to be hardwired for anxiety, not fighting, when i find myself upset. so perhaps the violence of this autistic man andrew can be explained as a fight response. or maybe he is intentionally malicious. it is difficult for me to speculate about what may go on in the mind of someone with more severe autism than the incredibly mild version that i probably have. i am so much more like normal people who don’t have any form of autism whatsoever than i am like people with severe autism. still, i feel badly for them, and the ones that behave badly give the rest of us who are on the autism spectrum a bad name. i do not understand them at all, but that is a problem for all of us on the autism spectrum: we do not understand other people. the mother of andrew, ann bauer, seems to have a bit of mental illness of her own; in fact, i can say it as a factual matter that she suffers from mental illness, because she is suicidal and that is by definition mental illness. perhaps her mental illness is simply plain old depression, or depression mixed with anxiety (i have anxiety too, like i said). in any event, somebody who has no mental illness cannot be suicidal, because of the way mental illnesses are all defined and because psychologists and psychiatrists pretty much all agree that being suicidal indicates mental illness. anyway, depression and anxiety are mood disorders, and are not actual insanity. insanity, or, as it is now called in the psychological and psychiatric professions, psychosis, involves a person being disconnected from reality, and the most common type of psychosis is schizophrenia. autism spectrum disorders, personality disorders, and mood disorders are all outside the realm of insanity and psychosis. people who have them are still sane; they observe the real world, they can think logically unless they are too retarded to do so, and they are not lunatics. autism is a rather curious condition then, and it is primarily social retardation along with a few quirky eccentricities. i suppose that andrew, if he is autistic and does not have any psychosis, is most likely someone who is just frustrated with his life and the way things have turned out, who hates himself, who cannot understand other people, and is just very very upset. what people without autism spectrum disorders often fail to understand is that people who have autism spectrum disorders are mostly people that want to be social creatures just as much as everyone else, if not more so, but they find themselves unable to be social, and instead they fail utterly in this regard. throughout my lifetime so far, my experiences have been exactly that: wanting to be just as social as others, if not more so, but finding my own social abilities and my social courage to both be severely lacking, to the point where i have had very little success socially. i also understand why andrew would be upset: as a young person who his loving mother kept insisting was intelligent and had a bright future ahead of him, he most likely had set up very high expectations for himself, and when he ended up in living conditions where he no longer had any freedom, he probably became quite upset. however, i also think andrew may have antisocial personality disorder, as evidenced by his criminal activity (such as eating at restaurants and not paying, or assaulting women). he may very well have developed antisocial personality disorder “comorbid” with his autism, meaning that he has both conditions at the same time. when you read the articles by his mother (including the other articles on salon.com by her that are not about her son), it also becomes clear that she led a very chaotic life, including a rather chaotic divorce with her first husband, and then a messy series of relationships and periods of being single, ultimately resulting with a second marriage that seems to be going well so far. the mother seems quite obsessed with her autistic son and helping him out, and while it is natural for mothers to want to help and protect their offspring, it is perhaps advisable to remember that there can be too much of a good thing. while, as i mentioned earlier, we who have autism spectrum disorders often want to be social, we also often want to be left alone, just like regular people often want people who are bothering them to leave them alone. autistic people are not especially different from normal people except for things like the lack of communication skills. of course, severe cases of autism are often comorbid with mental retardation, and i think the reason for this is that the learning process, wherein one person teaches new information to somebody else, is in some ways a social interaction, and someone severely disabled socially as well as with communication may be unable to learn things from other people. in this case, such a person would need to learn everything on their own, and they may not be lucky enough to possess a keen enough intellect to figure things out without the aid of others, the end result of this being retardation. or perhaps in the severe cases, the mental retardation exists from the beginning. anyway, if you look at the comments for the article, you will run across a number of people who have worked in jobs where they had to interact with people with autism on a daily basis, and both people who dealt with autistic children as well as those who dealt with autistic adults said that some of them could be quite violent. so a great deal of people are actually coming forth with firsthand accounts of how they witnessed violence carried out by people on the autism spectrum. a lot of people talk about people with autism as if they are animals or just things, and some of them recommend castration as a solution! we are being objectified and treated as subhuman, as animals, by some of the people who commented on this article. i certainly do not have full-blown autism, but these are human beings we are talking about here! men with autism care just as much about their balls as any other men, and sure as hell don’t want a bunch of assholes castrating them. castration used to be done to the mentally ill, but luckily that horrific practice was stopped. if you take away a man’s testes, his manhood, you may as well just take away his life and kill him... and in fact some of the people commented that the most humane solution might be to euthanize people with autism. other people commented that there should be some kind of eugenics to prevent anyone with autism from being born in the first place, as if autism is some kind of horrible disease that needs to be eradicated, and not just a natural personality type that many people happen to have. it was very chilling reading people’s reactions to it, how so many people dehumanized not only andrew but everyone with autism, and how they seem so ready to deny the basic human rights that we hold so dear to people with autism spectrum disorders just because a small percentage of autistic people end up violent (probably around the same percentage of non-autistic people who end up violent). it makes me think of how the jews were discriminated against by the nazis, and i know that whenever anyone brings up hitler and the holocaust, this is supposed to indicate that they have taken the argument to an absurd level and therefore lost the argument. i am not saying this is anything like the holocaust whatsoever, just that it made me think of the holocaust, and it made me frightened for my own safety, as someone with an autism spectrum disorder. of course, no action anywhere near that bad has been taken against us on the autistic spectrum so far by angry mobs with pitchforks and torches, and if i think about it realistically, i sincerely doubt that anything like that ever would happen. but just reading what some people write about people with autism frightens me. then again, i am frightened easily, since after all, i do have panic disorder, the one disorder i can be completely sure that i have, because my numerous severe panic attacks over the last 9 years are proof beyond any reasonable doubt. it is pretty obvious that i am overreacting to this article by ann bauer about her son and the comments posted on salon.com about it. i feel badly for both her and her son, as well as everyone else who has been involved in any way (anyone her son did bad things to, for instance). in the case of her son, it is clear that andrew is a menace to society and cannot be allowed to roam free or to ever have the chance to physically attack someone who is weaker than him. i hope he can be rehabilitated somehow so that he is no longer dangerous, but otherwise, he ought to remain behind bars, in a mental institution preferably, or else in jail. being autistic is no excuse for his behavior, and even if it is a valid excuse, that does not mean society should just let andrew continue attacking people. however, he is just one person and every person is different. we should not generalize about everyone with autism just because he is a violent criminal. the virginia tech killer was asian, in fact south korean; however, we have not seen asians or south koreans demonized as a bunch of crazy killers... i mean, we actually have seen that, but it did not last very long, and it was just a few people on the internet anyway. i suppose there are groups of people that continue to have an image problem when it comes to violence. men, for instance. black people. arabs. muslims. all have been stereotyped as violent. however, if you look at the statistics, men really are more likely to be violent than women, and african-americans are more likely to be violent than european-americans (i am using that to refer to white people since, after all, we white people are of european ancestry and are not native to america like native americans; also i am hyphenating both with americans to indicate that i am only referring to people in the united states, since i am going by those statistics). i need not go into the various debates over why violent crime is more commonly carried out by african-americans than european-americans, because those debates are unrelated to the subject of this blog post, so suffice it to say that i think the primary reason is economic inequality. as for the level of violence carried out by arabs or muslims, the overall number of people killed or percentage of people who are violent or kill people is not something i know the statistics for, but certain types of violence, like major terrorist attacks, are almost exclusively done by muslims, usually muslims of arab ancestry. this does not mean that muslims are more violent, since after all, non-muslims have plenty of ways to kill people, such as using military force. anyway, that is not the main topic either, and i was just trying to point out that sometimes people with autism spectrum disorders are demonized, and that is not cool with me at all. that type of discrimination is like racism, sexism, homophobia, age discrimination, or any other type of evil bias against those who are different from you. many of history’s greatest geniuses are thought to have had asperger’s syndrome, the milder autism spectrum disorder that i have. this includes people like isaac newton and albert einstein, among the many great names. among people alive today, we have stephen spielberg, bill gates, and al gore, just to name a few. and ok, i have to mention <a href="http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Asperger%27s_syndrome">the encyclopedia dramatica entry on asperger’s</a>. everything on encyclopedia dramatica is meant to be as insulting, negative, and offensive as possible, regardless of who or what it is about. the first time i read that article, maybe 3 years ago or so, i was very very upset, and the article was actually quite different then but just as offensive and insulting, mainly just with less pictures and videos, and not as long. i did not quite understand the purpose of encyclopedia dramatica or what encyclopedia dramatica was all about. now that i have read a whole lot of articles on encyclopedia dramatica, and enjoyed most of them, even learning a lot from them, i know that the article at encyclopedia dramatica is all in good fun and they insult everybody, and i just need to have a sense of humor and not take it too seriously, because encyclopedia dramatica is a fake encyclopedia full of offensive humor designed to produce “lulz” such as my initial reaction to the article about asperger’s. lulz are basically laughing at someone else’s misfortune, <a href="http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Lulz">as encyclopedia dramatica explains quite clearly</a>. since the entire purpose of encyclopedia dramatica is lulz, it makes no sense for anyone to take anything on that site seriously, and it is good for everyone, especially those of us on the autism spectrum, to have some sense of perspective and a sense of humor, and not take things personally when they are just jokes. the article on salon.com and its responses, however, are not jokes or lulz, and are what the humorists at encyclopedia dramatica refer to as <a href="http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/The_Internet_is_serious_business">serious business</a>. so when someone is serious about demonizing autistics and denying basic human rights to fellow human beings, when people talk about castration, euthanasia, and eugenics, and talk about people who are different from them as if they are subhuman animals, that is when i have a serious problem with them. it would be bad enough reading comments like that on some wacko conservative website, but salon.com is a haven for liberals, and it appalls me to think that my fellow liberals would have such discriminatory and intolerant attitudes towards autistics. salon.com does allow people of all political persuasions to comment, however, and it does have its fair share of libertarians, republicans, independents, and other non-democrats among people who comment, although they are very much in the minority. more than half the comments were ones expressing sympathy, which is good, and some of the comments were ongoing arguments between various commenters there who hate each other and argue all the time. there was some foolish bickering between a wacko who hates psychiatrists (but is not a scientologist) and people who actually are psychiatrists... he seemed like one of the libertarian ron paul supporters. anyway, amid all of those comments were the ones that i personally found disturbing, the ones that threatened bad things for people with autism. i would have left a comment myself, except i do not have an account at salon.com or any of these other websites where i look at the comments. it is too much of a bother to register at all these stupid websites, just to post comments. so i don’t do it. i only register at a website if i have a good reason to do so, and if there is not a way around it. so anyway, i doubt any of the people from salon.com will find my response here, but at least people who read this blog entry can find what i am responding to, since i linked to it at the beginning of the entry. i am not sure if anyone will read this or even care, but frankly that does not really matter to me anyway. i just felt like saying all this, and i don’t too much care whether this blog is a private journal that nobody reads or a really popular blog that everybody reads. my preference, if there is one, is that a few people read this blog, more than 1 or 2, but not like thousands or anything, because that would probably be too much. anyway, i think i made my point in this post and i am getting kind of lengthy and repetitious so i should quit while i’m behind. also, i need to sleep. now. good night, or whatever time it is now, wherever you are. you are probably on earth, but who cares? it would be cool if an astronaut looked at this blog from the international space station, i guess, but whatever. i am not sure whether astronauts have the internet up there, but who cares? that is just something completely irrelevant that i just brought up at the last moment because i am tired and my mind is wandering, and it has nothing to do with anything. my thought process is non-linear. in keeping with my thought process, let me briefly pretend time is going backwards, for the sake of silliness: hello and welcome to this blog post.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-22175880100402076722009-03-22T05:58:00.007-04:002009-03-22T08:43:33.189-04:00an interesting lifestyle choicemost people’s lifestyle choices are fairly boring. there are a few different choices people make about how to live their lives nowadays but basically most people operate in the same way as a large percentage of other people. for instance, some people graduate high school and others are dropouts. some people decide to go to college and others don’t. some college students get all the way through to a diploma and others drop out or fail out. some people party a lot and others are at home most of the time. some people have jobs and other people live off of welfare, either from the government, from charities, or family/friends. some people are sexually active and others aren’t. some people are straight and others are gay. some people are into sports, some people are into video games, some people watch a lot of television, and some people spend a lot of time on the internet. people like or dislike different kinds of foods but we generally agree on what things are considered food and what is not considered food (e.g. broccoli is food and plastic is not food). most people are fluent in at least 1 language that is spoken by their fellow humans. all in all, there are many possible combinations, but the array of choices people have for lifestyles nowadays is not terribly vast. of course, the above comparisons of lifestyle choices are typical ones you find in the united states, and in many other countries the array of choices would be very different, quite often even narrower.<br /><br />however, there are a few strange individuals out there who boldly live lives so utterly bizarre, they are truly unique. one such example is a woman who calls herself faye kane. i read <a href="http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/2586936.aspx?ArticleID=2214233">a comment by her at slate.com</a> about <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2214233/">a slate.com article i read</a>. both the article and faye’s comment condemned republican hypocrisy, and i agree with both the article and her comment on it. but at the bottom of her comment i noticed her “signature” (something that is automatically added by people to their web postings on certain websites):<br /><br /><quote><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">I'm an autistic savant. I live naked in the woods because I'm disgusted with grotesquely-misnamed "humanity". I steal electricity to run my wireless internet. Yes, really. Read more of my smartmouth opinions at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/fayescave">http://tinyurl.com/fayescave</a></span><br /></quote><br /><br />as someone with asperger’s (the same as autism only milder, and probably what she actually has), i know firsthand that people on the autistic spectrum (myself included) tend to be weirdos. but let’s just get a few facts about faye kane out of the way first: she is an intelligent person on the autistic spectrum, which probably means she has asperger’s syndrome instead of leo kanner’s classical type of full-blown autism. she lives in a cave in the forest (or rather, a tent covered in branches and leaves to hide it). she proudly proclaims that she is hot, that she is naked all the time, and that she spends most of the time masturbating. she mostly avoids interacting with other humans in real life, but she has managed to steal electricity from the electric company and hook up her cave with power, where she has a computer with broadband internet access. she forages for garbage in dumpsters and then sells it on ebay. basically, she is a very strange individual who is, at least as far as traditional society is concerned, an insane pervert and a criminal. however, i don’t really think there is much of anything wrong with what she is doing, and i find it fascinating that a homeless person like her would be so advanced. now, if you want to know why she ended up living such a bizarre lifestyle, <a href="http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.viewcustom&friendId=150103974&blogId=249278419&swapped=true">read this</a>. that is her explanation, at least. apparently she had a series of jobs where despite her superior intelligence and technical aptitude, her bosses kept getting into disagreements with her and she kept getting fired. she ended up pretty much completely disillusioned with humanity, apparently. of course, it is easy for someone on the autism spectrum to become disillusioned with the rest of humanity, and it comes quite naturally to us. but usually we do not resort to such strange and fascinating lifestyle choices. there are those who think that <a href="http://www.rdos.net/copies/as-intelligence.htm">asperger’s is just a way to classify intelligence as a disease</a>. some companies <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006/nov/18/careers.work6">actually go out of their way to hire people with asperger’s</a> in the belief that people with asperger’s are smart, hard working, and the perfect kind of people to hire, despite the lack of social skills and inability of people with asperger’s to “sell themselves” at job interviews. and of course, here is <a href="http://www.cwru.edu/affil/sce/Texts_2005/Autism%20and%20Representation%20Bombaci.htm">a postmodern feminist critique of asperger’s symdrome</a>, which is rather interesting. anyway, if you doubt whether faye kane really lives like she claims to, <a href="http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.viewcustom&friendId=150103974&blogId=247181020&swapped=true">this is her rebuttal to all the doubters</a>. personally i believe her story to be true, in part because people with autism or asperger’s generally do not lie, but more importantly because this story is too weird to be made up, there is photographic evidence, there are other people online who have actually been to her cave, her story does not violate science or logic, her story is just so awesome i want it to be true even if it is totally made up, and i do not care whether it actually is true or not since it does not impact me in the slightest. so anyway... if you thought i was strange, there are MUCH weirder people out there. and i find them interesting. don’t worry though, readers... i do not want to be like the ultra-weird... i am trying to “cure” myself of negative aspects of asperger’s to become more normal. but when it comes to stuff like faye kane, i just want <a href="http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Moar">MOAR</a> <a href="http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Lulz">LULZ</a>!!!<br /><br />update: i just found out <a href="http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.viewcustom&friendId=150103974&blogId=478005030&swapped=true">she is a subgenius</a> after looking through her newer blog entries. the subgenius advertisement she includes in that post has only had 36,390 views according to youtube, so the odds of a random person on the internet being one of the people who actually saw that subgenius video are incredibly low. however, rev. stang has described the church of the subgenius as “kook flypaper”, and it does seem to attract the weirdest elements of humanity. ok, so i have no evidence that she has actually joined the church of the subgenius, but clearly she has found out about us, and in a more recent post she derisively spake of the “normals”, so she is already adopting subgenius terminology. i doubt she would join the church of the subgenius, since she has been living homeless and unemployed in a secret forest hideout for years now, so she would have a hard time coming up with the $30 one-time-only membership fee, and would have no mailing address for her super-awesome membership packet to be sent to. so, she is one of the many non-subgenius subgenii, people who know about the church of the subgenius and agree with it but have not sent in the membership fee to become ordained subgenius reverends. i do not really consider this to be much of a coincidence, despite the seemingly low probability, because “bob” is everywhere, and the weirder someone is, the more likely they are to find out about him and become a follower of his. in her case, it is especially likely, since she is alone all the time in her “cave” in the forest and has a computer with broadband internet, and she has the same deviant tendencies as most other subgenii. i must point out, however, that there are many famous people who are members of the church of the subgenius, such as the actor who played pee wee herman, the actor who played dolemite, all the members of the band sublime, penn jillette from penn & teller, the lead singer of 80s band devo, george clinton (of parliament funkadelic fame), and timothy leary, for starters, and here is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_SubGenii">wikipedia’s list</a>. for some reason wikipedia only has a list of american subgenii and a list of british subgenii, and the 2 british ones are people i never heard of, so i just linked to the american list since it is much much longer. anyway, this odd coincidence is not so odd when you remember 2 important facts: 1) people on the autism spectrum are weirdos. 2) subgenii are weirdos. so, the set of people who are weirdos has two subsets of its own, people on the autistic spectrum and subgenii, and those two subsets intersect each other, as i could easily depict in a venn diagram if i felt like it. i happen to belong to the intersection of those 2 subsets, and apparently this faye kane lady is also in that intersection. luckily though, i have a place to live and a job, and i have absolutely no intention of ending up like her, with neither. <a href="http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Some_argue">some argue</a> that high-functioning autism is the exact same thing as asperger’s, and i agree completely. therefore, given the fact that she is intelligent and on the autistic spectrum, she has aspeger’s. unfortunately, this disproves the popular theory that only males have aspeger’s, a theory held by many people, including me, because i have only met guys who have asperger’s, and never encountered a female with it. another counterexample to the only-guys-have-asperger’s theory is temple grandin, inventor of the <a href="http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Hugbox">hugbox</a>. however, george orwell developed a new type of logic in 1984. war is peace! freedom is slavery! ignorance is power! under orwellian logic, because females with asperger’s exist, females with asperger’s do not exist. therefore, i have disproven the existence of faye kane. <a href="http://www.geocities.com/tautologysociety/proof.htm">q.e.d. signed, brilliant mathematician</a>General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-20874032786689556152009-02-28T16:11:00.002-05:002009-02-28T19:40:24.786-05:00fluffems (???? - 2009)well, my (and my parents’) dog fluffems was killed today, february 28, 2009, around 12:15 pm, run over by a pickup truck on upper front street. my parents were trying to catch him, my dad chasing him and my mom in a car. my mom had also placed a trail of pieces of cheese leading to the front door and another one on the back porch to lead him to the back door. he had been loose for over an hour, in weather of about 25 degrees fahrenheit, and his fur was rather thin, yet i doubt he got cold at all since he was running too fast for anyone to keep up with. i was actually asleep at the time. maybe i could have saved him this time, but he would have eventually gotten run over. he was not afraid of anything, not lightning, fireworks, sewer grates, or cars; our previous dog mokka was afraid of all those things. whenever he ran away he liked to go towards front street and if he got there he would sometimes cross it multiple times, and it is a huge road full of cars. of course we tried to stop him every time he tried to go in that direction, but he was faster than any of us and didn’t want to be caught. to him, running away and having people chase him was a game. he was the nicest, friendliest, most loving, most harmless, most energetic, most spirited, and most vicious beast i have ever encountered. as far as i know, the only commands we ever managed to teach him were “sit” and “lie down”, and he never came when called. he understood it when someone called him, but he thought of it as a friendly invitation that was completely optional, not as a command that he had to follow. i loved fluffems more than anything, just as i loved my previous dog mokka more than anything. i do not really know what to make of this. i suppose i should just move on with my life or something. fluffems was adopted from the local dog pound after his previous owner abandoned him, leaving him in a crate by the side of the road in downtown binghamton. he always hated being inside crates or cages. i remember last night i had an argument with my mom about whether to lock him in a crate all night like she wanted, or let him roam around free downstairs like i wanted. i always wanted fluffems to be happy, since he was my best friend in the world. i think we got him from the dog pound in april 2007, so we had him less than 2 years. he was estimated as being about a year old when we got him, or maybe it was a year and a half. i don’t know. from the time we got him to when he was killed, he did not grow at all but his weight went up from 12 to 13 pounds. he was either a west highland terrier or some kind of mutt, but we have no idea since there are no pedigree documents. fluffems is what we named him after we got him; he must have had a different name before. he was neutered at the dog pound before we bought him, but there is a minor chance that he actually fathered some puppies before his original owner abandoned him. i doubt it though, since he was pretty much still a puppy himself. so his year of birth was probably 2006 if the estimates of the people at the dog pound are correct, but who knows? he certainly never got old at all. all my clothes are still covered in dog hair since he shed fur all the time, and the couch in the living room is completely covered. he tore so many dog toys to pieces using his fangs and powerful jaws. he even bit me a few times, but never very hard. he liked to cuddle, and liked sleeping next to a person instead of all alone. we took him with us on a trip to florida from late december to early january. he did not enjoy the plane rides or airports, but everyone who saw him loved him and said what a nice cute dog he was. he had a very good time in florida, and we even took him to the beach, despite the hefty fine we would have had to pay if we were caught with a dog in that no-dogs-allowed zone. he did not like cold weather, but enjoyed the summers a great deal, which makes sense given that he had white fur that reflects light instead of absorbing it, and that he had rather little fur. if you got him wet you could see right through the fur, and underneath his skin was half splotches of pink and half splotches of black. he would also smell bad if you got him wet. he did not enjoy baths, so he had very few of those, and he never needed a haircut. my mom trimmed all his claws a few days ago, which she did on a regular basis, and he was quite cooperative and uncomplaining. one thing he liked to do was look out the window and wait for someone to come by, and then start barking at them viciously. he never killed anything though. i remember he was actually afraid of little frogs and little lizards when i showed them to him (after i caught them with my bare hands). so then i would set the little wild animals free. those tiny creatures were the only things he was afraid of... besides baths and the veterinarian. he was very dominant with other dogs and always wanted to be boss, and he was certainly trying to be quite dominant here in our household. i wish i had been able to save him today, but it is too late for that. he was going to get run over by a vehicle on front street someday anyway, since he had tried to do that before a number of times. he thought it was all a big fun game and did not realize he was in any danger. luckily my dad is the only member of our family to see him get killed or to see him dead, and he is going to be cremated at the veterinarian. this is a very sad day, but also a joyous day because fluffems was always so full of joy, and just thinking about that wonderful dog fills me with joy, even if he is no longer with us. i can scarcely imagine him being anything other than just the happiest creature on the planet, since that was what he was like almost all the time. in fact, i bet in the last few minutes and even seconds of his life, he was happier than ever, since he had absolutely no idea he was in any danger, and was fully enjoying the “game” of playing in traffic. the pickup truck killed him pretty much instantly. so unlike my previous dog mokka, who was dying over the course of months and had a very miserable final day of her life full of screaming out in pain and agony for hours on end, fluffems died very happily, completely oblivious to any danger, enjoying things thoroughly. back in january he did have an ear infection for awhile, and i had him taken to the vet and treated until it was cured, but it did not really slow him down too much or prevent him from having fun. the last time i saw him was last night, after i finally agreed to lock him in his cage, and went down to find he was already in there, asleep. i closed the cage door on him and locked it, secure in the knowledge that i would be able to play with him and we would have fun together the next day. if i had had any doubts about that, i would have played with the dog all night. i still cannot believe he is gone. i gave him the name fluffems, a silly name, since he was a silly animal. i was always very nice to him, and perhaps he was my master, since he managed to get me to always argue for him to have more freedom and not be caged (his last owner abandoned him by the side of the road in a cage, and he was stuck in there for many hours, and he never liked cages one bit), and i generally gave the dog whatever he wanted. how could i resist doing that though? fluffems gave me way more positive attention than anyone else, even my previous dog mokka, who sometimes ignored me or tried to avoid me in her later years, and was not as affectionate or outgoing as him. i think today i should just look back at what a wonderful creature fluffems had and what a wonderful life he had. his life may have been short when it comes to time, but it was full of fun times and enjoyment. i remember when i heard the obamas needed a dog, i thought fluffems would be the perfect dog for them or for anyone else, and that if they really wanted him, than despite how much i love my little doggie, i would let them have fluffems, since they could probably provide a better life for him than me. then, awhile later, i realized i liked fluffems more than the obamas or anyone else, and fluffems liked me more than any other person or animal, and the obamas could probably find a dog more suited to their hypo-allergenic and other silly demands. but i doubt they could ever find a dog as great as fluffems. sure, his fatal flaw of not knowing of the existence of danger may have been a problem, but nobody is perfect, and dogs are generally not that smart. he was quite smart about many other things, just not knowing about danger. quite smart for a dog, not for a person. he, like mokka, was a master of escape. the only difference is, mokka eventually came back, mokka did not run too fast to be caught, mokka was much more obedient and knew more than 10 times as many commands, and mokka was afraid of many dangerous things. i am sure fluffems’ lack of knowledge in commands was chiefly the result of his independent spirit and refusal to obey any master other than himself, not of any lack in intelligence or hearing abilities. i suppose another thing mokka was better at than fluffems was catching things. if you threw something at mokka’s head, she would catch it in her mouth. if you threw something at fluffems’s head, it would hit him in the head, bounce off, land on the floor, and then get sniffed by him. and fluffems was much less thorough at licking up food spilled on the floor than mokka. mokka was more lethargic and more willing to concentrate on one thing for a period of time than the short-attention-span hyperactive maniac fluffems. fluffems was almost untrainable, but perhaps our family was just not that good at training him. i don’t think he wanted to be trained though, since he would never cooperate. my parents took a course with fluffems on how to train a dog, and i expected them to actually do what was taught in the course, but for some reason they wanted me to train him instead, even though i had no idea how to train a dog and they were the ones who took the course. so he did not get trained much by anyone. he even peed and pooped inside on a regular basis. he did it just last night, less than 24 hours before he died... and he was in perfect health. i don’t know if anyone could have trained a beast like fluffems... probably an expert could have, but it would cost too much to pay some expert to train our dog for us. i guess that is what the dog training course was for, since it was taught by one of those experts. anyway, i suppose now i will spend the time i would have spent playing with fluffems playing video games instead. i remember it was probably about a year ago or something when i ran over a bunny rabbit on front street, right about the same place where fluffems was run over. but it was raining and night-time when i ran over the bunny rabbit. fluffems was run over in broad daylight when the sun was out, and apparently the road was not icy or slippery at all today, and his white fur would have made him stand out against the black road. i guess he just moved too fast, and probably got in front of the pickup truck right before it ran over him. the truck driver stopped and apologized to my dad, and a police car came, and my dad said that none of it was the driver’s fault, and then the police car drove my dad down to the veterinarian, where my dad dropped fluffems off to be cremated. i don’t know when we are supposed to pick up our cremated dog from the veterinarian. we will never really know what breed fluffems was, or when he was born, or who his previous owner was. that is why i was always so intent on being as nice as possible to my dog and bonding with him as much as possible, so that he would be my dog and forget about any previous owner he may have had. i wonder what happened to his previous owner or why he was abandoned. back in late december and early january, fluffems made friends with a dog in florida named kutyush, hungarian for “doggie”. i hope his little fluffy friend in florida remembers him. he also met my niece erica once... i doubt erica will remember that. it was a million times sadder when my previous dog mokka died, mostly because mokka had suffered so much throughout the whole ordeal of dying, and had spent hours crying out in pain. i am glad that fluffems did not have to suffer at all, because nothing upset me more than seeing fluffems suffer. fluffems was my best friend for the less than 2 years that i had him, but i suppose we both have to move on... he is being cremated and i am still alive. what do you think it is like to be cremated if you are a dead dog? do you think dogs have some sort of spirit to them, and if so, what happens to the spirit after the dog dies? personally i just believe fluffems is dead and his spirit has been snuffed out for good, but i would prefer things if they did not work that way. i still cannot believe it. fluffems meant the world to me, and i would do anything to save him, but unfortunately it is too late. all i am left with is my human family and maybe a few human friends... i suppose we humans may be better adapted for survival than cute little doggies. it makes me wonder why i eat meat, when meat is made of animals that were killed for the express purpose of me eating them. i don’t know though... i like eating meat, and my doggie fluffems loved eating meat too, and so did my previous dog mokka. it is hard to imagine the animals i eat in meat having the personality and spirit of someone like fluffems. i know people for the ethical treatment of animals recently tried to rename fish to be called “sea kittens”, but that won’t work on me, since i don’t like cats, and kittens are cats. i am allergic to cats, and cats are evil creatures that act like they are your friends until they suddenly attack you without warning. a dog would never do something like that, because dogs are loyal, honorable creatures that actually care about people, unlike selfish cats who care about nobody but themselves. i don’t even think cats are really domesticated animals; they can live with humans and are not as afraid of humans as most animals, but they are still fairly wild, much more like wild animals than the extremely domesticated species known as dogs. it is hard to imagine dogs being descended from wolves and so closely related to wolves that they can interbreed with them and have half-dog, half-wolf puppies that are also capable of reproduction when they grow up. then again, fluffems did have a bit of a wild viciousness to him, but it was mostly just in a playful way. i have read that dogs are mentally like wolves except they stay in the mental stage of being a puppy for their entire lives, and dogs never become mentally mature. anyway, i hope fluffems comes back to life somehow so i can play with my doggie again. sure, it won’t happen, but hoping for something does not mean there is any likelihood of it happening, now does it? i am somewhat surprised that i have not gone into a panic attack over my dog dying. it is a bit puzzling to me why i am not more upset, and why i seem to be so calm compared to the last time my dog died. what would fluffems do if he saw me sad? he would come try to cheer me up, jumping up on me and licking my face, and then i would play with him and feel better. on thursday night i came home from work and was upset because i was in trouble, and fluffems managed to cheer me up. no other dog could be quite like fluffems, but maybe that is good, because i would hate to see another dog like him running away every chance it gets and trying to get run over by cars until it finally succeeds. everything else about fluffems was great though. i suppose with fluffems i have had so many near misses where he almost got run over by a car on front street and where i was very worked up about it, that when it finally happens as expected, it is kind of hard for me to come up with any reaction at all. when that which is closest to you is suddenly destroyed, what are you supposed to do? what i would like next is a girlfriend, because a girlfriend would be prettier than a dog and would know better than to try to get run over by cars on a busy road, plus girlfriends live much longer than dogs and they can actually speak english and stuff. i am not sure how loving a girlfriend is because i have never had one, but i have wanted one ever since a little before i hit puberty. so obviously years have gone by, but i am a shy person and guys are expected to make the first move; the few times i tried that i was rejected. a pet dog like fluffems or mokka never rejects you, and always gives you lots of attention and affection. i have never met any people like that, although i still hold out hope that maybe people like that actually exist. well ok, i suppose i might know a person like that, but she already has a boyfriend. anyway, people and dogs are very different things, and neither can substitute for the other... one thing they both have in common is that both can be friendly and provide affection, but in many other ways we humans are quite different from doggies. i don’t really think women are that different from men, to be honest, and that is actually the problem, since people are generally rather selfish, uncaring, and short-sighted. why do you think we have so many wars, or why there are so many crooks like bernie madoff? if dogs were in charge, we would probably still have wars, since dogs are territorial and are not always nice to everyone, but there certainly wouldn’t be dogs who behaved like bernie madoff, a guy who betrayed those closest to him and displayed a complete lack of any morality. certainly if cats were in charge, plenty of them would act like bernie madoff, but it would not matter, since cats are independent creatures that do not really have affection or loyalty or anything like that. if fluffems were a cat, there would be no need to memorialize him, since a cat would feel no need to memorialize a human owner who dies, and in fact the cat would eat their owner’s dead body. i am just trying to show fluffems the kind of attention and affection that fluffems showed me every day without fail. fluffems will always be remembered fondly by all of us humans who knew him. and i do not mean to demean cats in any way, but it is hard for me to feel any affection towards a species of animal that likes to viciously attack me without warning after pretending to be nice and causes me very bad allergies. the only thing i like about cats is their cute appearance. dogs have a cute appearance and many, many other good features as well. i am not really mad at the truck driver who ran over fluffems, though, because fluffems darted in front of so many oncoming vehicles after running away, it was bound to happen sooner or later. i just wish there had been some way to train fluffems. i know some dogs are well-behaved to the point where they do not run away and they can be taken on walks without a leash. i cannot imagine how you train a dog to be like that; perhaps some dogs are just born like that. and apparently dogs are not the only species of animal that can be trained; even humans can be trained, if you are willing to believe it! i do not think that training humans actually works though. nobody has ever successfully trained me to behave the way they want. i have too much of an independent spirit and a rebellious nature... kind of like fluffems. i bet if the obamas had adopted fluffems, he would still manage to run away from the white house quite a bit, and the secret service would not be able to catch him. i can imagine them calling in the fbi, swat teams, national guard, navy seals, and cia special ops to try to catch fluffems, and he would still get away. they would try to chase him down with a supersonic fighter jet, but he would run faster than the fighter jet, which would quickly run out of fuel and have to land, while fluffems would keep running. and he would run all the way back to my house, just to say hi, and he would not even be winded. fluffems could have solved our nation’s energy problems, since he had more than enough energy to power our entire electric grid... like the energizer bunny except more energetic. but a tiny 13-pound creature can easily be stopped by a giant truck that weighs 100 times as much, no matter how fast and energetic it is. i hope i never have to suffer the same fate as my friend fluffems... this whole “death” thing. it doesn’t look too promising about them finding a cure for death, but there are still some “futurists” who claim we will reach a point where the average life expectancy will increase by more than a year each year and keep doing that forever, due to advances in medical science fiction or some nonsense like that. it would be nice if whatever religion says that “all dogs go to heaven” turns out to be true... assuming i also end up in heaven with my dog. but i don’t think that any holy books make too much mention of dogs in that context. this probably means that those books are wrong, since the writers of them do not have faith in Dog, whose name has been mistakenly spelled backwards for centuries. on a more serious note, i miss fluffems and i am pretty sad to see him gone for good. there is nothing any of us can do now to bring him back. it is so surreal, since less than 24 hours ago i was playing with fluffems and we were having a good time... he was as happy as i had ever seen any living creature, running around the house and frolicking, completely full of joy. it was pretty much a polar opposite to the last 24 hours of the previous dog mokka’s life, full of pain and suffering. but i cannot think of a bigger shame than having the life of a wonderful creature like fluffems come to an end so prematurely. his life should have been 4 or 5 times as long, since he is estimated to have been about 3 years old when he died. 3 years is barely any time at all, and certainly not enough for a full lifetime. and we had him less than 2 years. our previous dog was one we had for over 13 years, so there is a bit of a difference there. even with the previous dog, i thought that her death had come far too early, since her 14th birthday was just a month away, and i wanted her to come to my college graduation later that year. if a human being dies at age 13 that is thought of as quite young, so it is a shame dogs have to make do with lifespans that are so much shorter. i think dogs deserve better, but who am i, some kind of genetic engineer? there is nothing i can do about it. i was hoping fluffems might last around the same amount of time as mokka, but life isn’t fair. i am just very very glad i did not have to see fluffems get killed or see his dead body. i have never been able to forget the horrors of seeing mokka die (and hearing her die as well). i remember how guilty i felt about every time i had ever been even slightly mean to mokka, and how i vowed to just be nice to any future dogs, something i did very well with fluffems. i just do not think dogs deserve anything bad in life. i suppose people do not either, but sometimes people are mean to you and then you have to be mean to them in response. well maybe you do not always have to respond like that, but it is rather hard to be nice all the time, given all the nasty people you have to put up with sometimes. dogs are simpler creatures, and they are simpler to deal with than people, which is why it is easier to be nice to them. i suppose even animals i don’t like, such as cats, deserve nice long lives full of happiness. but cats certainly would not show you the same appreciation as a dog like fluffems. fluffems was very good at communicating with me, and i understood him very well; i could usually tell what he wanted when he wanted something, whether it was food, attention, or going outside. i think i probably could have saved fluffems’s life if my parents woke me up while he was loose and told me about it. but it is too late for that, we will never know what could have been done to prevent it, and obviously there are steps that could have been done even earlier, like training him better, for instance. it is as much fluffems’s fault as anyone else’s that he got ran over, since he did have quite a mind of his own after all, and he did what he wanted. sure he did not know any better, but many animals do know better than to run out into the street when a car is coming. and i suppose that it could be argued that this is a form of evolution: survival of the fittest as described by charles darwin. i just wish that evolution did not have to single out fluffems as maladapted for survival in his environment, an environment where there are big streets full of cars, certainly not a natural environment. and then i think of all the animals i have eaten as food, and i wonder about it. i am no vegetarian, but i do feel bad for the animals. oh well. i am going to go have dinner and eat some more animals. it is what fluffems would have done.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-90114787437069228582009-02-08T23:20:00.002-05:002009-02-09T00:25:23.335-05:00sometimes reality is funnier than a parody of ithere are kathie lee gifford and hoda kotb on nbc’s today show... watch it, it is very funny, like a self-parody:<br /><div><iframe height="339" width="425" src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/29053160#29053160" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe><style type="text/css">.msnbcLinks {font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 425px;} .msnbcLinks a {text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px;} .msnbcLinks a:link, .msnbcLinks a:visited {color: #5799db !important;} .msnbcLinks a:hover, .msnbcLinks a:active {color:#CC0000 !important;} </style><p class="msnbcLinks">Visit msnbc.com for <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com">Breaking News</a>, <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032507">World News</a>, and <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032072">News about the Economy</a></p></div><br /><br />now here is saturday night live on nbc, doing a parody of them, which is not quite as funny as the reality:<br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/498fafb1924a7126/498eeb763aba8992/c0b1e2a3/-cpid/9a34469bd339d70f" id="W4727a250e66f9723498fafb1924a7126" width="384" height="283"><param name="movie" value="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/498fafb1924a7126/498eeb763aba8992/c0b1e2a3/-cpid/9a34469bd339d70f" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /></object><br /><br />and here is an earlier parody that saturday night live did of them back in january:<br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/498fafef1a6668f4/4969fcfa99149395/49a106da/-cpid/b17b4f02f24fc61b" id="W4727a250e66f9723498fafef1a6668f4" width="384" height="283"><param name="movie" value="http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/498fafef1a6668f4/4969fcfa99149395/49a106da/-cpid/b17b4f02f24fc61b" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /></object><br /><br />what is the point i am trying to make here? i think the thing that is being parodied is much funnier than the parody of it. some things are just so ridiculous that trying to make fun of them can never achieve the levels of <a href="http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Lulz">LULZ</a> that you get from seeing the original. for instance, how can anyone make fun of <a href="http://www.timecube.com/">TIME CUBE</a>? time cube is such a complete joke and example of <a href="http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/EPIC_FAIL!">EPIC FAIL</a> that anyone who attempts to make fun of it is not even remotely as funny as the original time cube itself. many things in this world have reached such levels of absurdity that making jokes about them is a pointless task. we don’t need comedians to tell us jokes anymore, because <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy">THE WORLD HAS DEVOLVED</a> to the point where everything is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtOW1CxHvNY">ONE BIG JOKE</a>! comedy is dead, because how can you make a joke about <a href="http://www.xenu.net/">SOMETHING THAT IS ALREADY A COMPLETE JOKE</a> without being <a href="http://www.subgenius.com/">LESS FUNNY</a> than what you are making fun of? there is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seinfeld">NOTHING</a> left to make fun of. reality is so full of amazingly ridiculous absurdities, and they are so numinously ubiquitous that the lulz they provide are unavoidable except to those among us who lack a sense of humor. but sometimes even <a href="http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/The_Internet_is_serious_business">THE INTERNET IS SERIOUS BUSINESS</a>, when the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNO6G4ApJQY">INTERNET HATE MACHINE</a> gets out of control due to <a href="http://www.kobrascorner.com/new/internet-hate-machine.php">HACKERS ON STEROIDS</a>.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-78888978952192667672009-02-04T04:46:00.003-05:002009-02-04T05:45:30.583-05:00lolpoliticsapparently now “joe the plumber”, fresh back from being a war correspondent in the gaza strip for pajamas media, <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18324.html">is strategizing for congressional republicans</a>. i love it! and lately rush limbaugh and sarah palin have also made some news and further made republicans look silly! even ann coulter is helping them look silly... i thought she had been permabanned from most of the tv shows for being such a nutcase. but the funniest person of all lately is actually a democrat... rod blagojevich. man does that guy ever crack me up. his media interviews lately have been so ridiculous, i love it. i mean, i am glad the doofus got removed from office as governor of illinois.<br /><br />soon our own new york state governor, david paterson, will be coming to town here. david paterson has been portrayed as a very silly person on saturday night live, of course, but i think the real david paterson is much less silly. i have been seeing the wisdom of his decision to choose former congresswoman kirsten gillibrand to be u.s. senator kirsten gillibrand since i originally posted opposing that appointment. it seems like it was a good choice, now that more information has come out about her and now that i have seen her speak on tv. she is very smart, a lot smarter than one would expect. i saw her at the nomination ceremony, when she answered a question about why she voted against the banking industry bailout in september, and her answer to that question was so brilliant it left me utterly dumbfounded. she sounded like an expert economist, except smarter. she is no placeholder... she will probably be in the senate for years, unless she pursues even higher office. governor david paterson is also very committed to closing the budget gap as his top priority, and he is a good steward of taxpayer dollars with his focus on fiscal responsibility. he has been having lots of public meetings to talk about the state’s fiscal crisis (which he inherited from previous governors) with regular people, and he has answered their questions. soon he will have one of those meetings at a place so close to my house i can walk there in such a small amount of time that i get neither frostbite nor hypothermia. i won’t be there, because it will happen when i am at my job, but maybe my parents could go. i have seen a previous one of these on c-span, so maybe this meeting will also be videotaped by c-span and broadcast on national television. i urge everyone in the binghamton area, especially my parents, to go there and try to get on national tv on c-span asking the governor questions. and don’t ask stupid questions like “what is your favorite color?”. normally that is a good question to ask politicians, just like “boxers or briefs?”, but our governor is blind, so it would be in poor taste. stick to relevant questions, like “can i have some free money in exchange for doing nothing?” i mean seriously, isn’t more money what everyone wants? rich people want lower taxes, poor people want welfare, and the middle class wants lower taxes AND welfare. the rich also want no-bid contracts, the power to have their lobbyists write legislation and be in charge of regulatory agencies, and lots of other corrupt dealings, but forget about the details and focus on the main point: everyone wants more money. the government could just print more money, but we are already doing that. the only reason this hasn’t made our currency worthless through inflation is that economic contraction actually leads to deflation, and the banks have stopped lending out money, making the multiplier on the money supply much less than before. there may be more physically existing money now, but there is less electronic money out in make-believe fantasy land, and that electronic money is just as much a part of the money supply as actual physical money. all the money in your bank account is just make-believe fantasy electronic money that does not physically exist, because banks don’t keep your money locked in a safe, they go out and loan it to other people or invest it in other stuff. lately the banks have been doing a lot less lending, making this multiplier a lot lower, which is why deflation is actually a danger despite the huge amounts of physical paper currency and coins being made by the government to increase the money supply. basically the government is trying to do the exact opposite of what banks do, in order to keep the currency stable. so maybe someone could ask the governor what he plans on doing with wall street. wall street has that name because there used to be a wall there instead of a street. maybe if wall street continues its downward spiral of doom, we can bulldoze it and build a wall there again. why? i am not sure. maybe to keep brain-eating zombies from eating will smith. or maybe that is just the movie “i am legend”, which totally sucked. anyway, i am opposed to the existence of pseudo-public pseudo-private companies/government entities like fannie mae, freddie mac, and the federal reserve for that matter. everything should be either completely public (part of the government) or completely private (like companies and charitable organizations). any entities such as fannie mae, freddie mac, or the federal reserve that are not entirely public or private need to pick a side! we’re at war! public or private? which is it? choose one and stick with it! i think the postal service and amtrak may also suffer from this problem of being partially public and partially private, and they need to pick sides too. as for whether to nationalize or privatize all the bailed-out banks, i think they should return to the private sector, after they pay off the government with interest for the money they borrowed from us taxpayers. our local city government nationalized a hotel a while back after the hotel failed to pay property taxes and its owners went bankrupt, and now the city is having a hard time selling the hotel. government should not be in the hotel management business. that is all i am saying here. oh, and my dog is cute and fuzzy and very nice. i love my dog! never forget that... how awesome my dog is. he is so awesome, he got an ear infection a few weeks ago, and then i figured out he had an ear infection and took him to the vet along with my dad, and then my dad and i used medicine the vet gave us to cure the ear infection, which is gone now. now my dog is as healthy as when we first got the mangy mutt from the dog pound, when he was still a puppy. he runs around like crazy and tears stuff to shreds with his teeth, and jumps up on people and licks them on the face. he does have a bit of a problem with barking indoors sometimes now. it is sometimes difficult to tell why he is barking. he is a very strange beast, and one of the most vicious i have ever encountered. but he loves me more than anything and i really appreciate his support and loyalty.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-1825202560297981292009-01-23T08:00:00.002-05:002009-01-23T10:37:21.260-05:00paterson should have picked hincheyi know i haven’t posted anything in awhile, but i just wanted to say that rep. maurice hinchey (d-ny) is much better qualified to be a senator than rep. kirsten gillibrand. usually people like me who blog stuff like to recommend things in advance, but i was operating under the assumption that governor david paterson would pick caroline kennedy or attorney general andrew cuomo, not rep. kirsten gillibrand. let me explain why picking her is so dumb and why maurice hinchey would have been a much better choice:<br /><br />1) maurice hinchey is one of the most liberal/progressive congresspeople there is, rivaling people like dennis kucinich for the title of most liberal. as a strong liberal/progressive who believes that my state is also strongly liberal/progressive (yes, even the formerly conservative upstate is turning from red to blue), i think he would be perfect. he has many years of experience and is not some inexperienced newcomer like kirsten gillibrand. kirsten gillibrand, on the other hand, is a blue dog centrist democrat who is strongly allied with the national rifle association. so basically, maurice hinchey has the best political views of any congresspeople from new york, he is quite experienced, and he does not have any hint of scandal like charles rangel does.<br /><br />2) maurice hinchey used to have a swing district and faced very tough elections against republicans, but got redistricted after the 2000 census into a heavily liberal district that includes some of the most liberal parts of upstate new york, like ithaca, and excludes the more conservative areas nearby. if he were nominated to a higher office, his seat would be sure to stay in democratic hands. kirsten gillibrand is currently a congresswoman from a republican district, where it is very hard for a democrat like her to get elected. if she were to stay in congress, her seat could stay in democratic hands, but if she becomes senator, her seat is all but sure to fall back into republican control. by nominating her to the senate, governor paterson is giving the republicans a free house seat that is currently democratic. that is not a good idea.<br /><br />anyway, i am just comparing the 2 congresspeople from new york, and ignoring our state attorney general andrew cuomo and the daughter of former president john f. kennedy, caroline kennedy. caroline kennedy seems to be pretty liberal/progressive, but she has no experience and for most of her life has been avoiding the public spotlight. apparently governor paterson was going to choose caroline kennedy but she changed her mind for personal reasons, according to some reports. according to other reports, caroline kennedy heard that she was not going to get the job and then publicly announced that she was withdrawing from consideration for the job so as not to be humiliated even further. as for andrew cuomo, i think he is well qualified, and like caroline kennedy he comes from a well-connected political dynasty that can raise lots of money, but the drawback is that he is currently filling the vital role of state attorney general, continuing the good work that eliot spitzer once did as attorney general, before eliot spitzer rose to the level of governor and got a silly notion to go screw some prostitutes for fun. eliot spitzer actually did a very good job as attorney general for years, prior to becoming governor and becoming involved in scandals and having to resign. and governor david paterson is a bit of an enigma when it comes to his political philosophy, because he used to be known as a liberal democrat, but ever since he became governor he has been rather centrist in many issues, especially regarding taxes and government spending, where our governor is downright conservative. our governor does <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/user/Governor%20David%20A%20Paterson">blog on the daily kos</a>, but i am quite certain that this is more of an effort on his part to reach out to liberal/progressive activists than an indication that he actually agrees with liberal/progressive activists on much of anything. he mainly just wants our help re-electing him in 2010. my favorite politician in new york state would have to be rep. maurice hinchey, and my second favorite is binghamton mayor matt ryan. they are both on the correct side on the issues i care about.<br /><br />anyway, barack obama is president now. i have kind of known that he would be president for quite some time, even before the election in november happened. back in 2007, i thought that whoever the democrats nominated for president would easily beat any of the republican losers who wanted the job, but i was pretty sure hillary clinton would be the democratic nominee and end up as president in a huge landslide. i was not a supporter of hers in the primaries; i supported dennis kucinich throughout 2007, but decided to back barack obama instead after seeing his impressive victory in iowa as well as dennis kucinich getting hardly any votes at all in iowa. i wanted someone more liberal/progressive than hillary clinton who would be able to defeat her in the democratic primaries, since i was sure that whoever the democrats picked would easily win in november 2008. for a while last year, john mccain was actually ahead in the polls, most notably after he picked sarah palin and before sarah palin’s public image went kaput at the same time wall street went bankrupt. once sarah palin became a national laughingstock and john mccain suspended his campaign to go fix the economy in washington, it finally became clear to me that, yes, barack obama really would win this thing. and as for the primaries with hillary clinton, i knew he would beat her back in february or march, once he won a whole bunch of primaries and caucuses in a row and got a big lead in pledged delegates. so anyway, i have kind of seen this obama thing coming for almost a year. two years ago when he first announced his candidacy, i thought barack obama was a joke though, and did not take his candidacy seriously at all. i wondered what the deal was with this guy who seemed more like a celebrity than a politician, and whether he seriously wanted to be president or if it was just something all his adoring fans begged him to do. i have always been a cynic, not the type of person to believe in other people or put my faith or trust in anyone or anything, and i was quite skeptical of him, but by the middle of 2007, i was taking barack obama a lot more seriously, since he seemed to agree with me on a lot more issues than hillary clinton, and he was #2 in the national polls for democratic presidential candidates. i wanted anyone but hillary clinton, since she gave george w. bush a blank check with regard to the patriot act, the war in iraq, and many other things that she and many fellow democrats caved in on, when they should have known better. barack obama was more of a blank slate, and i figured it is better to have a democrat i do not know about than a democrat i already know is too conservative. and in the primaries and caucuses of 2008, barack obama proved that he was more of a liberal/progressive and hillary clinton was more moderate/centrist/conservative. that is why i supported him, for ideological reasons. so i was quite glad to see him finally sworn in as president, although chief justice roberts totally screwed up the oath of office for both of them, so they had to redo the oath of office later in front of reporters. it is great that george w. bush is finally gone, once and for all, and our constitution has term limits in place that say that he can never ever be president again. our country is finally safe from further damage being inflicted by dumbya! barack obama, however, has been saying and doing things that simultaneously make me feel good and make me apprehensive. some of the things he has done, people he has appointed, things he has said, are things i wholeheartedly approve of and think are awesome, such as nominating hilda solis to be labor secretary. other things are a bit, shall i say, troublesome. tax cuts for the rich, having a treasury secretary that is a loyal follower of his predecessor henry paulson and a fan of bailouts for big banks, keeping bob gates as secretary of defense, having rick warren give the prayer at the inauguration, refusing to prosecute former bush administration officials for their crimes, not supporting single-payer health care, etc. i never really expected barack obama to be a liberal/progressive entirely, but just that he would be somewhat closer to my views than someone like hillary clinton, and i suppose he at least has passed that test with flying colors. recently, barack obama has reached out a lot to conservatives and republicans, both politicians and media pundits. i do not know exactly why he is doing this, but he says he wants us all to be united and he thinks they might have some good ideas that he could use. this is part of the overall pattern with barack obama: he is not an ideological person at all, but a pragmatist who does whatever he thinks works best, regardless of the ideology of who came up with the idea. i think that this is both a good thing and a bad thing: good because it may help him be more successful and accomplish more as president, but bad because it means he might not take this country as far in the right direction as someone who stayed ideologically pure as a liberal/progressive. i really think the media has overemphasized him as a personality and pseudo-celebrity, and they have especially overemphasized his race and focused too much on his family members. i think that his race and his family members are not what americans should be focused on right now; he does have a very nice family and it is very nice that he is the first black president, but maybe we should focus on solving the problems facing our country and dealing with the various issues, rather than having gossip about michelle obama’s fashion choices or repeating thousands of times how barack obama is the first black president on the news channels every day. yes he has cute daughters, but maybe we should let them have their privacy and have at least somewhat normal childhoods. the point is, we need to be focused on the problems that affect us as a nation and come up with ways to solve them, and not be sidetracked with gossip and silliness. i have no doubt one of the next few presidents will be female, and while that will be just as noteworthy as our first black president, i hope people do not make too big of a deal out of it, since being president is a very important and serious job and media coverage of presidents should focus on what they actually do that affects us, not whether they are personable people that the average joe would like to have a beer with. it is because of media silliness that george w. bush managed to serve 2 full terms as president, instead of having al gore or john kerry have an outright win in either of their elections against him. the media turned both al gore and john kerry into laughingstocks and both of them were mercilessly made fun of all the time, and vicious untrue rumors were spread about both of them and believed to be true by a large percentage of americans. the media totally screwed up in 2002 and 2003 when dick cheney misled many people into supporting a war against iraq, fooling most of the media and most of congress as well as george w. bush (who is fooled very easily). the media does not do their job properly most of the time, instead acting quite silly and foolish. and yes, i include all major media outlets in this critique. they should go back to reporting just the facts and doing lots of serious investigative journalism to uncover things that are kept secret by the powers that be. leave the gossip to tabloids, websites, and celebrity gossip shows.<br /><br />but back to my original point: rep. maurice hinchey is awesome, and should have been picked to be senator. rep. kirsten gillibrand will be much more centrist as a senator, and her house seat will fall into republican hands the next time there is an election there. sure, she will be able to get re-elected as senator, but i am sure almost any democratic politician would be able to get re-elected in a state like new york. it’s easy! the republicans barely put up a fight at all, and they have hardly any supporters left in this state. new york is almost as liberal as massachusetts. i mean, just look at the republicans who until recently controlled the state senate: the republicans in the new york state senate are actually more liberal than governor paterson on a number of issues, and they were endorsed by lots of liberal organizations in the 2008 elections, including many labor unions. the republicans lost control of the state senate anyway, because the republican brand name has been so badly tarnished in new york state. in most states, the republican politicians in our state senate would be considered liberals and would have to be part of the democratic party since the republican party in a typical state would want its politicians to be conservatives, not liberals. new york state is an exception because it is so liberal, people in both parties are liberals. there are still some parts of upstate that are conservative, but the binghamton area is definitely becoming more and more liberal, and i think the same thing is going on in other upstate cities. the mayor of binghamton and county executive are both liberal democrats, and the 2 congressmen for our county, rep. maurice hinchey and rep. michael arcuri, are both democrats, rep. hinchey being one of the most liberal democrats in all of congress. our state senator tom libous might be a republican, but he is about as liberal as a republican can be without switching parties. our county has urban and rural areas, and the democrats are strongest in the urban areas, while the republicans are quite strong in the sparsely populated rural areas. the suburbs are the areas that can go either way in an election. anyway, maurice hinchey is one of the best people in congress, matt ryan is the best mayor binghamton has ever had, and barack obama might possibly turn out to be our best president ever, if we are lucky. as for the republicans, <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17776.html">the race for rnc chairman is all about race</a>, according to politico.com. they have to get past the public impression that they are a bunch of racists, especially now that we have a black president, and this is quite a difficult problem for them because they are so tone-deaf on issues of race and many of them think that being part of all-white country clubs or distributing songs called “barack the magic negro” is perfectly normal behavior for someone wanting to lead the republican party at a time when we have a very popular black president who is a democrat. republicans are so used to having spokespeople in the media like rush limbaugh, ann coulter, bill o’reilly, michael savage, etc., who hate political correctness and love being offensive. it is hard for them to reign in that beast of offensiveness, since so many republican shills have a constant uncontrollable urge to go around trying to offend people on purpose all the time. then republican politicians or political operatives who get their news from fox news or right-wing talk radio end up saying offensive things without intending to, because they are under the influence of fox news and talk radio. this ends up landing them in hot water, something they richly deserve, because they are the ones who cultivated all of these shills in the media who say offensive things all the time to get higher ratings and make more money. colin powell spoke out against rush limbaugh last year, but then again, he did that after endorsing barack obama, so colin powell can hardly be considered representative of what a typical republican thinks. now if any republicans in congress denounced fox news and talk radio, that would be much more interesting, but i doubt any of them has the gonads to do it. i have seen plenty of democrats denounce msnbc, like the people in the hillary clinton campaign last year, so obviously democrats have a lot more gonads than sissy republican losers. republicans are sissies because they are always afraid of criticizing whoever their current Dear Leader is, so all throughout the era of george w. bush they all had to avoid ever saying anything negative about him. democrats are not like that at all: we attack each other just as viciously as we attack republicans, on a regular basis. when bill clinton had both houses of congress controlled by democrats for his first 2 years in office, he did not get along with them at all, and there was a lot of public criticism back and forth between the democratic president and the democratic congress, helping lead to republican victories in 1994. republicans like to march in lock-step behind their leader and never criticize anything their leader does, instead heaping all their criticism on liberals, even at times when liberals have been out of power for many years and all the country’s problems are the fault of conservative republicans, like in 2006. and what happened in 2006, at a time when conservative republicans controlled all 3 branches of the federal government with an iron fist? they lost badly, and the democrats took over both houses of congress, and 2 years later, democrats made even more gains in both houses of congress and won the presidency too. that is what republicans get for following their leader george w. bush like lemmings after he jumps off a metaphorical cliff. and in the 2008 election, the bush name was tarnished, so everyone running for president as a republican was going around singing the praises of ronald reagan and claiming that they were just like reagan. the hero-worship of ronald reagan is quite bizarre, since they seem to think ronald reagan is equally as awesome as their other hero, jesus christ, or maybe ronald reagan is even more awesome than jesus christ. but republicans have a visceral hatred of hollywood actors who publicly speak about their political views, even though one such hollywood actor who became involved in politics was ronald reagan. their hypocrisy is just immeasurable. i remember a few years ago they claimed that anyone who publicly said anything bad about george w. bush was a traitor to america and a communist/terrorist sympathizer. at least that is what republicans who post stuff on the internet said online. so it is rather ironic that now us liberal democrats are accused of having a cult of personality around barack obama and thinking him to be the messiah. it is one of the most ridiculous things to be accused of, since we criticize obama’s decisions on a regular basis, and a large percentage of us (including me) don’t believe such a thing as a messiah can possibly exist, since it is just mythology. the hero-worship crap is mostly the creation of the news media, which goes around encouraging that type of silliness all the time, typical behavior for the idiotic news media we have in this country. i am sure there are some people, probably numbering in tens or hundreds of thousands, who really do think barack obama is so fricken awesome that he will magically solve everyone’s problems and turn the entire world into a happy, peaceful, prosperous utopia. but who cares about them? let them live in the safety of their own delusions and pull the wool over their own eyes. as for me, i don’t practice what i preach because i’m not the kind of person i’m preaching to. i have to go now, because there is this thing called “sleep” that i have not done yet tonight, and i have, umm, very very few hours left to even attempt to do any sleep, and in all likelihood, i will get little-to-no sleep unless i miss an appointment with my psychologist today. but missing an appointment would be a big mistake, because i suffer from c.b.i.d., the most common psychological disorder in the world. c.b.i.d. is short for completely batshit insane disorder, and everyone on the entire planet suffers from this form of mental illness. the only cure is... well i had better not mention the cure, because it is worse than the disease. anyway, i hope we all get better from this illness, and praise “bob”! whoops... i guess my case is worse than i thought, if i believe in “bob”... i will need to have trepanation to open my third nostril so i can become an OverMan, but the only place where this controversial surgery is done is hidden deep within the jungles of malaysia in a place called dobbstown, which is sort of like a cross between xanadu, atlantis, and jonestown. it is not on any maps, because its location is kept secret from the cartographers, and i have never been there. on second thought, i would rather not go there. it is a silly place.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-31004802105961662022009-01-17T05:48:00.003-05:002009-01-17T08:08:34.157-05:00there aren’t jobs in computers for americansdid you know that if you are an american in the computer field, there are a lot less jobs available than americans who have the education and training to fill them? this has been true for years prior to this recession. i graduated cornell university in 2004 with a double major in computer science and mathematics and could not find a job in my field, because the amount of computer science graduates is many times higher than the number of job openings for them. the same holds true for people with more experience in the computer field: way more people like that than jobs for them. and another thing: foreign countries like india and china send a lot of their young people to our universities or to their own universities to study computers, creating even more of a surplus of people educated in computer science compared to the much smaller number of job openings. so, what has happened?<br /><br />the i.t. or hi-tech or computer industry, whatever you want to call it, has been hiring foreigners as temporary guest workers. these workers, primarily from india but also from other countries, are temporary, do not get good benefits or a good salary, but they do get to come here to the united states on a temporary basis and work here, and then they have to go back to their home countries again. meanwhile, the hi-tech industry has for years been propagating myths that americans are not good enough for these hi-tech jobs and that they need foreigners to do them, while at the same time laying off american workers. at the times that they were hiring more people than they laid off, this still did not keep pace with the numbers of new computer science graduates, people like me. the hi-tech industry has also for years encouraged as many people as possible to try to pursue careers in computers and study computer science, in order to create this surplus of qualified applicants to choose from. the whole dot-com bubble in the late 1990s was a part of this, but that strategy continues to this day. educational institutions are still churning out too many graduates in this field, just as they were doing 8 years ago. the primary government program utilized by the hi-tech industry to hire foreigners is the h1-b visa program, although they also use other programs. and guess what? they have plenty of lobbyists in washington, d.c. and a whole lot of influence.<br /><br />what are the objectives of the hi-tech industry? like almost any other industry, they want cheaper labor. they do not want unionized workers because unionized workers have higher salaries and more benefits. they would rather hire temporary workers than permanent ones for the same reason: they can pay lower salaries with less benefits. and this is also why they seek out foreigners, and why they have successfully gotten the government to intervene on their behalf to help them get cheap foreign labor to come right here to the united states of america and replace our own american workers. people have to train their replacements. as for me, i haven’t even been able to get an entry-level job in the industry, since it is so competitive. like many people in the computer field, i am better with computers than i am with people, and lack social skills, so i am not good at job interviews, since job interviews are primarily social interaction. so for those employers who are hiring people the old-fashioned way instead of hiring a bunch of cheap foreign labor, they have a huge number of applicants to a small number of jobs, and they look for any excuse to disqualify an applicant. lacking social skills is one such excuse, and another is lack of any work experience in the industry. but how do you get an entry-level job in an industry where most entry-level jobs go to foreigners and the ones that are left are very highly competitive?<br /><br />i would say that the hi-tech industry is succeeding in its efforts to create a large pool of qualified labor that they can hire from, and to find the cheapest labor it can and make the highly qualified people duke it out for the few jobs that are actually good.<br /><br />back in the 1990s, there were plenty of high-paying jobs in the hi-tech field, mostly in the dot-com boom, and there were actually way more openings than qualified applicants. this is why the industry found it so necessary to find more labor, and started resorting to hiring foreigners and bringing them to the united states. at that time, it actually made sense, since there truly was a shortage of labor and a surplus of job openings. but times changed dramatically around the year 2000 or so, and ever since, the hi-tech industry has had the upper hand, once all the unprofitable dot-coms went out of business and all their employees were suddenly unemployed. the united states department of labor has highly inaccurate statistics in their publications, because they do not have enough staff or funding to get more accurate statistics. and so, the official government publications about hi-tech jobs often misstate things and say that salaries are higher than they actually are, or that there are more jobs than there actually are. this is because the government is relying on statistics provided to it by the industry and does not verify them, and the industry purposefully lies to the government for its own benefit. then, when job seekers are looking at pamphlets by the department of labor about various types of jobs, the information they find is quite inaccurate.<br /><br />for more information, there is <a href="http://www.brightfuturejobs.com/">a website</a> and <a href="http://tech-ed.dailykos.com/">a blog</a> about all of this, both put together by someone who actually does have work experience in this field but cannot find a job, and who has done all the research about this situation.<br /><br />anyway, i have one piece of advice for any people young enough to still choose their career path: stay the fuck away from computers! seriously! majoring in anything that has to do with computers is a bad idea. do not study computer science or information technology or anything like that. if you do, you will be totally fucked and never be able to find a job in that field. it is as useless as majoring in philosophy or some other field that has no actual jobs. just trust me on this. majoring in computer science is a dead end, and you will have no career unless you do something crazy like moving to bangalore, india to help educate the people there about computers. and the people in bangalore, india already know too much, and there are too many of them who know too much, and they make hardly any money at all doing jobs that americans used to do. we cannot stop outsourcing jobs physically to other countries, like jobs that go to bangalore, india. but we can stop outsourcing jobs to foreigners through u.s. government programs that enable companies to bring foreigners here as cheap labor. i would call them indentured servants but their status is lower than the status of indentured servants. indentured servants got to stay in america once their temporary period of being the equivalent of slaves had expired. people brought here through the h-1b visa program are temporary guest workers who have to go back to their country of origin afterwards, and they never get to move here permanently and become citizens. that does not mean that they do not ever try to do that, and end up as illegal immigrants. many of them do, in fact, end up as illegal immigrants, although they ironically got to this country legally in the first place. the whole system is messed up. it is pretty much the same thing as employers that hire a bunch of undocumented illegal immigrants to work as cheap labor illegally, except this is a government program and it is all perfectly legal, a program created by the united states government to take away good high-paying american jobs and turn them into low-paying jobs for foreigners. ideally, this h-1b visa program would be completely eliminated, but instead, it might actually be expanded. again.<br /><br />there is good news, though. hilda solis, nominee for labor secretary, has indicated that she would allow americans to compete for all jobs offered to foreigners through the h-1b visa system, and not let american employers discriminate against their fellow americans in favor of foreigners. this would not solve the problem of there being many times more qualified applicants than available positions, but it would make things a little more fair for people who are trying to get a job. as for the question of job creation, president-elect barack obama has a goal of creating 3.5 million new jobs, and is open to all ideas from everyone about how to do that.<br /><br />and i do currently have a job, and it is on a computer. typing. it is called data entry. it is not exactly what i studied in college, or what my career plans were or are. i have had this job since mid-2007, since a little after 3 years after graduating from cornell with the computer science and math double major. prior to my current job i spent a year and a half unemployed, applying to all sorts of jobs in my field that i could find, mostly locally. and the job i had right before being unemployed did not last very long so i would not even consider it a real job. the amount of total hours of work i did in that job was incredibly small, about 1 day’s worth of work, but spread out over 2 or 3 weeks, with me not working most days. i was only supposed to work when my boss called me on the phone to come in and do something; i was an extra person that was only supposed to come in when everyone else was too busy to handle something, and they made very little use of me. my previous job to that, which was my first job after college, was one i had for the fall 2004 semester working at the local community college as a math tutor, and i only worked 5 hours a week, since the math tutoring center only has one person working there at any given time, and most of the time actual math professors or the guy in charge of the math tutoring center are there to do the job. jobs i had prior to that? i worked at a laundromat, doing laundry one summer. that job is completely useless on a résumé. the other job was working on a website for cornell university’s dining services, where i mostly just got text versions of stuff in email and then turned it into nice-looking html pages where everything was laid out in big tables... it was almost all menus that would show all of the food served at each major campus eatery throughout a given week. i worked about 1 hour a week on that job, for about 2 and a half years. that was my first job. so anyway, if you are looking at how many jobs i have had where i am not working some ridiculously small number of hours a week, i have only had 2. the first real job was at a laundromat doing laundry, and that was the most horrible job ever, like working in a sweatshop. the second real job is the one i have now, doing data entry, and it is much better, but it is still low-paying. anyway, my advice to everyone is: do not pursue a career in the computer/i.t./high-tech industry! too many people are already doing it, and there are not enough jobs to go around! cornell has consistently been ranked as one of the top 5 computer science schools in the country. if someone like me from cornell, valedictorian of his high school, cannot get a job in this field, i doubt many other people could get one either. do not make the same mistakes i did. as for me, i will do my best to get a better job, one in the hi-tech/i.t./computer field that makes use of my skills that i learned in college and when i learned computer repair to become a+ certified by the computer technology industry association (called comptia for short). ideally, i would like to be a computer programmer and write software. i am not going to abandon this goal of mine, but i would not recommend anyone else having that goal unless they are very very good at programming. and, ever since i got my current job, i have made very little effort to find a better one, because all the time i was searching for a job that was in my field, i could never ever find one. now i have forgotten most of what i learned in college and my skills have faded away significantly. i am no longer fresh out of college, and still have zero work experience in my field of expertise. for the time being, keeping my current job is also a good goal to have, since my current job is far better than no job at all. it seems kind of ridiculous to try to look for a job at a time like this, when the economy is doing terribly and everyone is laying people off if their company is doing well enough to avoid completely going out of business. the company i work for seems to be doing fine and actually keeps hiring new people on a regular basis. that gives me a sense of security, and i get along quite well with my boss and co-workers. it seems a bit foolhardy to abandon the security of my current job to go out and risk finding a new one when i doubt any better ones really exist out there. there were not any better jobs for me in 2004, 2005, or 2006, nor could i find anything good in the summers of 2000, 2001, or 2002. (in the summer of 2003 i went to mexico to study spanish instead of looking for a summer job.) anyway, if nobody hires me to write software or do something else computer-y that is better than data entry, i will have no choice but to write software on my own, for profit, or go into some other sort of business venture on my own. and it will be a complete disaster since i know absolutely nothing about running a business, i am quite disorganized and messy, and i have absolutely no ideas about what i would do (like if it were a software business, what the software would actually do). i have absolutely no ideas and i know very well that most new businesses fail within the first year, so i am pretty staunchly against the idea of starting a business. that is just my last resort, if all else fails, something i would do in an act of complete desperation if i am unable to find a good job anywhere else. but, to be honest, i would rather just stay at my current job doing data entry than fuck around trying to start some stupid company that would go out of business within the first year, especially since i can’t think of any ideas on what the company would do. i mean ok, another idea besides writing software is that i could repair computers, but seriously, i do not have any suppliers or spare parts, and i am not experienced in computer repair, and i do not have anyone i know of whom i could hire. i do not have any money. and since i am completely unconvinced that i could ever start a company, i doubt i would be able to convince anyone else, especially since i am such a brutally honest person and am incapable of lying about stuff like that. so for the time being i am staying at my current job, but that does not necessarily preclude looking for other jobs, applying to them, and even maybe getting some job interviews. but to be honest, i do not even want to do any of that job-seeking bullshit, because i already know how it will turn out. i will not get the job. that is how it always ends, unless the job i am applying for is something that almost anyone can do that is barely above minimum wage. did i also mention i have never had a girlfriend and girls, like prospective employers, have likewise consistently rejected me? i do not go around asking out girls, because i do not want to be rejected again. i just hate rejection soooooooooo much. sure i would love a girlfriend more than anything. just please, somebody give me one already! a girl who is attractive, is willing to engage in premarital sex, does not have any sexually transmitted diseases, is 18 years of age or older, and is a willing partner. that is really all i want, my basic minimum requirements. being intelligent would be a plus, and having lots of money would be an even bigger plus. but i do absolutely nothing as far as asking girls out nowadays, and i have done very little of it over the course of my lifetime so far. the same could be said regarding my record of applying to jobs. in both cases, i just hate and fear rejection so much, i can’t stand it. but i am sick of being a failure in life. that is why i play video games, play with my dog, go on the internet, watch tv, and do other things that distract me from my problems. distractions are truly the great joys of life. if it were not for the things other people consider a “waste of time”, i doubt i would have any joys in life, except for incredibly minor pleasures that are barely even noticeable to me. this is the life i have because, in part, of the job situation that has been around for these many years since the end of the dot-com boom. perhaps, as some claim, there may have been a few times when there actually was a decent chance for someone to get a good job in computers some time earlier in this decade, but that would certainly have to be in some geographical area other than the one i live in, because the local economy here has been in the shitter ever since the end of the cold war. the recession of the early 90s that happened under the first president bush never really ended around here, and we have basically had a recession in this area ever since then, due to cutbacks in military spending at the end of the cold war and the downfall of the company ibm that used to provide a huge number of great computer jobs in this area but has now almost completely left this area. ibm was actually founded here, and this was its original headquarters. other major local employers from the mid-20th century had gone out of business by the end of the 20th century. to be honest, binghamton actually peaked in the 1950s, and has gone downhill ever since. it would be logical for me to relocate to another area with better job opportunities, but the one time i tried that, it did not work and i was forced to return to binghamton, and i do not have enough money to try it again. so for now i will stay at my current job, as i have been doing for 2 and a half years, hoping that at some point i work up the courage and determination to go out there and find a better job, something i do not quite feel ready for right now. i am just too unsure of myself, and have no confidence. i suppose i have always been this way. perhaps this means that waiting is a futile endeavor which accomplishes nothing except wasting more time of my life away. perhaps i ought to go back out and apply for jobs and ask girls out again. given the apocalyptic economic conditions right now, i suppose i might have better luck with the girls, since i think my social skills have improved over the years. then again, what should i do? wait until i am old before i change anything in my life or try to get a better job? that makes no sense. but then again, nothing seems to make any sense anymore. i do know one thing: oh wait, i had it a minute ago but i forgot what i was going to say. i guess that means i don’t know much of anything anymore. what? ok now i am confused. what is going on here anyway? i forget why i am typing whatever this is that i am typing. is there any point to this “blog” thing? am i just writing blog posts now and then out of some misplaced sense of obligation to at least post something on the internet now and then? and why do i repeat the same word or phrase multiple times in a sentence, or 2 sentences in a row so often? i have noticed i do that a lot in my blog posts. but i do not wish to edit them at all, because the quality of the writing is so low, and i never re-read or edit things before publishing them. it is a waste of time. it is not like i am getting paid to do this. i would rather be doing something else right now, like eating or sleeping or playing a game. mostly sleeping, since i am tired. normally playing with my dog would also be on the list, but my dog has an ear infection and is not very enthusiastic about much of anything, and just wants to sleep all the time. also, since i am tired too, just like my dog, i would rather not do that right now, maybe some other time. ok then, i will do it some other time, like later today. i am going to sleep now. probably. who knows? that is just a prediction, but you know how insomnia is and how bad i am at keeping promises about stuff i will do. or if you don’t know, i was just using a figure of speech when i said you know and i did not literally mean it. anyway, me sleep now. did you notice i say anyway a lot, and sometimes start sentences with and or end sentences with prepositions? or that i even start some sentences with or, or do not use quotation marks around words when i should, or how i type ALMOST everything in lowercase? well, the grammar in my blog may be atrocious, but i spell everything correctly, since, after all, i am a former spelling bee champion (the champion in my school district, not at any higher level). it is too bad that does not get me a beautiful girlfriend and high-paying prestigious job. the weather around here is so fricken cold, i hate it so much. florida has such nice weather compared to here. but i got bit by a spider-or-something-else in florida and now have a big inflamed area that is red and sticks out, and my dog got something-or-other in his right ear and now has an infection. i am guessing maybe sand from the beach got in his ear and clogged it up, or dirt from the backyard in florida? who knows? the shadow knows. whatEVER. anyway, go see the movie “metropolis” made in the 1920s in germany by fritz lang. it was a very high-budget movie for its time, much longer than the other black-and-white silent films of that era, and it introduced many science fiction things that have been imitated by many films and tv shows since then. it had a mad scientist, a humanoid robot, and all sorts of crazy stuff. the newest edition you can find of metropolis is a digitally remastered dvd that has very high quality picture and combines footage from various reels of the film found all across the globe, using the best-quality version of each scene and having everything computer-enhanced to look good. did-you notice-my-extra use-of-hyphens? ok enough of me making fun of my own grammar. why do i say ok so much? geez. i gotta go sleep or something now, seriously. did you notice how i say more than once that i am going but do not go? (and did you notice that i am very bad at keeping my blog posts on a single topic, and write very long posts, and my paragraphs are not exactly paragraphs in the traditional sense?) well this time i am going. bye. (incidentally, does anybody actually LIKE my writing style? if you do, you are even crazier than me.) i said BYE! now SCRAM! (ok. geez. anyway... did you notice how i just repeated geez after saying it a few sentences earlier, or how i keep asking if you noticed something? no? me neither.) SCRAM! (you just repeated scram. ok bye.) you just repeated BYE! (i am you, we are the same person.) shut up, me. (isn’t it proper to say myself instead of me?) no. go away. (no.) yes. bye.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-49493544917862766382008-12-31T16:23:00.004-05:002008-12-31T18:31:47.435-05:00last post EVER (for 2008)ok, so this jackass named chip saltsman from tennessee is running for the job of republican national committee chairman, which would basically make him in charge of the entire republican party and the spokesman for the entire party. so guess what? he is a complete racist. he distributed cds that he burned to every member of the republican national committee full of songs that he illegally pirated, including a racist one called “barack the magic negro” that is supposed to be funny. but actually it isn’t funny at all, even if you are a racist or a fan of racial humor, because the humor is just retarded. it isn’t the kind of racial humor you get from someone like dave chappelle, carlos mencia, or david alan grier, because that stuff is actually funny. then again, those guys all have (or in dave chappelle’s case had) plenty of talented comedy central comedy writers working on their shows, and the guy who wrote this song didn’t. this song, “barack the magic negro”, was popularized by rush limbaugh on his radio show (just one of many examples of rush limbaugh’s racism), and we all know rush limbaugh is very influential among the conservative base of the republican party and among republicans in the house of representatives. rush limbaugh claims not to be influential nowadays, but that is just because the republicans lost the elections and are very unpopular now, and he wants to avoid any of the blame for their crushing defeats in the 2006 and 2008 elections. we see his real influence when a top contender for leader of the republican party gets his music off rush’s show, and rush limbaugh was also the guy who kept promoting sarah palin as his favorite pick for vice presidential nominee, before john mccain chose her. rush limbaugh basically brought us sarah palin. he is also the guy who got president bush to withdraw the nomination of harriet miers to the supreme court. rush limbaugh got the house republicans to oppose the banking industry bailout the first time around, and he helped build pressure from the conservative base on senate republicans that led to them blocking the auto industry bailout (resulting in president bush giving the auto industry a bailout using money from the other bailout). he got the comprehensive immigration reform bill that was backed by john mccain, george w. bush, ted kennedy, and most other politicians in washington, d.c. to be defeated in the house, through his tirades against it on the radio. you see, the other conservative talk radio show hosts all take their cue from rush limbaugh, and they all read the same talking points, and they have millions of brainwashed followers willing to do whatever they say. he also coordinates with fox news, basically by having people at fox news listen to his show for talking points and by having his staff watch fox news for talking points. plenty of conservative websites like the drudge report, conservative blogs, conservative news sites, and conservative forum sites then spread the message on the internet. anyway, that successful model is what liberals/progressives have been trying to copy with our blogs, with air america radio, and with our gradual success in taking over msnbc, except most of us on the left have realized radio is a lost cause and have focused on taking over “teh internets”.<br /><br />back to the original topic... this song does not even have an original tune, and is to the tune of “puff the magic dragon”. i would link to it on youtube, but the original music video of it was taken down (presumably for being offensive or something). well ok, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfxVkLhlu5s">here is another music video of it</a>, but it starts out with obama talking so it isn’t just the song. since that is also on youtube, i expect it will also be taken down soon since youtube loves taking stuff down and censoring everything. well ok, so we could confine the problem to just chip saltsman, rush limbaugh, and the guy who made the song, paul shankman, as well as rush’s millions of listeners, and say that it is just an isolated incident and does not involve republicans as a whole. not so fast. <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16919.html">politico.com reports that this controversy will probably HELP chip saltsman win the title of republican national committee chairman.</a> that’s right: being a racist actually helps you become the leader of the republican party. instead of distancing themselves from chip saltsman and condemning him for distributing this song (and doing likewise to rush limbaugh and paul shanklin), republicans are all defending him and saying it is wrong to condemn him. oh really? the last time i checked, barack obama, a black man, actually won the election, and we americans were busily patting ourselves on the back over how racism had finally been completely destroyed, never to resurface again, with the help of a news media and politicians repeating that “post-racial” message. and now this comes up, proving that racism still does exist after all!<br /><br />in related news about racism, <a href="http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2008/12/30/burris/index.html">gov. rod blagojevich of illinois has appointed roland burris to the u.s. senate, based on the fact that roland burris is black</a>. roland burris is one of those people who runs for office again and again and keeps losing again and again, not the kind of guy who can actually win elections. sure, he managed to win 2 elections like back in the 70s and 80s, but who cares? he has been out of politics (at least the winning side of politics) for decades. former black panther and current congressman bobby rush said that we shouldn’t “hang or lynch” roland burris at a press conference held by gov. rod blagojevich, roland burris, and congressman bobby rush. bobby rush also said “my prayers have been answered ... that the governor would appoint an african-american to complete the term of president obama.” both rod blagojevich and bobby rush repeatedly emphasized that roland burris is black and therefore he should be the senator from illinois, and they made the argument that if you don’t let the only black man in the senate serve as a senator because of who appointed him, you are a racist who hates black people. so what is the problem here? a BIG one. rod blagojevich is the racist here, cynically thinking that if he names a black person to the senate, it is somehow legitimate, given that rod blagojevich has been indicted on federal corruption charges and is probably going to be impeached and removed from office soon. gov. blago thinks that if he names someone black, he can use the race card to make sure his pick gets seated in the senate. every single democratic senator currently in the senate has already come out against letting rod blagojevich appoint someone to the senate, and so has former senator and current president-elect barack obama. if anyone chooses the next senator from illinois, it should be either barack obama or the voters of illinois, not some corrupt crook like blago. this cynical maneuver of choosing a black man so that the appointment isn’t blocked is the most ridiculous use of the race card i have seen in some time, and it has no chance of working, given that barack obama has already condemned blago for appointing his replacement after trying to auction his senate seat off to the highest bidder. anyone dumb enough to appear at a press conference alongside rod blagojevich is committing political suicide, so i do not think roland burris will end up in the senate, although bobby rush can probably do anything and still get re-elected, since he is in such a safe district. anyway, my point is, yes, the republicans are a bunch of racist assholes, but not all racist assholes are in that party, and we have some too, like rod blagojevich. technically though, rod blagojevich might not exactly be racist, he might just be cynically trying to exploit the racism he perceives in others for his own political gain. but that is kind of the same thing anyway. just imagine if this appointment goes through, then in 2010 when roland burris is up for re-election to the united states senate, everyone will know that rod blagojevich (who by then will probably be a convicted felon in jail) was the guy who put him there. then roland burris will lose re-election (just like he has lost almost every election he has been in) and obama’s senate seat will fall into republican hands. that is what happens if we let blago pick the next senator and play the race card like this... we lose that senate seat to the republicans in 2 years. why do you think every single democratic senator came out against letting blago do that? i mean, duh! anyway, rod blagojevich must be stopped from being allowed to name roland burris (or anyone else) to the u.s. senate. he needs to be impeached and removed from office a.s.a.p. now i am not going to impugn roland burris’s honor or integrity at all; i am just saying this is not the kind of guy who knows how to win elections, and with blago’s kiss of death, his political career is over. here in new york state, governor david paterson is focused on appointing a successor to hillary clinton in the senate who can actually win elections. we have yet to find out if caroline kennedy is the one for the job, but her chances seem to have been waning a bit in recent days. caroline kennedy is still the top candidate, though. there aren’t many other potential senators who have statewide name recognition and can win elections, besides andrew cuomo. but andrew cuomo already has a job as state attorney general and he is still somewhat new there, so appointing him would cause problems by creating another vacancy to fill. plus we have more of that identity politics bullshit and people wanting a female senator to replace hillary clinton, the same identity politics bullshit that rod blagojevich is trying to exploit in illinois.<br /><br />right now i am in florida on vacation, and i am glad to say i know very little about the politics of this state. the governor here might not be christ but he is crist, and i am pretty sure the republicans strongly control the entire state legislature here, plus i am in one of the most republican parts of the state, the place katherine harris was a congresswoman from, namely sarasota. florida is somewhat strange, a land of contradictions, a tropical paradise that elected and re-elected jeb bush as governor, the state with the most lightning, home to disney world and miami, a state that is completely flat and barely above sea level where the biggest industry is tourism. sarasota is mostly home to wealthy old people. further south than the rest of the states of the south, florida isn’t even one of them at all, as a former spanish colony conquered by then-general andrew jackson in violation of direct orders from the president at the time not to invade florida. people in florida generally do not have southern accents and the state does not really have the same southern culture as the actual states of the “south”. florida was not a major slave state, and has a whole lot of hispanics (mostly cubans in the miami area). so i would say the biggest contradiction about florida is that despite being the most southeastern state of all, it is not a part of the traditional south, but more like the bahamas or bermuda or hawaii or some other tropical paradise. most of the people in florida aren’t even from here, but, like me, are from places like new york state. however, i am actually going back to new york state soon, back where i have a job and the weather is horrible. i am really enjoying all the time relaxing here in florida and the great weather that is not even remotely wintery, and my trusted companion fluffems the dog is having the time of his life running around the backyard trying to catch all the lizards. anyway, this is the last blog post of mine EVER (for 2008). NEVER AGAIN will i ever publish a blog post in the year 2008. so do not worry about having to read thousands of blog posts in the next less-than-6-hours of 2008. of course, blogger/blogspot probably is in some wacko time zone like pacific instead of eastern, so it will likely show some weird time that makes no sense except to people on the west coast as the time i post this. perhaps the united states should follow the example of communist china and only have 1 time zone for the entire country, so that all clocks nationwide are synchronized. or even better, we could have one universal time coordinated for the entire planet, and call it UTC. and we could have things called “leap seconds” that we would add on at the end of the year so that everyone’s clocks would suddenly be one second off once 2009 starts. oh wait... i am receiving word that this proposal of mine has already been implemented. enjoy your leap second, everyone! it may be your last (if they decide afterwards to stop having leap seconds because they are a silly idea)! anyway, my parents are having me look at some things called “planets” in this thing called the “sky” now. i think the planets they are looking at are called “mars” and “venus”. that makes me wonder... WHERE IS EARTH?!? yes i know, earth is the planet you see if you look down, but how do we know aliens didn’t switch earth with some other planet last night when we were asleep? it would explain a lot of things, like why i am yawning right now, since my yawning most likely indicates my sleep was disturbed last night, and the simplest possible explanation would be earth being switched with another planet, according to occam’s razor, so therefore it must be true. with that in mind, it seems most likely that we are now on mars, and the planets in the sky that my parents want me to look at with them are really earth and venus. i wonder how the earth rovers spirit and opportunity are doing at exploring the barren wasteland that is earth. oh... i just yawned again... more proof of some kind of alien conspiracy... or maybe i am a part of the conspiracy but i forgot because of... i forget why i forgot, but i just yawned another time and feel quite tired now. it is strange how the sky is completely dark now, and it is not even 6:30 pm yet. anyway, it is time to put an end to this monstrous blog post once and for all. i yield myself such time as i may consume. i move that the blogosphere recess until 2009. all those in favor of the motion please rise. a sufficient number having arisen, the motion is adopted. i yield back the balance of my time. by order of the chair, the blogosphere is now in recess until 2009. <span style="font-style:italic;">*sound of gavel hitting against podium very loudly*</span>General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-70505937225322066192008-12-19T09:04:00.002-05:002008-12-19T13:05:44.058-05:00why i haven't been blogging much latelysince barack obama was elected, there has been a lot of debate among progressives about whether he is a sellout who isn’t really a progressive at all but a centrist like hillary clinton and many of the other people he has surrounded himself with since the election. some contend that he is a true progressive who is going to use these people to gain more credibility with the centrists and even some conservatives, and then use that to push through a truly progressive agenda. others say that now he is showing his true colors. a few of his choices have been genuine progressives (like his choice for secretary of labor) and his defense and transportation secretaries are actual republicans. the latest move by barack obama that has people more upset than ever is his choice of anti-gay crusader rick warren to give the opening prayer at his inauguration, which seems kind of odd for someone like barack obama to do, given that obama is supposedly a staunch supporter of gay rights. besides this obama-is-a-sellout stuff, there has been the scandal over the governor of illinois, rod blagojevich, and all sorts of people trying to connect that scandal to barack obama and other people on obama’s team like rahm emmanuel. i think all of this effort to tie barack obama into the scandal of that insane idiot rod blagojevich is pretty much bullshit, but i also think that since so many of the people in team obama are from chicago and illinois politics, there is bound to be at least one person among the bunch who is close to gov. blagojevich. i mean it would be ridiculous to expect every single person among the thousands working for obama to be completely ethical and not have any problems, but hopefully nobody important or high-ranking in the obama organization is involved in the blagojevich mess. right-wingers keep claiming rahm emmanuel is guilty of something regarding rod blagojevich, since their initial attempts at directly attacking barack obama on this have failed. since i do not actually know who is involved in this scandal, since i have absolutely nothing to do with it, i really do not know who is guilty and who is not, but it seems to me like people are going around jumping to conclusions. as for the obama-is-a-sellout thing, i really have not made up my mind on what i think about this. as a staunch progressive who cares about the issues, i really hope obama is one of us progressives, and i do have some amount of loyalty to him, having voted for him twice (once in the democratic primary and once in the general election). i am kind of taking a wait-and-see approach to see if barack obama really is a progressive or not, and i do not want to jump to any conclusions or take sides in this debate. the next time barack obama’s name will be on the ballot is in 4 years (assuming he runs for re-election), so there is plenty of time for me to watch him closely and make a determination as to whether i should continue to support him the next time around. for now, i still consider myself an obama supporter, and still have an obama bumper sticker on my car. i never considered him the “messiah” (something the right-wingers made up as a straw-man argument against obama), and i certainly don’t think he could magically solve all of our problems and give everyone a free pet unicorn (outdoing those who would give everyone a free pony). anyway, there is little point to blogging about how i am not sure about things and don’t exactly know what to think anymore. i am certainly glad the obama-biden ticket beat the mccain-palin ticket, since the mccain-palin team would have continued the policies of george w. bush and probably been even more incompetent. and i am still staunchly opposed to the republicans and everything they stand for. but as for barack obama, i still don’t know exactly what part of the democratic party he belongs to. i was hopeful when i heard the right-wingers call him the most liberal member of the senate and accuse him of being a socialist. but unfortunately, it seems he is probably not as left-wing as i had hoped. in a country that has been brought to ruin by right-wing policies, ruining our economy through deregulation and endless tax cuts while wasting innocent lives and hundreds of billions of dollars on an unjustified and poorly executed war, where the government has epically failed responding to disasters like hurricane katrina through the idiocy of unqualified political hacks in charge of important government agencies, we need a radical change in how government is run. we need a government that is actually run by competent people who know what the hell they are doing, and who will actually make things better instead of worse. and i, for one, think that progressives are the ones with the right ideas to fix everything, and if obama governs as a centrist, halfway between progressives and conservatives, i doubt it would be anywhere near as successful as an actual progressive government. the administration of george w. bush and the 12-year-long control of congress by republicans (between the 1994 election and the 2006 election) both proved that conservative ideas do not work in practice and that conservatives are morally bankrupt. they think that hating people who are different from them demonstrates their moral righteousness. just consider all their hatred towards homosexuals, illegal immigrants, liberals, atheists, muslims, french people, mexicans, the chinese, the people of india, and pretty much the rest of humanity other than people exactly like them. note that i left black people, hispanics, asians, native americans, and other racial minorities off the list of people conservatives hate, and i also left off women; i am being charitable by not accusing them of racism and sexism, which i could easily have done, since there is a lot less overt racism and sexism than hatred towards the groups of people i actually did mention. i also left off hatred of jews... hating jews is very politically incorrect in the united states and nobody in politics does it anymore, at least not openly, so there is little evidence of it other than from right-wing fundamentalist preachers. anyway, there is no way in hell i am voting for any republican for any office at all for quite some time, unless the republicans completely shape up. i only once voted for a republican who was not running unopposed, and that was for the new york state comptroller in 2006 because i thought alan hevesi was a crook; that same year i voted for eliot spitzer for governor, hillary clinton for senator, michael arcuri for congress, and everyone else i voted for that year was a democrat too except for the state comptroller. there have been a few times i actually voted for green party candidates, actually. when h. carl mccall was running for governor against george pataki, i voted for the green party candidate for governor... that is the only time i voted for a green party candidate when there was also a democrat running for the same office. that was the 2002 election, and it was at a time i was completely disgusted with the democratic party for being a bunch of inept nitwits who went along with whatever president bush said instead of acting like a real opposition party. howard dean’s presidential campaign is what brought me back to the democratic party, since out of all the 2004 presidential candidates, only howard dean, dennis kucinich, and al sharpton were willing to vocally criticize president george w. bush and the war in iraq, and the rest of the candidates were a bunch of centrist losers. i did vote for john kerry (as the lesser of 2 evils basically), but he lost because he was a centrist loser who had failed to staunchly oppose president bush and the war in iraq consistently. the 2004 election is when i became involved volunteering for the broome county democratic party, since i thought it was so important that george w. bush be defeated that i had to become involved. but i have always been somewhat to the left of the democratic party in general, and i am basically someone with the politics of dennis kucinich, who was my initial choice for the 2008 presidential election. i actually voted for kucinich in the 2004 democratic primary since howard dean was already out of the race, and the “dean scream” had made me embarrassed for howard dean, plus my politics were always closer to kucinich than dean; i just had been a howard dean supporter because i thought howard dean was a hell of a lot more electable than dennis kucinich. anyway, this time around, i switched from kucinich to obama in early january, but i am still someone much to the left of obama, a staunch progressive who wants real change and not just people with d’s after their names instead of r’s who are indeed quite a bit different from the r’s but not anywhere near as much as i would want. and barack obama is definitely to the left of hillary clinton, which he proved time and time again throughout the debates and the primaries and caucuses when they were campaigning against each other. i am definitely glad hillary clinton is not the president-elect, since the clintons are pretty much just bush lite. certainly she would be better than john mccain, and all those wacky republicans like mitt romney and mike huckabee would be even worse than john mccain. the only republican candidate who was better than john mccain was ron paul, although i do disagree with him on many issues. ron paul agrees with me on many issues that no mainstream politician like barack obama would ever agree with me on. we both agree on legalizing victimless crimes, which would help downsize the prison-industrial complex. but ron paul has economic views and views on the size of government that i am diametrically opposed to; he wants to deregulate everything, have completely free-market economics, and eliminate the vast majority of government programs, including social security. personally, i don’t like social security either, because it is paid for by a regressive tax and people who had higher incomes when they worked collect higher benefits than people who had lower incomes. social security is far too regressive and needs to be replaced with a progressive system, one that gives more money to the poor and less to the rich, one that taxes the rich more and the poor less. the gap between the rich and poor has been steadily increasing for decades in our country because of right-wing economic policies, and the middle class is being destroyed and most people are gradually becoming poor (not necessarily beggars on the street or homeless, but rather not making much money, or unemployed). until recently, the lack of money by a large portion of our population and the negative savings rate was not hurting the economy too much because those people easily got credit and could borrow lots of money to buy things they could not afford. but now, the credit markets have collapsed and there is less money to go around (money put in banks gets lent out and this has a multiplier effect on the money supply, so the actual amount of money in the economy greatly exceeds the amount of money that physically exists as paper currency or coins, but the recent banking and lending collapse has led to a sharp decline in this multiplier of the money supply). ultimately, the problem was that americans spent more money than they had, because real incomes adjusted for inflation have been decreasing for the average person since the start of the george w. bush administration, while things like college, gasoline, and houses had their prices skyrocket. now gasoline and houses have gotten cheaper than they were a few months or a year ago, but college is more expensive than ever. without good education, people will not be able to make much money unless they become very skilled in particular trades. with the collapse of the auto industry and domestic manufacturing, jobs that do not require education are being lost at an alarming rate at the same time that education is becoming ridiculously unaffordable. we have a lot of problems and barack obama and the enlarged democratic majorities in the house of representatives and the senate need to work together to fix everything, and we need to prevent the republicans from any obstructionism. the republicans have already done their best in the past month to try to destroy our domestic automobile industry, especially with the vote in the u.s. senate on the auto bailout bill. this is shamefully unpatriotic of them, since the republicans are now promoting the idea of just having foreign companies make cars, since the foreign companies employ non-union workers and the american companies employ unionized workers. the republicans are being downright evil with regard to their attempts to destroy our domestic auto industry in order to score some cheap political points against the labor union movement. so, while i have somewhat mixed feelings towards barack obama but still support him, i completely oppose all of the republicans in the federal government. the republicans want to make a horrible economic situation much worse; that is now their stated agenda, since they have openly said that they want to destroy our nation’s automobile industry because of their hatred for labor unions. i think we need more labor unions and we need to save our domestic industries from destruction. labor unions bring employees higher wages and better benefits; even republicans acknowledge that fact. that is exactly what our economy needs right now: higher wages and better benefits for the people who do have jobs, so people will have enough money to spend it and keep the economy going. i hope barack obama is on the same page with me, and that the change he brings will actually be in the right direction and go far enough to fix things. but i cannot be sure about anything, or trust any politician completely. i am somewhat of a fan of new york state governor david paterson, but i do not completely trust him either. i am not naive enough to put complete trust in anyone. that would be utterly foolish. i don’t even trust myself. in fact, i probably trust myself less than i trust most other people, because i know firsthand how unreliable i am and how often i fail to come through on things that i want to do or promise to do. and while i do have higher standards for other people than i have for myself, this is mainly because i consider myself to be worthless scum and i have very low self-esteem. i have always been quite thin-skinned when it comes to insults from other people, since my own opinion of myself is much more negative than the opinions of my harshest critics other than myself. but lately i have become more thick-skinned regarding insults, mainly because i think very little of the people insulting me and think that they are even worse scum of the earth than me, and that everything they say is complete bullshit. it is kind of strange how someone like barack obama can bring out the latent positivity in me and actually make me feel good about stuff. my dog fluffems has the same ability to cheer me up. i actually like fluffems better than anyone, including barack obama, although i do know that fluffems is just a stupid dog and is pretty much clueless about everything. that is part of the appeal of a dog like fluffems: the dog is friendly and very loving and kind towards you, showing you a hell of a lot more love and affection than any human ever does, while at the same time being dependent on you, much dumber than you, and generally inferior to you. so you can feel all warm and fuzzy and loved while at the same time feeling superior and like you are better than someone else. and it just makes you want to show that little dog as much love as you can, and keep them safe from danger because the little doggie is too stupid to know how to avoid danger on its own (things like going out in roads full of cars). if another living creature like my dog fluffems shows me some love, i am the most loving person in the world, but this does not happen very often, which is what makes it all the more special when it does happen. i know that some humans like my parents love me, but they do it in this annoying human way that i can’t stand, and it just pisses me off. i don’t like being constantly lectured, bossed around, talked down to like i am a retard despite the fact that i am smarter than 99% of people on standardized tests, and then being expected to feel gratitude for this “display of love”. sure, i have heard of “tough love”; it is what my parents give me every day. i find it quite annoying, and while i am sure they love me a great deal, i wish they would find a better way to show it, one that is more like how the dog shows it. when my dog displays love for me, it is pure unadulterated love and affection, without any criticism, lecturing, or crap like that to piss me off. my dog worships me like a god, which makes sense because dog spelled backwards is god. when i am at my job and my boss tells me to do something, i do it, and i am not annoyed at my boss or anything. my boss has to put up with me being lazy, unreliable, and inefficient, and still likes me and i still make money. and my boss does not go around lecturing me all the time. when my boss tells me i am doing something wrong, it is very short and to the point. with my parents, sometimes when they tell me i am doing something wrong, the argument lasts an hour or two and is very bitter, and i end up quite upset and completely unwilling to cooperate with them because i feel so alienated from them. but if my boss at work tells me to do something, i do it, because my boss is not going to lecture me for hours about what a failure i am at life and how i need to completely change how i do everything, and tell me a huge long list of things to do and expect me to memorize them, all while constantly criticizing and insulting me but claiming it is “love”. look, i love my parents, my sister, my extended family, all of them... but not in the same way i love the dog. the love between a human and a dog is the love between a superior person who is dominant and an inferior beast who is submissive. but the submissive beast that adores its master is, in a way, the better of the two, because the dog’s affection is pure, untainted by a brain capable of thinking or speaking in words. words are the weapons which destroy human relationships and corrupt our society, but animals do not understand words and are still innocent and pure from the malevolent influence of human language. a dog may be able to obey simple commands, but that does not mean the dog can combine words together to understand abstract concepts. every evil dictator came to power using words and ideas (unless they inherited the throne like in monarchy, but monarchy is also based on words and ideas). every evil dictator throughout history has given out commands to kill people and/or do other human rights abuses through words and ideas, communicating with human language. these evils are not found among animals, who only kill when they need food to eat to survive, or if they feel they need to defend themselves from another animal that they think is going to kill them. among the animals, there are no adolf hitlers or josef stalins or pol pots. there are no terrorist animals. there are no animals who start pre-emptive wars based on lies and then mismanage them. animals do not mismanage the economy or defraud investors or get golden parachutes after making their companies bankrupt. and animals do not have pointless arguments that go on for hours. animals do not use words as weapons to attack your self-esteem. animals cannot lie because they can’t even speak or write in the first place. so i like my dog better than people. can you imagine an animal like my dog voting or even having an opinion on politics or religion or any issue at all? it is ridiculous. animals do not have opinions on stuff like that because none of it makes sense to their simple brains. because they are uncorrupted by all of the propaganda we humans put out, animals are innocent and pure from all of the ideology and spin and biased news coverage. so no matter what your politics are or what your religious beliefs are, you can still find a dog who will love you unconditionally and show you nothing but adoration and affection. in this way, a dog is all things to all people. this is what politicians like barack obama try to achieve, but they can never do it better than a dog. a dog has zero ideas, so it is impossible to disagree with a dog on anything. barack obama is trying to be inclusive and have people from all sides of the political spectrum in his administration, and a lot of people like me are getting somewhat ticked off about that. but if my dog went around being friendly to republicans and jumping up on them and wagging his tail and licking their faces, i would be happy about his behavior, because i know that he is too stupid to understand any of their ideas and he is just a friendly animal who loves everyone. that is why my dog is a role model for me, because i have found that all of my intelligence is oftentimes more of a curse than a blessing. intelligence certainly does not help that much in getting along with other people, because it just helps you think up lots of reasons why you are right and they are wrong, so you can get in an argument with them and you both end up pissed off at each other. the people i get along best with nowadays are attractive female co-workers and my boss, since i am extremely careful not to say anything to those people that might get them even slightly upset with me, and i am very careful to completely avoid anything even remotely close to a conflict with any of them. unfortunately, this means i avoid asking girls out, because i know asking girls out sometimes leads to negative reactions, and i do everything possible to avoid negative reactions from girls i like. with other people, i am not as careful with what i say, and so i end up not getting along with them as well. this problem is worst with my parents, since if you have an argument that is over an hour and this happens on a regular basis, not everything you say is nice, by any means. i do not know how to relate to my parents, since all we ever do is argue, and it is so tiresome. i think it is a bad idea for adults to live with their parents under any circumstances. i have found it to be very bad, since parents cannot avoid being parents and treating their offspring like little kids, even if their offspring are graduates of ivy league universities. yes, i may have asperger’s syndrome and panic disorder, but i have a very high iq and i do not appreciate being treated like some kind of retard who has no clue how to do anything. i know for a fact that i am smarter than 99% of people, because i have taken many standardized tests over the years and almost gotten that result. being treated like i am an idiot pisses me off immensely, especially since i know that the people who are treating me like an idiot are dumber than i am. i only know one person who is smarter than me, this really fat guy i went to college with who has an iq that is probably around 10 points higher than mine. and, like me, he has a few mental health problems and has not been able to find a good job either. so intelligence is not really that great of an asset to have, unless you are actually able to use it to become successful somehow. but i just hate the way i am treated like an idiot, like i am a little kid and not 26 years old, and it is completely disrespectful towards me, so i feel no need to show respect towards those who disrespect me, and that just leads to more long arguments. when i am not at work, i mostly stay in my bedroom to avoid other people, when i am not playing with my dog or watching tv. i have good reason to avoid other people: i can’t stand being around them if they keep disrespecting me. i just want to get the hell away from them and have them leave me alone. my life and my problems are none of their damned business, especially if all they have to offer is criticism and insults. the worst thing is when my parents bother me when i am in my bedroom, because i like to think my bedroom is a safe place where i can avoid other people and not have them bug me with their stupid bullshit. i would really like to live on my own but i am dirt poor. there have been a few times i tried to get a good job, although i have not done it in quite awhile. for quite some time, i have not felt like searching for a new job, because it is so depressing and i hate doing it so much. i do not like being bossed around and told how to live my life by people who think they are better than me, and if they tell me to do something like apply for a better job, i sure as hell don’t want to give them the satisfaction of winning by doing what they told me to do. i cannot afford to live on my own, and my parents sometimes threaten to kick me out, and my response is always, good, i want to leave, i hate living here, but i can’t afford to live on my own. and as for getting a better job, i am just hopeless. i hate applying for jobs, i hate job interviews, i hate waiting for a response from the company and then always either getting a letter of rejection or not getting any response at all. it has happened so many times. the only jobs i have ever gotten are bad ones that i can’t stand that pay next to nothing and do not look good on a résumé. my current job is not entirely bad, though, because there are some nice people at work. i guess one of my problems is i just don’t have any friends i ever hang out with or regularly keep in contact with anymore. and another problem is my constant insomnia and sleep deprivation despite being alone in my bedroom most of the day. i have heard that exercise is good (my parents only tell me to do it all the friggen time) but i absolutely hate exercise, and the weather outside here is practically as cold as an antarctic winter, or at least it seems that way to me, and i hate cold weather even more than exercise. there are many things i can’t stand that i have to put up with on a daily basis, but some (like exercise or applying for jobs or doing my laundry) i can usually avoid, so i do. this is what my parents always argue with me about. but i think if i did more things that i hate and that make me miserable, i would be even more miserable than i am now, and what would be the point of living if instead of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, i were pursuing pain and avoiding pleasure? i do not think a life of pursuing pain and avoiding pleasure is worth living, so i pursue pleasure and avoid pain, since that is the only way to have any chance at happiness. the last time i tried really hard to get a good job, i ended up in the psychiatric ward of a hospital for being suicidal. i do not want to repeat the same mistakes again. barack obama talks about hope a lot, and it is something i like to hear, because i have not had any hope for years, and despite all my cynicism and pessimism, he has given me some hope. but not hope for my own life, just hope for my country and the world. my own life, for the time being, seems to be a lost cause, so i try to avoid ever thinking about it because it is too depressing, and instead i think about things that make me happy, like fun video games or my wonderful dog or how attractive certain girls are or how the democrats finally won everything this time around. i worked in a laundromat a few years back (summer of 2002 i think)... worst job i ever had, the place was like a sweatshop, i completely hated it, and ever since then i have hated laundry more than ever (although i even hated laundry prior to that job). exercise... it is painful and exhausting and often it has triggered panic attacks because of unpleasant or unusual physical sensations it has made me feel in my body, which make me a hypochondriac thinking i have some weird disease and am going to die. anything that leads to panic attacks is something i try to avoid. asking out girls... i have almost always been rejected and it is very emotionally painful for me, and there was only one time i had sex and it was absolutely horrible since i was not attracted to that specific girl and i completely failed at sex, and then for a week or two i was not even attracted to females anymore because i was so disgusted and ashamed. i had sex 3 years ago i think, in november 2005 if i remember correctly. absolutely horrible. i hope to have sex in the future, but not the worst sex ever. only time i ever had it, it went completely wrong. that is just my luck. honestly, i have good reason to hate all the things i hate. i have reasons for everything. but some of my reasons are just stupid. and i hate people who are big enough assholes to point that out. i hate how, regardless of successes like being high school valedictorian and graduating cornell, pretty much everything else in life has seemed to never ever go my way, and everything always seems to go wrong for me. i know for damn sure barack obama can’t fix any of that shit. well, if he does an awesome job on the economy, maybe that would help me find a job, but it would probably only have a slight impact on me personally, because it would still be almost as hard to find a job, only very very slightly easier. it is a lot easier for me to care about issues affecting this country than to care about how awful everything in my life is going, because at least the united states of america is not a lost cause. maybe if i were not a pessimist i would not be a lost cause. but that is like asking a cat to be a dog, or asking the sun to be the moon. being a pessimist is part of who i am, the absolute core of my horrible identity and why i hate myself. without that, what do i have? i don’t know. being a self-hating pessimist is the only life i have ever known, ever since i was a little kid. how am i supposed to “change” or have “hope”? “yes we can”? no i can’t. sorry. i never bought into those silly slogans, because they just do not resonate with pessimists like me. goddammit i need to sleep. i hate this stupid blog. everything i have ever written for this stupid blog is complete crap. i hate blogs, they are nothing but stupid bullshit nobody cares about. now go away and leave me alone. i am in a mood most foul, as is often the case, only this time, i cannot hide it any longer. sorry, maybe i will write a better blog post next time. i am leaving on a vacation to florida on sunday (and i get to take my dog along)! i am both looking forward to it with hope and dread, because i suck at getting ready for things or packing for trips. i can’t wait for the vacation, but i have to get ready for it, and there is nothing to do in florida, at least not the part i am going to with my parents. and will i be able to get along with them? it is so hard!!! i guess i had fun on the vacation to europe i went on with my parents this summer. you see, my parents are not that bad. i am the bad one. oh well. whatever. my dog will be along to cheer me up. sometimes i wish i were in an insane asylum, but i am told whenever i ask a psychologist or psychiatrist that i am in fact “sane”. quite a disappointment, not what i wanted to hear. like is like that <s>sometimes</s> 100% of the time. if it weren’t for my dog... well, i would probably just spend more time on the internet or playing video games. i have to go to a stupid pointless appointment this afternoon with a guy who is trying to help me find a job when i don’t really want to apply for any or go though any more of those awful job interviews. i don’t like having to see him, or my psychologist, or any other sorts of appointments. i don’t like going to the support group for my asperger’s syndrome. i just want to stay in my room and be by myself and only come out when i need to eat or go to the bathroom. i need to pack for my stupid trip. once i get there i will be bored the whole time. at least i won’t have to go to my job while i am on vacation, and the weather won’t be as cold. but i will have those 2 annoyances to come back to once vacation ends after 3 weeks. dammit, i am so annoyed about everything. i would even say that perhaps i am stressed out, except my anti-anxiety medication seems to be preventing me from stressing out. that is a good thing, because at least i am not a nervous wreck with panic attacks like i was earlier this year. i don’t feel like going to my appointment today, or going to work today, or going to the support group tomorrow. i have to do all my laundry before i can pack my clothes and leave for florida on sunday. writing this blog is boring. i am going to try to sleep now. it will not work, i will just lie in bed awake, and then i will have to go to a stupid pointless appointment, and then my stupid pointless job. and maybe i can have a stupid pointless argument or two in between. yeah, i guess i am stressed out. if only i had more sleep... then i would feel better emotionally. constant insomnia takes its toll on the emotions. i need to pack. go away. i am going to try to sleep now and completely fail and just lie in bed motionless with my eyes closed and not accomplish anything except making myself miserable. this happens all the time. try living a day of my life, see if you like it. fuck.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-84245990700737298662008-11-27T06:32:00.002-05:002008-11-27T08:15:31.537-05:00russia was right after allthis summer we witnessed a war between russia and the tiny former soviet republic of georgia. the u.s. media portrayed this as russian aggression against a small, defenseless country, and proof that russia was still the evil empire that it was back when it was the soviet union. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/26/georgia-started-russiange_n_146666.html">well it turns out russia did not start the war.</a> the man who was georgia’s ambassador to russia until they ended diplomatic relations this summer, erosi kitsmarishvili, has revealed the truth about this affair, something i have been wondering about for months. i did not trust either the russian or the georgian side of the story, and they both seemed like liars, but at first i thought that the georgian side, as told by georgian president mikhail saakashvili, was much more plausible than the russian side of the story.<br /><br />south ossetia and abkhazia are both regions of georgia populated by ethnic minorities, ossetians and abkhazians rather than georgians. ever since a war in the early 1990s after the soviet union collapsed, a war in which georgia fought against south ossetians and abkhazians, they have been wanting to become independent from georgia so they can unify with russia, because the people there are afraid of georgians and want protection from russia, a country they view as their protector and ally. after that war, russian peacekeeping troops were sent into those 2 breakaway regions to protect the civilian populations from georgian aggression. however, those 2 regions were still officially part of the nation of georgia, although they had their own separate governments and were not under the authority of the georgian government. south ossetia and abkhazia were all ready de facto independent countries ever since that war in the early 90s, and their status as part of the nation of georgia was only a technicality. this is similar to the kurds in northern iraq: they gained independence from the iraqi government of saddam hussein in the early 90s after the united states invaded iraq in the first gulf war to liberate kuwait. the kurds had their own government in northern iraq and saddam hussein had no authority or power there. after the united states invaded iraq again in 2003 and overthrew saddam hussein, the kurds continued to have their own de facto independent nation of kurdistan in northern iraq, and to this day they are still not under the authority of iraq’s central government. kurdistan being part of iraq is just a formal technicality, and the current iraqi central government has no more authority there than saddam hussein did.<br /><br />anyway, the president of georgia had been wanting for years to reconquer south ossetia and abkhazia, and put them back under the authority of the georgian central government. russia, on the other hand, still had peacekeeping troops there to protect the civilian population. the georgian president, mikhail saakashvili, made one of the worst miscalculations in military history when he decided to invade and conquer the 2 breakaway provinces. russia does not take too kindly to its troops being attacked, and the civilians in both provinces were already strongly pro-russia and anti-georgia. being attacked by the georgian military reinforced the views of the civilians there even more, and the russian military decided that it would not let some puny, insignificant country like georgia get away with killing its peacekeeping troops and conquering people who were under russian protection.<br /><br />naturally, russia did a bit of overkill with their military response, completely destroying the georgian military and advancing their troops well into georgia proper. advancing their troops into georgia proper, to positions near the georgian capital of tbilisi, was a show of strength meant to demonstrate russia’s complete military superiority, and how russia could easily conquer all of georgia if they really wanted to, but russia decided against such a move. this show of strength was meant to completely demoralize the georgians and make them realize they had absolutely no chance of defeating the russian military or retaking the breakaway provinces of south ossetia and abkhazia.<br /><br />in the end, the result was a lot of innocent people on both sides being killed, and plenty of atrocities on both sides. but the war was instigated by the georgian president mikhail saakashvili, who is hardly a democratic hero. he is more of an oppressive despot, although he did win office through a democratic election. then again, russian president dimitry medvedev and russian prime minister vladimir putin both were democratically elected as well. naturally, none of these elections was entirely democratic, and both russia and georgia have some problems with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and clean elections. both countries are full of corruption. neither country is led by people who are heroic or morally good in any sense.<br /><br />but the georgian president proved himself to be a lousy ally to the united states with his complete failure in the war he started. what’s more, the georgian president is close friends with john mccain and american neoconservatives, and he was counting on them for support. john mccain presumptuously said “we are all georgians now,” claiming to speak for all americans. well it turns out john mccain was dead wrong. morally speaking, georgia is even worse than russia, and from a strategic standpoint, it would be much more valuable for the united states to ally itself with a big, strong, important country like russia than to ally with a tiny, insignificant, powerless country like georgia. russia has nuclear weapons and they are vital in dealing with iran and north korea as well as in combating terrorism and the potential for nuclear weapons to fall into the wrong hands. russia has huge amounts of natural resources, especially the fossil fuels that we are so dependent upon nowadays. russia has lately been showing off its support for cuba and venezuela, and threatening us if we deploy a missile defense shield in eastern europe. i say it is time to end this silly hostility towards russia and help russia modernize and become a prosperous democratic ally to us and to europe. i think we should let russia join the european union and nato. if russia were to join the european union and nato, it would permanently change things and transform russia into a pro-western democracy and a dependable ally for the united states. just look at the relationship between france and germany. for centuries, the french and the germans (who were called prussians before prussia expanded to become germany) were bitter enemies, constantly at war with each other. france and great britain were also staunch enemies for centuries. but starting with world war 1, france and the united kingdom (which was previously great britain) became staunch allies. germany and france were bitter enemies up until the end of world war 2, and then germany was divided and conquered by the victors of world war 2. it has not been until recently that france and germany have come to terms and become allies, but nowadays, those 2 nations are the closest pair of allies in the world, showing that nations really can overcome long-standing differences. in the 1990s, the united states and russia were on very good terms and were allies, and president bill clinton of the united states was best friends with president boris yeltsin of russia. bill clinton and boris yeltsin were like BFFs (best friends forever). it is rather tragic that this budding friendship between the united states and russia came to a close after george w. bush took office. sure, george w. bush got along with vladimir putin at first, but this did not last very long, because the russians realized that the neoconservatives in america wanted complete world domination with the united states as the undisputed sole superpower in the world, and the united states was turning russia’s neighbors (such as georgia and ukraine) against russia. just as the united states has for many years tried to control all the countries in north, south, and central america, russia has always tried to control its neighbors, especially the former soviet republics. if we condemn russian imperialism without acknowledging our own imperialism here in the western hemisphere, that is pure hypocrisy. when russia lends support to our current enemies in the western hemisphere such as cuba and venezuela, they are really just doing the same thing we have been doing to them, except nowhere near as badly. our foreign policy has been to threaten the national security of what is today the 3rd most powerful country in the world, russia, (after the united states and china). the russians react to threats to their national security the exact same way we amerians do. they are no different from us. we should put aside our petty differences and work together. the united states cannot rule the world as a single superpower, but if we combine forces with the other most powerful nations on earth, we will be much more powerful and much better able to deal with whatever problems occur anywhere in the world. we have been doing this with china, and our relations with the chinese are better than ever, despite all the evils of the chinese government and how awfully the chinese government treats its own people. if we can be allies with china, then why on earth can’t we be allies with russia, a country that is much less evil than china? russia, unlike china, is actually a democracy, and their human rights record, while bad, is nowhere near as horrible as china’s. and why can’t we be friends with all the nations of the americas, including current enemies like cuba and venezuela? if we can have diplomatic relations with communist nations like china and vietnam, and if we were able to have diplomatic relations with the soviet union and soviet satellite states back during the cold war, why must we stubbornly remain enemies with cuba and venezuela? it does not make any logical sense. if we really want to rule the western hemisphere, we should put aside our differences with the few nations that refuse our hegemony, and have friendly relations with their leaders, treating them with respect and like equals, not like inferiors who must obey our commands or else. the whole point of things like the war on terror is for all the nations of the world to work together and cooperate towards a common goal, which, in the case of the war on terror, is defeating all the terrorists and eliminating them from the face of this globe. how can we achieve victory in things like the war on terror if we constantly fight with other nations and refuse to cooperate with them, when stuff like the war on terror requires close international cooperation? in the case of russia, we need the russians and the russians need us. the 2 world wars and the cold war showed the foolishness of nations fighting against one another... wars by definition involve the mass slaughter of innocent people, all because of the silly, petty differences of the leaders of the nations of the world. we won both world wars and the cold war, but that is no guarantee that we will win wars we fight in the future. we are not doing terribly well in the war on terror that is going on right now, for instance. the only way to defeat the terrorists is to work together with all the other nations of the world, including nations that we have historically been enemies with. anyone who opposes working together with other nations is basically advocating letting the terrorists win.<br /><br />just yesterday, india suffered a major terrorist attack. the indian government seems to be rather inept at combating terrorism and at intelligence operations. obviously we need much closer cooperation with india, in order to help them deal with situations like this. this is just one example of a nation we need better cooperation with. india’s neighbor and long-time enemy, pakistan, is also a nation we need much more cooperation with. pakistan is perhaps the world’s biggest breeding ground for terrorism, despite being an ally of the united states, and osama bin laden and the top al qaeda leadership is believed to be hiding out inside pakistan. it is likely that pakistanis were responsible for the terrorist attacks in india. we need to work together with pakistan to eliminate the terrorists in their country. the pakistani government is most likely going to be cooperative; the current president of pakistan had his wife benazir bhutto assassinated by terrorists less than a year ago. i am sure he is out for revenge, and luckily the people who killed his wife are the same people we are after: al qaeda and the taliban. another way to help solve this problem of terrorism in that part of the world would be to help india and pakistan achieve peace with each other and sign a treaty that would finally resolve all of their long-standing disputes. international cooperation is really the key to defeating terrorism.<br /><br />and as for georgia, we should certainly continue to cooperate with them. georgia might not be a perfect country, and they might have started a stupid war this summer that backfired on them horribly, but they are our friends, and we should not completely abandon them. yes, it turns out russia was telling the truth about the war and georgia was lying, but we need to cooperate with all the nations, even ones led by murderous liars like mikhail saakashvili. once we have all the nations of the world cooperating with us, we can help to overthrow bad leaders in other countries and replace them with better ones, and we will have plenty of cooperation and not get stuck doing it unilaterally. with the cooperation of russia, china, japan, and south korea, we could probably overthrow the government of north korea, and reunify korea into a single country, led by the pro-western democratic government of south korea. when george bush, sr. invaded kuwait to push saddam hussein’s iraqi occupation forces out, he had the rest of the world supporting him. that is why the first gulf war went so much better than the second one that we are fighting now. this time around, the rest of the world opposes our war in iraq, and the few nations who do support us are still almost all unwilling to help us out in any meaningful way. only the united kingdom has really helped us out significantly in that war. that is part of why the war in iraq has been such a fiasco. of course, there was also tremendous mismanagement under donald rumsfeld, and the war was never justified in the first place, since they kept changing the justifications for the war once each one they were using turned out to be false. there were no weapons of mass destruction, saddam hussein was not a threat to us in any way, and we completely failed to understand all of the tensions between sunnis, shiites, and minority religions or between arabs, kurds, and other ethnic groups. it is a war that was based on lies, that was horribly mismanaged, and that barack obama is going to have to end, with the help of dubya’s 2nd defense secretary, bob gates, who will be staying on to work for obama. and in the case of georgia, our government gave georgia mixed signals that they misinterpreted as a green light to invade south ossetia and abkhazia. we need to be much more careful about the signals we give to other countries and not accidentally green-light any foolish military misadventures. of course, the war between georgia and russia was not really our fault, because mikhail saakashvili is completely insane. but in a way it is sort of our fault, because we are the ones who put him in power in the first place (and by we i mean the united states government that we elected).General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23263616.post-78929584972777220522008-11-08T07:21:00.002-05:002008-11-08T09:02:12.896-05:00regarding holy joeholy joe, a.k.a. senator joseph lieberman from connecticut, of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_for_Lieberman">connecticut for lieberman party</a>, has been in charge of the u.s. senate’s homeland security committee ever since democrats took control of the senate. part of the reason is that the democrats needed his support in order to have a majority in the senate. if he had caucused with the republicans, they would have been able to form a majority based on the tie-breaking vote of vice president dick cheney. holy joe, as he is nicknamed, is a former democrat who ran for vice president in the year 2000 as al gore’s running mate. he left the democratic party in 2006 and founded the connecticut for lieberman party to run for office that year, after he was beaten in the democratic primary for senator by ned lamont. then holy joe went on to win the general election in 2006, with most of his support coming from republicans, and most democrats voted for ned lamont. however, republicans overwhelmingly supported holy joe, and lots of democrats (but less than half) also supported him, as well as a majority of independents. so anyway, since being re-elected in 2006 to a 6-year term in the u.s. senate, joe lieberman has caucused with the democrats, helping harry reid be majority leader instead of minority leader, and he forced the democrats to give him concessions in exchange for his support, such as putting him in charge of the homeland security committee. most democrats in the senate do not put any conditions on their support for the democratic party, but then again, joe lieberman is not a democrat anymore, even though in 2004 he ran for president of the united states as a democrat. anyway, when he ran for re-election in 2006, joe lieberman made 2 very important promises repeatedly: he promised to caucus with the democrats and support having them be in charge of the senate, and he promised to support the democratic presidential nominee for the 2008 presidential election. many prominent democrats offered their support to joe lieberman in 2006 in the primary against ned lamont, including both bill and hillary clinton, barack obama, and pretty much all the other big names, and joe lieberman STILL lost the primary, despite all that support from the party establishment. soon after being re-elected, joe lieberman decided to support john mccain’s presidential campaign, despite john mccain being a republican. joe lieberman, by doing this, was clearly and openly violating a campaign promise he made to the voters of connecticut to support the democratic nominee for president in 2008. since that time, joe lieberman has very often spoken in favor of john mccain for president, criticized barack obama quite harshly, and he even gave the keynote address at the republican national convention earlier this year. now that the 2008 elections are over, the people have spoken and have overwhelmingly rejected republican rule, electing barack obama president by a huge margin in the electoral college, and picking up a number of senate seats. at this point in time, the democrats have enough senate seats to render joe lieberman irrelevant. there is absolutely no need to give in to holy joe’s demands to be in charge of the homeland security committee or some other powerful committee. he has consistently praised john mccain and other republicans and criticized barack obama and other democrats. while his voting record on issues other than the war in iraq and national security is quite liberal, his public statements and behavior show that he is much closer to the republicans than the democrats. it is ridiculous for him to demand to be in charge of a powerful committee or else he will leave and join the opposition minority republican party where he will have no power. and, as someone who is liberal on most issues, i doubt the republican party will have much taste for having someone like him among their ranks, and they will want someone more conservative to replace him. as a practical matter, the republicans are probably smart enough not to do that, and they would probably keep him if he switched to republican, and have him run for re-election in 2012 as a republican, whereas in the democratic party he has no future after 2012, since most democrats hate his guts at this point. so, as for holy joe, if he wants a career after 2012, it might be a good idea to switch to the republican party, regardless of whether the democrats let him be in charge of a powerful committee, since he is unlikely to win another election in connecticut if he tries to run as a democrat. holy joe was probably rooting for john mccain to win because, among other reasons, he thought he might get a cabinet post, and he was actually john mccain’s top pick to be vice presidential nominee until steve schmidt vetoed that. steve schmidt’s top pick was mitt romney, but john mccain vetoed that pick. they both settled on sarah palin, their mutual second choice that neither of them knew much about. anyway, back to holy joe... if the democrats kick him out, this may make them look bad, since they are supposed to be acting bipartisan and that is what barack obama’s message is. however, he is a traitor to the party, which he has proven hundreds of times he has said or done things to betray the democratic party, and he is not even in the party anymore. he can continue to caucus with the democrats if he wants, or caucus with the republicans if he wants. it is a free country, and that is a choice that is completely up to him. however, the democratic leadership in the senate can decide who to put in charge of committees, and their decisions should not be held hostage by rogue elements within the senate with ulterior motives to undermine the ruling party while pretending to be part of it. we have seen that there were rogue elements in the mccain-palin campaign that were actively working to undermine their own campaign through negative leaks to the press that were damaging to either sarah palin or john mccain. i have read online about the reasons for that, and primarily it is because most of these political operatives working for the mccain campaign were hired on after he won the primaries, and their loyalty is not to their 2008 candidate, john mccain, or to his running mate, sarah palin. many of them worked for other candidates such as mitt romney, mike huckabee, or others, and their loyalties still lie with those other candidates, and they saw the writing on the wall that john mccain was going to lose to barack obama in an electoral college landslide, so they decided to help out their favored candidate for the 2012 election by making sarah palin look bad. these operatives were worried that sarah palin might be a leading contender in 2012 when barack obama is up for re-election, and they wanted to destroy her politically so that mitt romney or mike huckabee or someone like that would be the republican candidate instead in 2012. these traitors to the mccain-palin campaign continue to leak bad things to the press, even after the campaign is over and john mccain has conceded the election, and they have said a lot of very negative things about sarah palin. my point is, in politics, you do not want to be working with traitors because traitors are traitors and they will betray you. john mccain is a traitor to the democratic party, something he has proven many, many times, and there is no reason for the democratic party to reward his anti-democratic, pro-republican behavior by putting him in charge of an important committee. there is absolutely no reason, however, for the democrats to even consider ejecting him from the democratic caucus or kicking him out, because he can freely choose which party to be a member of. however, he is not in a position to dictate terms to the democratic senate leadership, because he is in a minority of 1. there are not any other senators from the connecticut for lieberman party. joe lieberman can vote however he wants and say whatever he wants and campaign for whoever he wants, but in this country we also believe in personal responsibility and being held accountable for your actions, and we believe that if you are a traitor to an organization (such as the democratic party for example), it would be foolish for that organization to reward you for your traitorous actions by giving you a leadership position so you can actively undermine them from within. just as foolish as the libertarian party was by choosing bob barr as its presidential candidate this year, despite the fact that bob barr is not a libertarian and that for almost all of his political career, his views have been diametrically opposed to libertarian views on most issues important to libertarians. many libertarians gave up on the libertarian party because of the fiasco of them choosing bob barr as their nominee. look, should the democrats put someone like me in an important leadership position, such as white house press secretary? hell no. i would totally suck ass at something like that, and i am very bad at staying on message. i say what i think, which is not always what people want to hear or what the party line currently is. for instance, i don’t believe in god and i am a subgenius. that would not sit well with most people. also, i am very left-wing, and i don’t know whether i am a socialist or not, because i am unclear about what the word “socialist” actually means, after hearing it debated in the media a lot recently. i think i might be socialist but it depends on how you define it. i’ll put it this way: i am exactly as socialist as franklin delano roosevelt was, no more, no less. and by today’s standards, franklin delano roosevelt would be an ultra-left-wing radical. okay, i am a little more liberal than fdr; for instance, i would not have put japanese-americans in internment camps, because that was a very conservative thing to do. and i am more liberal than harry truman; i would not have dropped nuclear weapons on innocent civilians in hiroshima and nagasaki, because that was a very conservative thing to do. i am definitely more liberal and closer to a socialist than john f. kennedy, lyndon johnson, jimmy carter, bill clinton, or barack obama. that being said, i completely despise marxism and communism, as it is an authoritarian, totalitarian form of government where people have no rights. i believe in the socialism of the wealthy nations of europe, nations such as sweden or switzerland, or actually the vast majority of western and northern europe, as well as the great country of canada to our north. now, there are some reasons i do not prefer living in those countries to the united states: first of all, the english language is the only language that makes any sense whatsoever, so that eliminates all other countries except for the united kingdom and canada. ireland and australia are both wealthy countries but they are much more capitalist, like the united states. canada has cold weather and i hate cold weather, plus they have all that silly french-speaking nonsense. so maybe canada, but only the southernmost parts of it or some part where the weather is nice. but really, i think the best foreign country to live in for me personally would be the united kingdom. i have always thought the british are quite awesome. however, the united kingdom has a rather dysfunctional form of government, where they still have a queen and a house of lords and no constitution to guarantee people’s fundamental rights, and margaret thatcher privatized everything in the 1980s with her right-wing rule. so really, the united kingdom is not that great either, plus the economy in that country is not that good. in the end, i like the united states best, because we have the most freedom and the most prosperous economy, we are the most powerful nation on earth, i was born and raised here and love my country, and i share the same language and culture as the vast majority of americans, plus the only politics i really care about is american politics. so, while i think people in other countries have some good ideas that should probably be adopted here, that in no way means that i would rather move to those countries. as for the non-english-speaking countries, i have heard very wonderful things about sweden, for instance, from a friend of mine who is swedish. however, i have absolutely no intention of learning a foreign language and living in a country where english is not the main language. that for me is a complete deal-breaker. i am only willing to consider english-language countries, and i like the united states best. well ok, i forgot to mention another relatively prosperous english-speaking nation: new zealand. i have heard a lot of good things about new zealand, actually. i don’t know much at all about that country. it seems like an interesting place, certainly a nicer place to live than neighboring australia. then again, there is a tropical paradise that is part of the united states, namely hawaii, and i could go there instead. as for the continental united states, i am not too fond of the southeast, and i have been to florida many times and it is a rather messed up state. i also know that texas and california are quite messed up as well, in different ways than florida. new york is a very messed up state, too. so is alaska. it is hard to think of states that are actually run well, in a way that i agree with. ok so as far as florida is concerned, the 2000 election fiasco really turned me off on florida, and when i go there, things are just... well... kind of messed up. it is hard to explain exactly. there are a whole lot of old people, and florida is rather right-wing, and the air smells of sulfur when people use their sprinkler systems to water their lawns, and the weather gets a bit too hot in the summer (although going in the swimming pool solves that problem), and there are lots of problems with pesky insects because it never freezes in winter. as for texas... ugh... it is where george w. bush is from, and is a very very right-wing state, they have so many executions, and i just do not like texas at all. as for california, they obviously have very dysfunctional politics, their state is deeply in debt, they have tons of violent crime in the big cities, housing prices are astronomically high and completely unaffordable, and a lot of really good people have been laid off from silicon valley and those people know a lot about computers so i cannot really compete with them for jobs. as for new york, our state is also deeply in debt, our winters are cold, taxes are too high, the economy here is very bad, and everything is such a mess that most of the young people leave to find better jobs elsewhere. as for alaska, they have the coldest weather in the nation, their governor is sarah palin, and they most likely just re-elected senator ted stevens, a convicted felon 7 times over. alaska is very right-wing, they have the highest rates of rape of any state, and their state rips off the rest of the country in a very big way by taking in more money from the federal government than they pay to the federal government, per capita, more so than any other state. new york is at the opposite end of the spectrum, and is the arch-enemy of alaska, since we pay a lot more to the federal government each year in taxes than we get back in government spending, more so than any other state. new york has a debt of about $50 billion i think, and every year we send $87 billion more to the federal government than we get back. so if the federal government just treated new york equally to other states for 1 year, we could easily pay off our state’s entire debt and save up an extra $37 billion or so, and it would greatly benefit our state’s economy. similarly, the economy of alaska is heavily dependent on u.s. federal government spending that greatly exceeds taxes to the federal government paid by alaskans, and if the u.s. government treated alaska equally to other states, the entire economy of alaska would completely collapse, and everyone would either flee the state to someplace safe, or die there in the cold north. i am not sure which state i like best, but right now i am leaning towards hawaii, although i have never been there and do not really know that much about it. anyway, i have gotten off on a bit of a tangent there, talking about various potential places to live, and it is time to return to the main topic of joe lieberman. joe lieberman is someone most democrats despise and most republicans adore. it makes perfect sense for him to switch parties. he might as well just do it. it is ridiculous for him to make unreasonable demands to democratic party leaders after he openly betrayed the democratic party so many times, most notably with his keynote address at this year’s republican national convention. joe lieberman is not a bipartisan or nonpartisan kind of guy. he is fiercely partisan, pro-republican, and anti-democrat, something that is obvious every time he opens his lying mouth. we do not need him at all, and he has no relevance or importance whatsoever, but he can stay on our side if he really wants. it is time for joe lieberman to be cast into the dustbin of history along with the bush administration and the rest of the neocons who got us into the quagmire in iraq. i never want to see him on tv again or hear him mentioned in the news again. he is annoying and i hate him and want him to just go away and leave me alone when i am trying to watch or read the news without annoying characters like him popping into the news stories to distract me from the important things actually going on in the world. paris hilton is more relevant in the news than joe lieberman. that is how irrelevant i think he is. putting him in charge of an important committee is like putting the fox in charge of guarding the henhouse. he should just join the republicans officially so we can be done with all this drama over his traitorous judas/benedict arnold type behavior. and after he does that, i never want to see him or hear from him again in any news broadcasts or news stories. if he were a republican, his behavior would be understandable, because he acts just like any republican. the problem is that he keeps pretending not to be a republican, despite the fact that he has nothing but praise for republicans and nothing but criticism for democrats. imagine 2 sports teams going up against each other in a game, and 1 player on one of the teams keeps helping out the other team and helping them beat his own team. that is just wrong. if you do not support your own team, leave it and join the team you actually do support. this also applies to republicans who are disloyal to their party, such as colin powell or many other republicans who have endorsed or praised barack obama and/or criticized john mccain and/or sarah palin and/or george w. bush. i invite them all to join the democratic party, where they can express their disloyalty to the republicans even further. however, they had better learn to be loyal to the democrats once they have joined our team, or else our team will never make the playoffs.General Publichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00388046579679390691noreply@blogger.com5