the “dead to me” board

you may have wondered: is there really a “dead to me” board or just an “on notice” board? well, i have a “dead to me” board. nobody from the “on notice” board in my last post has managed to fuck up badly enough to get placed on the “dead to me” board yet. to be on the “dead to me” board, you have to be f.u.b.a.r., or fucked up beyond all recognition. this is the most elite status of suckiness the world has ever known. very few are qualified for this level: there can be only 8 (that we can see at any one time). here it is, your moment of zen:

my on notice board

ok everyone, if you are on the list below, you are on notice:



if you are on notice, i would heartily recommend doing something to shape up, before i move you from the “on notice” board to the “dead to me” board. a helpful reminder from your friends at numinousubiquity.blogspot.com. :-)

people are quite uninformed about democrats

it is amazing how uninformed people are about the alternatives the democrats are trying to offer to the republicans. especially republicans. you would think that the big right-wing blowhard pundits would want to know what the democrats are up to, what the left is planning on doing if it gets elected. but no. i was watching c-span today, and it was a panel discussion with a bunch of right-wing political pundits such as bob novak and the editors of national review and human events and some other top republican talking heads, in front of a very conservative audience. they have absolutely no idea what democrats believe in, or what democrats are about, or what democrats want to do once we get into power! they actually believe that all we plan on doing is raising taxes and letting the terrorists go ahead and defeat us. they really have no conception whatsoever of what we on the left have been doing. and they obviously have never looked at sites like dailykos.com or huffingtonpost.com; all they know about is right-wing websites like townhall.com, and they don’t even bother with the left-wing sites. these right-wing pundits were tremendously demoralized and were not even supportive of their own party anymore, saying that the republican leaders had basically screwed everything up. i basically agreed with most of what they said about the failings of the republican leadership. but for everyone’s reference, i would like to point out exactly what everyone seems to be so uninformed about:

the democrats have plans. those on the left, on the blogosphere, also have plans. a lot of people on the left-wing side of the spectrum have plans. and i think people ought to take a good look at these plans, regardless of where they stand on the issues. just remember, if anyone says the democrats do not have a plan for something, they are either lying or ignorant. we actually have plans for everything. democrats.gov has the official democratic plans for national security, the war in iraq, homeland security, etc. you can also find out more about the democrats’ plans at housedemocrats.gov and democrats.senate.gov, both of which go into more detail than democrats.gov. now some of these things might seem a bit lacking in specifics, or in substance, you might say... that is what i thought when i looked at them. but, that is because these are pretty much just things everyone in the democratic leadership agrees on, that they think most americans will agree with. and democrats.org also has some stuff about the democrats’ plans, although you should be aware that the democratic national committee is not really in charge of policy matters; the house and senate democratic leadership are the ones in charge of that. do not be deceived into thinking that democrats.com is an official democratic site, however. it is the site of bob fertik, a loyal democratic party operative. but he is quite a bit to the left of the party leadership. democrats.com is really of little importance, unless you want to find out a bit more about what left-wing democratic activists are up to. but there are better sites for that. afterdowningstreet.org is a site to coordinate activities in favor of impeaching bush and against the war in iraq. blackboxvoting.org is a site to tell people about the dangers of electronic voting machines that republicans allegedly use to steal elections. and thenation.com is the site of a very well-written left-wing democratic magazine where you can read most of the articles for free. or if you want people so far to the left that they oppose the democratic party because they think it is too right-wing, try counterpunch.org or znet, which are ultra-left-wing sites. now you might be thinking, ok, what about the centrist democrats? well they have a magazine that is sort of like a centrist alternative to the nation called the new republic, online at tnr.com. there is also dlc.org, the website of the democratic leadership council, an umbrella group for centrist democratic politicians and also a think-tank that puts out centrist policy proposals.

now, you might not know about this if you are a republican or if you are uninformed or whatever, but there is kind of a major divide in the democratic party between the left-wingers like me, and the centrists like those at the democratic leadership council and the new republic. this may spell trouble for the democrats after the election, and it has caused problems in the connecticut senate race. but, in most of the rest of the country, both the left-wingers and the centrists are fully onboard with supporting the democratic party in this fall’s elections. it is very telling that even the communist party is supporting the democrats in this fall’s elections. they are about as left-wing as you can get! and noam chomsky, the famous leftist intellectual from mit, has also been strongly advocating support for the democratic party, which is unusual for him. of course the communists and chomsky also supported the democrats in 2004, but prior to that election year, they both maintained that there was practically no difference between the 2 major parties in the united states. what is great about having the ultra-leftists on board is, some of them can volunteer for the democratic party and help the campaigns, but after the election, the candidates will throw them away like yesterday’s garbage, and they will go back to hating the democratic party again. one interesting far-left website that continues to maintain a hardline anti-democrat stance is the “world socialist web site”, wsws.org, a trotskyist website. it is fascinating how unpopular that sort of anti-democrat opinion has become on the left.

meanwhile, of course, a lot of centrists, moderates, independents, and even some conservatives are on board, supporting the democratic party in this fall’s elections. joe scarborough, an msnbc pundit who was once a republican congressman and still calls himself conservative, is now repositioning himself by pretty much doing everything he can to help the democrats while still maintaining the illusion that he is still a conservative republican. and, watching the panel discussion of the right-wing pundits that included robert novak, i saw that most of them had pretty much lost interest in doing anything to help the republicans, and they felt really let down by their own party, and didn’t even care anymore; all the filters that would normally keep them from dissing on their own party were off, and they let the republican leadership have it. you can read articles by columnists robert novak and george will and see how they are both souring on supporting the republican party, after being staunch supporters of it for so many years. public support for the republican party is remarkably low, even among people who are conservative on all the issues and don’t agree with the democrats on anything. it is remarkable how republican apologists are becoming rarer and rarer, at a time when you would expect everyone on the right-wing side of the political spectrum to unite behind their party and silence all dissenting views like they did in 2002 and 2004. but 2006 is looking like it will be quite a different sort of election year than those two. whereas until recently, the right wing dominated political discourse, it now seems that the left wing is becoming increasingly prominent in the voices we hear in the media, a trend that perhaps first began with michael moore’s film “fahrenheit 9/11” back in 2004. the real kick in the nuts for the right-wing noise machine was hurricane katrina in 2005. even fox news’s right-wing anchors had a momentary lapse in party loyalty and criticised the handling of hurricane katrina by the bush administration. so how long had the right-wing radicals been dominating political discourse? not too long, really. the right-wingers only really dominated the media after the supreme court declared bush the winner of the 2000 election. this right-wing media bias was rather annoying and helped get the tax cut bill passed in early 2001, and the media was anxious to portray president bush positively, after ripping him apart back during the 2000 election (which they had also equally done to al gore). anyway, the right-wing media bias got much worse after the terrorist attacks of september 11, 2001, and for several years, the right-wingers could get pretty much anything they wanted, and the democrats would just roll over and play dead. it was not until late 2003 or early 2004 that the media started to become a little more balanced, and stopped having such a pervasive right-wing bias. and in 2005 and 2006, things have gone steadily downhill for right-wing control of the media. and the left-wing democratic radio network air america radio is doing better than ever... i listen to it all the time. of course fox news still has a tremendous amount of right-wing bias, but nobody takes it seriously as a news channel anymore. the whole mythos that fox news is the one unbiased source of news on tv and everything else has liberal bias, that has been shattered in the public imagination, and people who had once trusted fox news are now turning to other networks instead, as fox news’s ratings have started to fall. now, we liberals are nowhere near having control of the media yet, of course. we still have to take over talk radio and fox news, as well as the washington times, the new york post, the new york sun, the wall street journal, etc. but you want to know what media we liberals already control? well, we have comedy central and all of its fake news programming (jon stewart and steven colbert), as well as the air america radio network. we have keith olbermann on msnbc, who has a 1-hour show every night. and the new york times. and i am pretty sure that both nbc news and cbs news now have at least a slight amount of liberal bias. i don’t watch cbs news so i am not sure about it, but nbc news and msnbc both seem to be more liberal lately. pbs, of course, is neutral, just like c-span. the news hour with jim lehrer and washington week in review with gwen ifill are both pretty neutral, and i think washington week in review is actually a bit conservative in its bias, based on the balance of guests from both sides of the political spectrum. cnbc, the financial news channel, still seems to be biased in favor of conservatives. oh, and abc news? well, they seem to be the most conservative of the 3 network nightly news shows. but their conservative bias is not very strong; it is a very slight conservative bias, barely noticeable, just like nbc news’s barely noticeable liberal bias. cbs news seems a little more obvious in its liberalism. abc news got rid of ted koppel a while back because he was too liberal and they wanted to purge any obvious liberals from their news operation. and of course cbs news did the same to dan rather after his little scandal involving how bush went awol from the national guard. but think about it this way: the parent company of cbs is viacom, which is also parent company of mtv, vh1, and comedy central. so, it is a pretty liberal company, compared to other media conglomerates of its size. they show some pretty racy stuff on channels like mtv and comedy central, stuff that conservatives all disapprove of, but liberals are fine with it (well most of us anyway). now i guess there are still some liberals who get upset by offensive stuff and try and label everything as sexist or racist or homophobic, who are upset about music videos on mtv or stuff like that. but, i do not think you can win an argument by saying you are offended and acting all outraged, even if your outrage is genuine. people like things that are offensive or provocative or push boundaries, so if someone says something offensive, you need an even more offensive comeback to ridicule them. that is how you can establish that everyone is equal, by showing that nobody is above criticism, and if you try and make offensive statements about other people, you will get made fun of even worse, and made a fool of. anyone who gets offended and then announces it automatically loses the argument, which is why i think we liberals should retire that tactic, as it always fails every time we try it. the whole game of announcing you are offended someone said something, and demanding they retract the statement, it is so outdated and boring. it just shows that you can’t think of anything new to say so instead you focus on bad things your opponent said. of course, your snappy, offensive comeback has to be carefully crafted so as not to alienate people, but instead to ridicule your opponent and make them look pathetic and stupid. this rhetorical technique could be of great use to democrats. now of course i agree in principle with the people who get offended, that discrimination is wrong, but i just have different tactics in reaching the same goal. like here is an example of a generic snappy comeback: “your head is so far up your ass that it has gone all the way up through your digestive tract and out your head again, causing a paradox that puts the whole space-time continuum in jeapordy.” or how about this one: “that idea makes a lot of sense... if we go back in time to 1945 and ask adolf hitler what he thinks right before he commits suicide.” another one to try out: “are you even human? because what you just said sounds so retarded, i could swear you were some bizarre evolutionary throwback to a bygone era when dinosaurs roamed the earth.” or if you are really offended try this: “thou hast besmirched my honor! i challenge thee to a duel to the death! fisticuffs only please, except i get to carry a handgun and you don’t.” or this: “how dare you say something so ridiculous! i am offended that you think i am a traitor to america, because america is not even a country, it’s 2 entire continents! i am a traitor to the united states of america, thank you very much, and you would do well to remember that fact!”

anyway, back to the main point, about people being uninformed about the democrats, knowing so little about the democrats that they don’t even know enough to be misinformed. most people are pretty well informed about the republicans, actually. they know the republicans are up to no good, and control everything, and have screwed everything up completely. that is basically all you need to know about them. it is easy to know what the republicans are up to because they control everything and they make all the important decisions, so if you just see how awful everything is going at home and around the world, it is pretty obvious. i mean it speaks volumes that president bush declared “mission accomplished” and “major combat operations in iraq have ended” and then over 3 years later, we are still at war in iraq and the enemy is stronger than ever. if you are worried about national security, or homeland security, or the war on terror, or the war in iraq, well, it is pretty clear that things are totally screwed up. if the bush administration cannot even deal with a simple hurricane, just imagine how horribly they would botch it if we were attacked by nuclear weapons or some other form of weapons of mass destruction. i mean maybe they have succeeded in preventing such disasters so far, but perhaps that is because they are so focused on prevention that they have totally ignored planning for what to do if a disaster actually does happen? so when a disaster inevitably does happen, do you want people in charge who can mitigate it and minimize the negative consequences, or the people who are in charge now? what the war in iraq showed, like the mismanagement of katrina, is that the bush administration does pretty much no planning about what to do if things go worse than expected. and their continued reliance on pro-democracy anti-terrorist rhetoric about the middle east is getting kind of ridiculous in its contradictions, as more and more terrorist groups win democratic elections across the middle east. did they have any sort of plan on what to do if terrorists won elections? no, of course not. so the president of iran, as well as the successes of hamas and hezbollah, have all caught bush off guard, by targeting his weak spot: his officially stated support for democracy in the middle east. no wonder we are losing to the terrorists. it is time to end the doublespeak and come out clearly and decisively on this issue: which is more important, democracy, or fighting terrorism? there is only one right answer. fighting terrorism, of course. it is not any concern to us what form of government some far-off country has, but it is a concern to us when terrorists attack us. so, we should not go around saying how great democracy is and then supporting foreign dictators because they are allies against the terrorists. fuck that. we need to be honest and tell the truth. and the truth is, if you are terrorists then you are our enemy and it doesn’t matter if you are the winner of a democratic election or not, and we do not really care about democracy except at home, because the form of government in another country is none of our concern except as it impacts our interests, such as our interest in not being attacked by terrorists. look at it this way: the bushies say that democracies don’t fight each other. bullshit. israel and lebanon just fought a war. both of them democracies. iran is a democracy, much as we like to deny it. but they are our enemy. can we really let democracy be a trump card, and allow other countries to get away with bloody murder just because they happen to be democracies? of course not. that would make no sense. adolf hitler came to power through democratic elections, but did that stop us from fighting him? certainly not. but bush’s ridiculous obsession with what form of government other countries ought to have is really causing a lot of problems for us. how about we let foreigners make their own decisions about what form of government is best, as long as they don’t attack us? that would make a hell of a lot more sense. the message from iraq is clear: keep your nose out of things that are none of your business. what business do we have in iraq? none whatsoever. iraq is a country, but it is on the other side of the world, nowhere near this country, which is called the united states. so why on earth are we trying to control iraq with our military and manage its political development as if it is some kind of baby? iraq has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, and is an ancient civilization. i think they can handle running their country better than we can handle doing it for them, because we still know hardly anything about them, and they do not trust us at all. they see us as the enemy, as foreign invaders and occupiers, and they see the terrorists fighting us as freedom fighters (although most iraqis deplore the stupid sunni-shiite internecine violence). if we had left earlier, we could probably have avoided the whole sunni-shiite civil war going on in iraq. but the bush administration actually tried to stoke tensions between sunnis and shiites early on, in order to divide the insurgency to defeat it more easily. they thought, if iraqis saw other iraqis as the enemy, they might not see us as the enemy anymore, and they might focus more of their violent energy on killing each other. well, problem solved. it worked. and now bush wants help cleaning up the mess he created. good luck with that. but i can tell you what the main result of us leaving would be: there would be a national reconciliation between insurgents and the government, and between sunnis and shiites. and some militant groups would refuse to join in the national reconciliation process. those groups would then lose their public base of support, and get defeated pretty quickly, because most iraqis have absolutely no interest in seeing sunnis and shiites kill each other. they just want all the american troops gone, so they can rebuild their country. so would iraq become a terrorist haven? well, it is a terrorist haven right now, the biggest one in the world, but if we left, i am pretty sure it would help in the war against terrorism. in the long run, that is.

i have a job

yes, everyone, i have a job! actually, since the time i posted the last post, i have gotten one job, lost it, and got a new job. on wednesday last week i got a job at a factory, making electric motors for vacuum cleaners. it was 3rd shift, 11 pm to 7:30 am. i only had that job for one night. on thursday i got a call from the temp agency that got me that job, saying that the factory didn’t need me anymore. now today (tuesday) i was in at a different temp agency, taking the typing test, and i set a new record at that agency for the fastest typist with no mistakes! sweeeeeet! on monday morning at yet another agency i had taken a typing test and while i had made zero mistakes, my speed was only slightly better than the minimum required to pass the test. it was 6113 characters per hour, when what was needed was 5000. i don’t know what the speed measured today was, but it was fast! so anyway, i also had to take a drug test, and they tested my urine. unfortunately, i had just taken a piss prior to the test, so i did not have much urine left for the drug test. but luckily, the little bit of urine that did come out turned out to be enough for the test. huzzah! so my new job in data entry starts tomorrow at 3 pm. the hours are 3 pm to 11:30 pm, second shift. this is going to be great! i am going to get paid $7.42 an hour. now, what i would really like is if those damned politicians raised the minimum wage. cuz i could use some more money. on every major issue that matters to ordinary americans like me, republicans are wrong and democrats are right. president bush says that the american troops are staying in iraq as long as he is president. well guess what mr. president? go fuck yourself! those are the same words your vice president, that little dick, said to a senator who had dared question how little dick v.p. was still getting paid by halliburton while halliburton got to price-gouge the government with its sweetheart deals referred to as no-bid contracts. republicans are so corrupt, when tom delay was indicted and had to step down as majority leader, they couldn’t find anyone who wasn’t a completely corrupt crook to replace him. temporarily the post went to roy blunt, and eventually john boehner got the job. both of them, complete crooks, though neither as bad as tom delay. and don’t get me started about those other republican crooks, duke cunningham and bob ney. or jack abramoff. or michael scanlon. republicans are basically completely lacking in any morality whatsoever. how do i know this? well, they go around parading their morality and their holier-than-thou attitude, and call us “godless” and such, and then it turns out they were hypocrites and corrupt criminals all along! it is bad enough that they are criminals, but what makes it worse is that they always go around pretending to have such high moral standards! they should at least shut the fuck up about moral issues if they decide to become corrupt and give out taxpayer dollars to their campaign contributors. and yeah, there was one single corrupt democrat in congress, william jefferson. but he was one of those right-wing democrats who mostly votes with the republicans. so he was basically a democrat in name only anyway. he wasn’t anything close to being a left-winger. and oh yeah, there is a corrupt democratic senator, too. his name is joe lieberman. fuck it, the dude actually brags about how corrupt he is. he was in a debate with ned lamont, and he was like, look at all this useless pork-barrel spending i got the government to spend, by inserting it into supplemental appropriations bills, getting the government to finance stupid projects in the state of connecticut, the wealthiest state in the union! hey guess what dickwad? those projects you had the federal government spend money on? they were all in your home state of connecticut, and they had nothing to do with the responsibilities of the federal government! if the people of connecticut really wanted that shit, they should have gotten the connecticut state government or local governments to do those projects, instead of dragging the federal government into the mess! this lieberman guy is best friends with karl rove and sean hannity, for crying out loud! ann coulter loves him! if that isn’t an alarm signal, i don’t know what is. so joe lieberman is now saying don rumsfeld should be fired. this he is doing as some sort of fake-ass demonstration that he is not really a republican in disguise. well guess what joe? everyone knows george w. bush does not listen to what anybody says, and that don rumsfeld is keeping the job as defense secretary. so, when you say that, it is just political posturing, to try and keep yourself from being framed as a republican in disguise. why don’t you actually name a substantive way you oppose the bush administration in its policies on iraq or terrorism or national security? like, for example, you could join senator russ feingold in calling for bush to be censured for breaking the fisa law! a federal judge recently found that bush is, indeed, a criminal, and has violated the fisa law on many occasions! in other words, george w. bush ought to be in a prison cell, not the oval office. so, senator lieberman, i implore you to actually prove you are a democrat, by calling for bush to be sent to jail where he belongs. these terrorists in england were caught by the british authorities, not us, and they were caught based on british intelligence. and even if that terror plot had somehow succeeded (which would have been impossible unless they chose different chemicals to use for the explosives), it would do very little to change the fact that the statistical likelihood for a random person to be killed in a terrorist attack would still be minutely small, only a tiny fraction of 1%. what the hell are we so worked up about and scared of? i am not scared of terrorists, not one little bit. they pose virtually no threat whatsoever. yes, they might be able to increase the probability of me getting killed by a small fraction of a percentage. but who the fuck cares? what the terrorists want is for us to be afraid of them. that is why they are called terrorists. so anyone who tries to make us afraid of the terrorists or who takes advantage of the fear of terrorism for political gain is basically a terrorist themselves. president bush is the #1 terrorist because he tries to make us afraid of terrorists attacking us, to bolster his sagging poll numbers, because he knows that is the only issue that the public actually agrees with him on. on every other issue, bush is a radical right-wing extremist, and his views are shared only by a small minority of the population. like who the fuck actually opposes stem cell research? well, president bush, and a small minority of the american population. but not anybody with a brain. i do not really understand how these right-wing loonies managed to brainwash so many people, but it is really sick how they have tricked so many millions of americans into voting against their own best interests, into voting for policies that make the quality of their lives worse, instead of better. now i am all for fighting terrorism, but what i oppose is people exploiting fear of terrorism for political gain, and trying to increase that fear so that there is more of it to exploit. republicans keep running single-issue campaigns about terrorism, to try and hide the fact that they are wrong about every single issue besides terrorism. and it is because of them that the economy is so bad, and that there are so few high-paying jobs being created for young people like me. i see a direct connection between republican policies and the bad state of affairs in my own life. all republicans know how to do is to take the wrong position on every issue and make the world a much worse place. like their stances on economic issues: tax cuts for the rich, corporate welfare for large corporations (this means the federal government is actually giving out your hard-earned taxpayer money to large corporations, for free, no strings attached), and cutting social programs for the poor, while keeping the minimum wage stagnant despite continued inflation. any attempt to simply point out these obvious facts is labeled “class warfare”, but the real class warfare is how we are letting the super-wealthy fuck us up the ass with these republican economic policies. and on social policies, they want the federal government telling people what they can and cannot do in their personal life. that is what it all comes down to. do you want to decide who to marry, or who to have sex with, or whether to give birth, or do you want some corrupt hypocrite in washington, d.c. telling you what you can and cannot do in your personal life? i want to make my own fucking decisions, thank you very much! i know how to use my penis a lot better than some viagra-popping old fundamentalist bastard who took bribes from jack abramoff! these assholes thought it was vitally important to save terri schiavo’s life and get her the best healthcare despite her being totally brain-dead, yet they could give a fuck less about millions of americans with no health insurance who actually have functional brains, who need medicine and doctors or else they might get sick and die. i will only have health insurance until next june, and then it expires, and i need to find some kind of job that comes with health insurance. otherwise, i am totally screwed, and i could die because of crooked politicians who cared more about helping out the assholes who bribed them than helping out millions of americans who need some fucking health care thank you very much! anyone in congress who does not take action to make universal health care the law of the land is a murderer, because thousands of americans die every year from lack of insurance! who killed them? congress! republicans disgust me, with their phony morality, and lack of any real morality. they are worse than scum. no word is loathsome enough to describe them. i am ashamed to be from the same universe as them, let alone the same galaxy, solar system, planet, continent, or country! and when i talk about republicans, please understand i am talking about the politicians in washington, not the poor, innocent, everyday americans who are brainwashed into being republicans. those people are not evil. they are just sad and pathetic. i just feel sorry for them. the evil ones are the ones who control all 3 branches of the united states federal government. and there is no other word for them besides evil. pure, dagnasty evil. like darth vader. except worse. these people are SATAN evil. hell, some of them are probably even eviler than satan! goddamn evildoers! anyway, the company i work for, doing data entry, the customer we are doing this for is the government. the new york state government. yes, we are doing work for one of those liberal government programs to help poor people. the particular liberal government program we are working on generates a lot of paperwork, and the company i work at scans documents and digitizes them, to make everything electronic, so the paper copies can go off and rot in some warehouse. so basically i will be helping this process to digitize all of these old-fashioned analog documents, for the 21st century. and without this liberal government program, this job to digitize documents would not exist. of course, that is from the state government, not the federal one. since, as we all know, grover norquist is busy drowning the federal government in a bathtub. now this job is not a very high-paying one of course, and i would like to have a high-paying job writing computer programs. but guess what? all of those jobs were outsourced to india, to people who do the same work for a fraction of the price! now there are some software jobs left, yes. i see them listed in the newspaper as openings. but they are all ones for experienced workers with years of experience and whatnot. not for rookies just out of college. the jobs for people like me have all left this country, thanks to free trade. just think... if all the people with entry-level jobs in programming that require no experience are in bangalore, india, then someday all the people with high-paying jobs in programming that require lots of experience will be from bangalore, india. something tells me i should move to bangalore, india. because i sure as hell can’t find a job in my field anywhere near where i live! this shows the failure of the free-market economic system. it does not plan for the future, only the short term. having companies lay off workers to cut costs might work in the short run, but in the long run, companies need to have lots of consumers out there with disposable income to spend. but since capitalism only cares about the short-term, these kinds of long-term structural problems with the economic system get completely ignored. the only way capitalism can survive is by spreading like a cancer into new markets, because otherwise, there are no existing ones that can maintain the necessary level of economic growth indefinitely. capitalism is so concerned with using up all the resources as quickly as possible, it forgets the need for sustainable development, the need to put in place a system that will continue to work for generations to come. if you are the ceo of a company, your job performance is measured by how well you can increase profits, and it has nothing to do with whether you put in place policies that will allow the company to keep doing business for hundreds of years. and profits can’t keep increasing forever, unless your company keeps growing and gobbling up other companies and expanding into more and more countries forever. of course, that is impossible, since this is a finite planet with finite resources and a finite amount of people it can support. which is why, in the long run, capitalism is a suicidal economic system for humanity to adopt, as a species. it might maximize per capita income and gross domestic product, but at what cost? at the cost of having a future for our species on this planet. now i do not think humanity will self-destruct so badly that the planet itself will be destroyed, or that all life will be destroyed on the planet. but, i do think that most, if not all, of the human race will be destroyed sometime soon, within the next century or two. this will be no biblical armageddon, but instead an apocalypse caused by human stupidity, lack of planning, ineptitude, and arrogance. i am not sure if it will be a nuclear war or something else, but one thing is clear: the ultimate reason for our destruction will be ourselves. all of us. you, me, everyone else. we have all failed. we have failed to act to stop this from happening, failed to adequately make plans so the human race can continue to thrive indefinitely. is it perhaps possible that we may change our ways and avert such a bad scenario? yes, but such an outcome is highly unlikely, if past behavior of humanity is any indicator. we would have to mend our ways quite drastically if we really wanted to survive. good luck. but, for now, at least i have a job, so i can pay the bills. that is, of course, very much a short-term concern: even someone as concerned with these long-term issues as me is only acting to fulfill short-term needs. it is rather pathetic that we humans are so concerned with fighting amongst ourselves that hardly any of us pays much attention at all to the dangers posed towards our collective survival as a species. this is one issue i think the republicans are really weak on, since they control all 3 branches of government, and they have done virtually nothing to advance the cause of saving humanity from certain doom. of course, superheroes in cartoons have done a great deal to save humanity from certain doom, and so have a lot of characters in movies, but that is all make-believe, and in real life, hardly anyone does it, which is what is so pathetic. we should all be doing our part to save our species. forget “save the whales”! how about “save the humans”? we can save the whales too, but they are less important.

how to use opera 9.01 for all browsing needs

opera 9.01 is the fastest browser on earth, out of all web browsers capable of rendering most web pages correctly. faster than any version of internet explorer, firefox, mozilla, netscape, safari, camino, konqueror, icab, epiphany, k-meleon, or anything else. opera might not be as extensible as firefox is with its extensions, but who really needs extensions anyway? opera has a lot of features built-in! so, although i am a devout firefox user, and have been using firefox more than 90% of the time for web browsing activities for over 2 years (since about april 2004), i would really like to get to know opera better, use it more, try it out. you see, no other browser for windows is anywhere near as standards-compliant, and opera is just amazingly faaaaast. but the main problem in opera is, some web pages are designed to work only in internet explorer, or only in internet explorer and mozilla-based browsers. there is a browser plugin called meadco neptune that lets you view stuff using internet explorer to render, in another browser such as opera, thus solving this problem. but that meadco neptune plugin by itself is not enough. i have developed something known as a “user javascript” to automatically view certain websites using internet explorer to render, if you are using the opera browser and have the meadco neptune plugin installed. here is the user javascript i have developed:

// ==UserScript==
// @name Embed Internet Explorer in Opera v0.01
// @author Numinous Ubiquity

// @description Uses Microsoft Internet Explorer instead of Opera to render
// certain pages, using the MeadCo Neptune plugin for embedding IE.

// Put this file in your Opera User JavaScript directory, which you can set
// in Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Content -> JavaScript Options ->
// User JavaScript Files -> Choose.

// You can edit the list of sites this happens on where it says "@include".

// Requires the MeadCo Neptune plugin to be installed in Opera.
// To install that plugin, visit http://www.meadroid.com/neptune/download/,
// download and install the plugin, and then copy npmeadax.dll from your
// Internet Explorer plugins directory to your Opera plugins directory.

// Known issues: you need to click first, while the screen is all white,
// and sometimes even that does not work. If you look at videos on video.msn.com
// or video.ap.org, you find out that this script actually loads 2 copies of
// the page, one that you see and one that is hidden.  I do not know why,
// or how to fix my script.  Maybe somebody else can figure out how to fix it.
// I have experimented with things and the current script is the best I can do.
// So, the version number right now is 0.01, to emphasize its pre-alpha status.

// @ujs:category general: enhancements

// @include http://*.blogger.com/*
// @include http://*.live.com/*
// @include http://*.microsoft.com/*
// @include http://*.windowsupdate.com/*
// @include http://video.ap.org/*
// @include http://video.msn.com/*

// ==/UserScript==

/*
* This script is granted to the Public Domain
*/

document.write('<embed pluginspage="http://www.meadroid.com/neptune/download/" width="100%" height="100%" type="application/x-meadco-neptune-ax" location="' + document.location.href + '"></embed>');

so that is the script. really only one line of code, if you exclude all of the comments, although the comments that start with "@include" tell what sites the script applies to, so they are really part of the code. so, three lines of code. anyway, you can edit the "@include" lines to have a different list of websites to apply to. and then, this sort of will duplicate the ie tab extension for firefox, except it is not quite as good, because my skills with this javascript stuff are not quite as perfect as i would like, so the script is a little buggy still. the comments in the script explain the bugs i know about. please, try this thing out, and if you know javascript, figure out what i did wrong and fix it, and maybe leave me a comment on how i can change this thing to work better. oh, and when you save it as a file in the user javascript directory for opera, you can give it any filename, as long as the extension is “.js”.

terrorism and iraq

so, apparently there was some sort of big-ass terrorist plot that was broken up, and the first thing the republicans want to do is blame all the terrorism on democrats. joe lieberman, dick cheney, and karl rove were all blaming it on ned lamont, and all saying that if we leave iraq, that will embolden the terrorists. you know what i think emboldened the terrorists? the way we are letting them win in iraq RIGHT NOW. our troops are sitting ducks for terrorists, in a hostile arab muslim country, where the terrorists can hide among like-minded muslim civilians. and our troops don’t know friend from foe, when it comes to the iraqis. you might think an iraqi is your friend, and he might serve in the iraqi military and go on missions like you, and then before you know it, he carries out a terrorist attack against you! stuff like that happens all the time. what the hell are we doing in iraq anyway? it is an unjustifiable war, anyway. we have killed hundreds of thousands, and for nothing. saddam hussein is in a prison cell, and some iranian-allied shiite fundamentalists are in control of the new iraqi government. but ya see, none of this iraq shit is any of our business. that is not our country. they never attacked us. al qaeda attacked us, not iraq. iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, whatsoever. we diverted troops from looking for osama bin laden in afghanistan to send them to iraq. republicans and joe lieberman keep talking all the time as if iraq and al qaeda are somehow connected. well maybe NOW they are thanks to YOU! yeah of course al qaeda has a presence in iraq now, because that is the easiest way to attack us. a hell of a lot easier to attack us in iraq than in the united states. and what the fuck about all the allies we lost? this is supposed to be a GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR. how the fuck can we fight a global war without any fucking ALLIES? it is such a joke! ok so we have the united kingdom as an ally. great! thanks for helping to get us into this mess, tony blair! without you, we probably would have never invaded iraq in the first place! asshole. the french tried to warn us, and gave us great advice, and all we could do was demonize them. shameful! there is no way we can win a global war on terror with no allies. and plus, isn’t this a war for the hearts and minds of the people of the arab and muslim world? to keep them from becoming radicalized and hating america and joining the terrorists? how do you think us fighting a war in iraq helps with the hearts and minds battle? joe lieberman is such a fucking idiot. he lost the election to ned lamont. concede already, you fucking republican! everybody hates you! guess what, lieberman? you suck ass! you have no clue about how to fight terrorism! you think we can go around invading all the arab and muslim countries, one by one, and keep killing people who oppose our occupying forces, and somehow end all terrorism that way? all we are doing is making more enemies, spending our nation’s treasury on iraq, and helping the terrorists recruit! osama bin laden has actually told us what his goal is. his goal is to goad the united states into spending so much money on wars and fighting terrorism, that our nation is completely bankrupted, and our economy collapses. and if you look at the bush administration’s economic policies, osama bin laden is well on his way to achieving this goal. and republicans who pretend not to be republicans, people like joe lieberman, only help osama bin laden reach his goals. just like the real republicans... all the republican policies are helping osama bin laden enormously. and he still hasn’t been caught! ned lamont wants to catch osama bin laden. bush? he doesn’t spend that much time on it. doesn’t really think it’s that important. and what about the war on terrorism? does he think he can win it? “we can’t win it.” - bush’s own words, regarding the war on terror. i think that says it all. bush is the dumbass who tried to sell out our port security to the united arab emirates, an arab muslim nation. the last thing in the world we need is for the arabs and muslims to be in charge of our security! jeez! these republicans have no shame, pretending to be the only defenders of our nation’s security, while they make these backroom deals to let the terrorists win, and while they behave in exactly the way osama bin laden and al qaeda want, in order for the al qaeda strategy to succeed. and meanwhile, the republicans criticize the democrats as somehow being allies of the terrorists, who want the terrorists to win. democrats are the only ones who can save us from terrorists, actually. because democrats are the only ones who can end the war and bring our troops home, restore our credibility in the world and our allies, and then work together with other nations on a global scale to make sure there is no safe haven for terrorists to operate out of. and as for iraq being a safe haven for terrorists, yes it is one now, and no it was not when saddam hussein was in charge, but the presence of our troops is part of the problem, and without them it would be easier for the iraqi people to defeat the terrorists. without our troops there, the terrorists would have no more sympathizers from the iraqi people, since there would be no foreign occupation to fight, and it would be clear-cut that the terrorists are the enemies of freedom and democracy in iraq, the enemies of stability and security, the enemies of normalcy. so my message to joe lieberman is very simple: SHUT THE FUCK UP! you are a moron and you have no fucking clue what the hell you are talking about, and everyone with half a brain knows you are dead wrong. get off your high horse and stop pretending to be righteous, you self-absorbed, whiny upper-class twit! all you really care about is holding on to your precious senate seat, since the only person you really care about is yourself, you selfish bastard! you have no loyalty to the democratic party, nor did you ever have any loyalty to the democratic party. as for me? i have loyalty to the democratic party, all right. i am voting for hillary clinton, and eliot spitzer, and other democrats running here in new york state. i may have criticized hillary clinton in the past, but you know what? she is all right in my book. i have watched her closely in the past few months, and she has been making some very positive changes. i thought about supporting her opponent in the primary, jonathan tasini, but he said some things that were a little too over-the-top, and he seems a bit too radical. if mr. tasini managed to beat her in the primary, he would probably not win in the general election, and even if he somehow won that, he would not be able to get anything done in the senate. he just lacks the good common sense that ned lamont has, that keeps mr. lamont from saying stupid things, that keeps mr. lamont from going off message or making a fool of himself. if you compare jonathan tasini to ned lamont, tasini just does not measure up. and hillary clinton is nowhere near as bad as joe lieberman. she is a staunch democrat, and a harsh opponent of the bush administration. earlier in the year i was disappointed with her silence on important issues facing our nation, but now she is doing much better, and has addressed my concerns. now, hillary clinton does not want our troops to all come home immediately; she wants a phased withdrawal. but there is no disagreement among democrats about iraq anymore. the leading democrats in the house and senate have all come to agreement about the best way to withdraw our troops. and with joe lieberman out of the party, we finally have some real unity on this issue. so if we are elected in november, we can really get things done. the president might be commander in chief, but if congress cuts off the funds to fight the war in iraq, there is nothing he can do to keep fighting the war there, to keep killing our young men and women (as well as some older folks too, now that they raised the age limit to join the military). somebody has to bitch-slap our crazy dumbass president, whose only veto was to prevent funding for research that might possibly someday cure cancer, alzheimer’s, spinal cord defects, heart disease, and pretty much everything else. this president is absolutely indefensible, as is the rest of his party. so anyone in our party, the democrats, who supports president bush publicly, had better shut the fuck up, first of all, and then either come to terms with reality and realize how big a failure bush is, or switch parties, because we do not have room for neocons in our party. what we do have room for in our party is people like senator russ feingold of wisconsin, the next president of the united states!

how pathetic can i get?

do you ever get the sense that you are a complete pathetic failure as a human being? i get that feeling all the time. i am a pessimist, you see. especially when it comes to self-image. now, the fake name “numinous ubiquity” does not really tell much about who i am, so i guess i’ll explain a bit. i was valedictorian of my high school, graduated an ivy league university with a double major in computer science and mathematics, and now i can’t find a job. you know how many girlfriends i have ever had? zero. how many times have i had sex? just once. last november. it was no good. whose fault was it, that the sex was no good? mine. now, i do not normally have any problem getting an erection, if i am sexually aroused. but, the odd thing was, i was not really sexually aroused or turned on at all when i had sex. the whole thing seemed too fake and scripted, and, to be honest, the girl did not exactly have the sexiest body in the world. let’s just say there is an obesity epidemic in the united states, and she was a victim. of course, i knew that in advance, and went forward with it anyway. i don’t even know if it counts as sex, since i did not even have an orgasm. i did have an erection for a while, and went through about 5 condoms, since the girl seemed to think that you should replace the condom with a new one periodically during sex, to avoid any of them getting worn out and ripping. but, my failure to reach orgasm was rather traumatic... i was 23 years old and had never had sex before, and there was a lot of internal pressure inside me, telling me i had to succeed. so, i did the next best thing, and brought the girl to orgasm. several times. using my fingers, in a certain part of her anatomy. anyway, that is the only girl i ever did anything sexual with. and of course i have never done anything with another guy, because that is disgusting. anyway, i have a tremendous sense of being a failure in this area, and just incredible amounts of self-loathing. i wonder if there are actually any pretty girls with nice bodies who would be willing to date me. they have to be pretty and have nice bodies for one reason and one reason only: my dick is not going to shoot out the juice for just anyone. if my dick does not like you, there is no hope in having a romantic relationship, because i will be physically incapable of ejaculation, due to my mental block. it is very similar to how i feel about cheese. i hate cheese, i refuse to ever eat it, and if i taste cheese in something, it makes me feel like vomiting. and if i want to, i can act on that impulse, and vomit. or i can try and calm myself down and somehow manage to eat cheese and not throw up. but, basically, what happens is, my mind rejects cheese, and my mental block causes my body to physically prevent me from eating cheese, by using vomiting and the gag reflex. i think this is the same thing that prevented my dick from being able to ejaculate, and then made my erection fade away after just a few minutes. but why the hell am i so stupid? i just thought i could fuck any consenting adult of the opposite sex, for some reason. theoretically, i saw no reason that i would be unable to have sex with someone who is unattractive, as long as they have the proper anatomy. but, i was wrong. anyway, i continue to be a pathetic loser, and have not really accomplished anything since graduating college, besides having sex once, and getting my comptia a+ certification for repairing computers. nobody wants to hire me for a job! wtf? i can’t even get a job through a temp agency, and i have signed up at all of them, and call them up every week to tell them i am still interested. i mean, am i really that big a failure, is it really that obvious? christ... i sure wish i did not have all these asperger’s syndrome problems that prevent me from having any social skills. oh well. and you know what else? i am incredibly disorganized, and cannot maintain any sort of normal sleep schedule. i miss appointments all the time, i do not fulfill my obligations, and i cannot keep promises to other people. i am incredibly lazy and have no motivation. i never seem to see any sort of light at the end of the tunnel. i am the most pathetic loser in the world. i am about to run out of all my money unless i get a job soon, but i still cannot find any employment. i only have maybe a month or two left before i am completely broke. i’ve got bills piling up even though i still live with my parents, and soon i won’t be able to pay my bills anymore. ridiculous! who ever thought this would happen to a valedictorian, an ivy league graduate who double majored in computer science and math? education means nothing in the real world! all of my book learning has been a complete waste! nobody cares about anything! i am mad as hell, and i’m not going to take this anymore! there are only 2 things i want: a job and a girlfriend. and i don’t care what i have to do; i will get them, by any means necessary. my life is not going anything at all like the way i would have liked it to turn out, but fuck it, i am going to fight like a wild boar with rabies to get things going in the right direction. i might be a lazy-ass loser who never accomplishes anything and sits at home all the time getting yelled at by his parents for being a lazy-ass loser who never accomplishes anything and sits at home all the time to get yelled at by them, but goddammit, i have had enough of this shit! why the hell does my life have to suck so much? i am more pissed off than the dude dick cheney shot in the face! my level of satisfaction with my life is so low, its square root is an imaginary number! i hate blogs. they are so stupid. why am i even writing this shit? what is the point? go away. you suck. what kind of dumbass would read this retarded-ass blog of mine anyway? oh hi there, president bush. whatever!

dos and windows

ok, so most people nowadays look back on dos and they are like, wow, that was lame, or wow, that was primitive. you see, dos used to be the main operating system for ibm and compatible pc’s, until windows 95 came out in 1995. then, for the last 11 years, microsoft has been hell-bent on eradicating dos from existence. but, beyond all the flashy marketing gimmicks about windows being better than dos, what is the real story? what really happened to dos? how many different companies made dos, and how powerful is dos? and how many different versions of windows are out there, anyway?

well, dos was originally a cheap knock-off of an operating system called cp/m, called qdos, short for “quick and dirty operating system”. microsoft bought the rights to qdos, cheap, since it was quite crappy, after all. then for about a decade microsoft and ibm collaborated on dos, both working together on it as a joint project, and packaging and marketing separate versions of microsoft ms-dos and ibm dos, based on the same basic source code. microsoft and ibm were also collaborating on something called os/2 which was designed to be the successor to dos. eventually microsoft and ibm had a major falling out, and completely quit working together, becoming staunch enemies. then things started to get really fucked up. microsoft decided to put all its eggs in one basket with windows, and wanted to kill dos. the last version of dos they released to the public, about a year before windows 95, was ms-dos 6.22.

the secret they don’t want you to know about is that they kept making dos after that. windows 95, 98, and me were all based on ms-dos, just like windows 1.0 thru 3.11. microsoft tried to market windows 95, 98, and me as 32-bit operating systems, but really they were hybrid 16-bit and 32-bit graphical user interfaces running on top of a 16-bit dos backend. windows 95 versions prior to oem service release 2 came with ms-dos 7.00. ms-dos 7.10 came with windows 95 oem service release 2 and all versions of windows 98. and ms-dos 8.00 came with windows me. ms-dos 7.00 introduced long file name (lfn) support, meaning a filename can be more than 8 characters and an extension can be more than 3. ms-dos 7.10 introduced support for the fat32 filesystem, allowing hard drives larger than 2 gigabytes. fat32 supports drives up to 137 gigabytes, in fact. ms-dos 8.00 was the watered down version of dos that came with windows me, the crappy version that they tried to make impossible to even run directly as a command prompt version. if you have windows me, you can still make an ms-dos 8.00 boot disk, from add/remove programs in the control panel. but ms-dos 8.00 is crap, and so is windows me for trying to kill dos, even though windows me at is very core is based on dos, meaning windows me is dead inside. in windows 95 and 98, they expose the dos functionality to the user and allow you to boot into ms-dos mode, so at least those versions have some justification for existing. windows me, on the other hand, completely abandoned any ideas of having backwards compatibility with dos, but they also failed to replace it with anything better, such as the nt kernel.

ok... so far i have not discussed anything too secret. but did you know that there are actually top secret versions of ms-dos the government does not want you to know about? they are classified, for military use only, not for civilians. microsoft actually continued to make ms-dos 6.xx after ms-dos 6.22 was the final public release of a standalone version of ms-dos. there are 3 classified, top secret versions of ms-dos: ms-dos 6.23, ms-dos 6.24, and ms-dos 6.25. very little is publicly known about any of them, except they contain advanced top-secret security features and encryption and are extremely stable and can run for years without crashing, and are in extensive use by the united states military for tactical advantage, against enemies like al qaeda who are so stupid they probably use windows me. these secret versions of ms-dos also supported fat32, just like ms-dos 7.10, but they have other features too. the most advanced dos technology is still being kept out of civilian hands, unfortunately. and civilians are still brainwashed into thinking windows is better than dos... quite untrue if you are talking about embedded systems that do not need a flashy user interface that need to be secure and stable.

and what about windows programs? people might say windows is more advanced than dos because windows can run dos programs but dos cannot run windows programs. well this is simply untrue. the hx dos-extender is a program that has been under development for years and is still being actively developed and enhanced. it allows you to run windows programs from a pure dos command prompt. the government does not want you to know about this, either. it is all a giant conspiracy, obviously. i should mention that wealthy jewish zionist banking agents are behind this, but secretly they are all space aliens from the planet x, also known as x-ists. on x-day, the x-ists will destroy the planet earth. x-day actually happened on july 5, 1998, and the entire planet earth was destroyed, and we were all killed. we are dead right now, and everything going on nowadays is entirely imaginary. we are living in the matrix, which was actually a documentary. okaaaaay... enough bullshit. so the hx dos-extender really does allow you to run windows programs from dos. it is really fucking amazing, especially since the whole program was just written by one guy, and it actually works.

now there are obviously other versions of dos besides the microsoft and ibm versions. the most important versions of dos besides ms-dos and ibm dos are dr-dos, pts-dos, datalight rom-dos, and freedos. dr-dos was for a long time a competitor to ms-dos and ibm dos, back when ms-dos was microsoft’s only operating system. dr-dos was technically superior, and generally much better than ms-dos, but they lacked the marketing savvy of microsoft, and failed to win much market share. eventually, when microsoft killed dos, this got rid of the competition from dr-dos. pts-dos was originally made by phystechsoft, a russian company that is part of russia’s military-industrial complex, with close ties to the russian space agency. it is what the russians use in their military, and what was used on the space station mir, and elsewhere in the russian space program. another company called paragon software, in germany, has developed its own version of pts-dos, which they basically stole from phystechsoft. however, they appear to have gotten away with this scot-free, and avoided any punishment. paragon software actually makes several very useful and high-quality products on their own, so it is a shame they had to resort to theft in this one case. datalight rom-dos is a version of dos developed for embedded systems, namely for everyday small electronic devices that we do not normally think of as computers, but that do have computer chips in them. it is certainly not the most popular operating system for embedded systems, but it has a certain amount of market share, and the company does make a profit. finally, freedos is the dos that was developed by the open-source community, free for anyone to use or look at the source code for, and licensed under the popular gnu gpl license agreement that was written by infamous open-source fanatic richard stallman. freedos is currently under quite active development, even in 2006, which is quite amazing. put that together with the powerful and actively developed hx dos-extender for running windows programs, and who knows what is possible? freedos may put the secret american and russian military versions of dos to shame at some point, if it has not already.

but enough about dos! this post is about both dos and windows, and nowadays, for good or ill, most computers run windows, and most popular programs are for windows. there are 7 different implementations of the windows api. what is the windows api? the windows api, formerly known as the win32 api, is the interface that software programs running within windows use to talk to windows. consistency of the windows api between different versions of windows allows software to run the same in different versions of windows. anybody who can implement the windows api, therefore, is now able to run most any windows program, using their implementation. so, what are the 7 implementations? well, let us go back into history for a bit.

microsoft windows started with version 1.0 a little after ms-dos started. microsoft continued developing windows to run as a dos program, up until windows 3.11 for workgroups, which was its final release as a standalone graphical user interface to run on top of dos. in addition, all versions from 1.0 thru 3.11 were 16-bit programs, with nothing 32-bit whatsoever. a lot of what microsoft did in windows was copied from apple’s macintosh operating system (mac os). this was settled in a lawsuit between apple and microsoft, and microsoft got to continue making windows as a result of the outcome of that lawsuit, although i believe apple did get a significant amount of money from microsoft in exchange for this. anyway, regardless, microsoft and ibm had been working on a project called os/2, which was supposed to be a revolutionary new operating system to replace dos. after microsoft had the big falling-out with ibm, microsoft decided to kill dos, and the very first step in that strategy was to create windows nt. windows nt was based around os/2 rather than dos as the backend, as the kernel, but with the same windows 3.1 graphical user interface. moreover, os/2 had been developed as a fully 32-bit operating system. so while windows nt looked like windows 3.1, windows nt was fully 32-bit, whereas windows 3.1 was fully 16-bit. and windows nt had the os/2 kernel tightly integrated with the graphical user interface, so that the computer would not boot up to a command prompt, but instead go straight into windows. the first version of windows nt, of course, was 3.1, although windows nt 3.1 is completely different from regular windows 3.1. later versions based on the same user interface were windows nt 3.5 and windows nt 3.51. after windows 95 came out, the next windows nt was windows nt 4.0, which looked like windows 95. windows 2000, windows xp, windows 2003, and windows vista are the 4 latest versions of windows nt. windows 2000 is technically called windows nt 5.0, windows xp is windows nt 5.1, windows 2003 is windows nt 5.2, and windows vista is windows nt 6.0. as for windows 9x, windows 95 is technically windows 4.0, windows 98 is windows 4.1, and windows me is windows 4.9. but most people do not know the real version numbers for microsoft windows, only the popular marketing names microsoft uses publicly.

ok, i got kind of off track there, but the point is, there are 7 implementations of the 32-bit windows api, and the first one was windows nt, which started with windows nt 3.1, and the latest version is going to come out early next year, as windows nt 6.0, more popularly known as windows vista. this is the first and best implementation, the one that is most stable, with the least bugs, the one the other 6 all imitate. the second implementation of the windows api was called win32s. win32s was a free add-on component for windows 3.1 and 3.11, which you could download and install, and it added some 32-bit support to windows 3.1x. win32s is called win32s because the s stands for subset; it only implements a subset of the win32 api. this means that most 32-bit windows programs do not work under win32s. win32s came with a demonstration program microsoft specially made to show off how it works; it was a solitaire game called freecell. if you have an old windows 3.1 computer with freecell on it, that is probably the only 32-bit windows program you have, on an otherwise 16-bit dos + windows system. the third implementation of the windows api is windows 9x, namely the windows 95, 98, and me series of operating systems. windows 95, 98, and me, like a windows 3.1 system with win32s, are a hybrid system with both 16-bit and 32-bit components. however, they provide a complete implementation of the win32 api, and not just a subset. for a while, windows 9x was considered the flagship product, the primary implementation of the win32 api, rather than windows nt. however, now, windows nt is restored to being the primary implementation of 32-bit windows, just like it was back when it first started, given the success of windows 2000, xp, 2003, and vista. the fourth implementation of the win32 api is called windows ce, which is a version of windows that microsoft developed to run on small embedded systems, the same type of systems that datalight rom-dos would run on. windows ce is fully 32-bit, like windows nt, but, like win32s, it does not implement 100% of the windows api. there are some things they had to leave out, in order to keep windows ce lean and mean. more recent versions of windows ce have other names, like “windows mobile”, but they are just newer versions of the same product. anyway, that is about it, as far as it goes with microsoft’s official implementations of the 32-bit windows api.

the fifth implementation is the hx dos-extender which i discussed earlier. it allows you to run certain windows programs from dos. and like win32s, it only implements a subset of the windows api, although for different reasons. with the hx dos-extender, the main core files of windows are emulated, but to run a typical program, you also need some .dll files, besides the executable .exe file. the hx dos-extender can use .dll files taken right out of the windows system directory, and essentially you end up filling in the gaps in the hx dos-extender’s implementation of the windows api by stealing files out of microsoft windows and taking advantage of them against their will. the sixth implementation of the windows api is called wine, short for windows emulator. wine is a program that runs on linux, mainly, and it emulates the windows api quite well. it is also incomplete, of course, because no implementation could ever be complete unless it is by microsoft. wine is the most popular 3rd party implementation of the windows api, and many linux geeks use it to run their favorite windows programs, without having to actually use windows as an operating system. finally, the seventh implementation is reactos, a free, open-source alternative to the microsoft windows operating system, licensed under the gnu gpl. reactos aims to be fully compatible with all versions of windows up to xp, although they might update it in the future to implement features from windows vista, if reactos ever gets that far. while reactos has made impressive strides, it is still nowhere near as functional and stable as an actual installation of microsoft windows, and still lacks many important features from windows. hopefully they will finish it up so they can focus on debugging. unfortunately, that could take a very long time, given all the secrecy surrounding internal details of windows, as well as the copyright laws that prevent reactos developers from directly copying anything from windows, requiring them to independently do everything. but someday, reactos could become the #1 operating system on earth, if it ever manages to fulfill the goals set out for the project at the beginning. which would still not be that great an achievement, seeing as the earth was destroyed on july 5, 1998, by space aliens from planet x. just kidding. but for now, i will keep using microsoft windows xp professional, with service pack 2, at least as my primary operating system. but i do plan on dabbling some more into alternative operating systems, to check them out some more. linux is actually a very promising operating system, especially a new type of linux called ubuntu. ubuntu linux is linux for humans. are you a human? then you need ubuntu. it is an african word. although hardly anyone in africa uses ubuntu linux. but it is the next big thing, just so ya know. basically it is easier to use than most other types of linux, and if you compare it to the other linux distributions that are centered around being easy to use, it is technically superior to them, because it is based on debian, and does not try to charge you money for anything. they regularly schedule updates: every 6 months, a new version of ubuntu comes out. and it has an automatic updates thingy just like windows xp. pretty advanced shit, if ya ask me. now 2 types of linux i used to think might be the next big thing were gentoo and knoppix. but gentoo makes you compile everything yourself and is just a big pain in the ass and not very nice for most users. and knoppix is apparently not as good as some newer livecds that have come out from other linux distributions; it is especially bad in terms of how slooooow it is. i would like to experiment with running wine on ubuntu and see if that is anywhere near as good as microsoft windows at running windows programs. i hope that someday soon, wine will be good enough so we can throw our windows cd’s in the garbage and just run linux. or maybe even reactos. and as for dos... just remember, when the military needs something mission-critical, they still turn to dos sometimes, to special top-secret versions of dos not available for civilian use. it would kick so much ass if i could get a copy of that dos, to see what it has in it. the main selling point of dos? it just works, period. and you only run one program at a time, which is nice, if you do not want anything else getting in your way. sometimes multi-tasking and graphical user interfaces are not really what is called for, and it is best to just have a good old-fashioned command prompt and run programs one at a time.

now i have talked about windows emulators, but there are also dos emulators and linux emulators. the most popular dos emulator is called dosbox, and it simulates not only the dos operating system, but the entire computer, including the cpu, the sound card, the video card, everything. or at least everything you need to play a video game designed for dos. and dosbox works from windows, or linux, or whatever other operating system you want to compile it on. another dos emulator, for linux only, is called dosemu, and it is not as good as dosbox. as for linux emulators, there is a program called cygwin that emulates linux on windows. mostly it is used to compile linux programs so they can run on windows, but it can also be used as an emulator of linux, to some extent. there is also another program called cooperative linux that allows you to run an actual copy of linux from within windows, at full speed, without any emulation. so, perhaps you can actually run a windows program within wine within linux within cooperative linux within windows, at the same time you run the same windows program directly in windows on the same computer. and you can compare how fast each of them is. i wonder, which one is faster? ha ha. tis obvious that running it directly in windows is faster. but how much faster? that is the real interesting question. and are there any bugs or problems encountered, running within linux? who knows? i might set this up on my computer to find out. but i have more important things to do. probably.

what is at stake in connecticut

the connecticut senate race is a race for the heart and soul of the democratic party. should we be a party that is open to anybody at all, regardless of what they believe, and let just anybody hold office and represent us, even if they disagree with us on many fundamental issues? or should we be a party that has principles, that has beliefs, that takes stands on issues, and that tries to have its members vote uniformly in congress so that we can actually excercise some power in washington instead of letting the republicans play divide and conquer with our congresspeople and senators? the democratic party has very little power in the federal government, and for years we have been divided while the republicans have been united. it is very clear when you look at the voting records on important legislation in congress, or if you watch c-span. the republicans have remarkable message discipline and are quite good at dealing with dissent; in the last year or so, of course, this has been changing, and they are getting more internal dissent, but they still have a lot less than the democrats. and another important question is: should we re-elect incumbent politicians that we don’t like, or throw them out and replace them with someone new? should we, in the democratic party, function as an elitist institution, where a small, never-changing elite group is always in control, and is never challenged by any outsiders? where things like the nomination to run for president are treated like entitlements, and the idea of running against a front-runner in a primary is considered treasonous? or should we really let the best candidate win, and hold our elected representatives to higher standards? if a politician from our own party goes astray, but we would never vote for the other party in a million years, isn’t our only option to defeat them in a primary? if you look at how congressional elections work, incumbents are re-elected a ridiculously high percentage of the time. and politicians are so arrogant, they act as if their positions are entitlements, and how dare the people they represent even consider voting for someone else. this is what the senate race in connecticut is all about. it is about determining whether democrats are willing to hold their own politicians accountable. nancy pelosi has already demonstrated that congressional democrats are willing to throw one of their own overboard if there are serious ethical problems, in the case of william jefferson. it would have been admirable if the republicans had been able to similarly ditch tom delay, before delay’s indictment forced it upon them. politicians are really public servants, elected to represent the people of their districts or whatever geographical region, whether city, state, or country. and if they fail to uphold their duties to represent their constituents, it is the duty of their constituents not to re-elect them, but instead to replace them with a challenger, unless the challenger is even worse. joe lieberman might do what he think is right most of the time, but the fact is, he is one of the most right-wing democrats in congress, consistently. he is the poster boy of the democratic leadership council, a thinly veiled corporate lobbyist group hell-bent on screwing working americans through a hostile takeover of the democratic party. now the democratic leadership council does have one claim to fame: they helped bill clinton get elected in 1992, and he was a close ally of theirs. that explains why clinton is helping lieberman out now. but really, the democratic leadership council does not belong in the democratic party. i mean of course wealthy people and corporations do have legitimate concerns and have a constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances, but so do all other citizens. and the democratic leadership council is entirely focused on having the wealthy and the corporations make all the decisions on economic issues. the democratic leadership council is also very hawkish and militaristic; it is not like any of them would have to send their kids off to die in a war. that is what working-class people do. now yes, joe lieberman and the democratic leadership council are very liberal on many social issues, but even on those, they have an uneven record, and are quite conservative on a few hot-button social issues from time to time. ned lamont, on the other hand, is a progressive, from what howard dean calls “the democratic wing of the democratic party”. we progressives include most of the liberal blogosphere, such as the daily kos and atrios and democrats.com and many other sites. the #1 favorite senator of most of us progressive democrats, russ feingold of wisconsin, is actually jewish, so no we are not anti-semitic, and joe lieberman’s judaism has nothing to do with why he is a bad senator. moveon.org, michael moore, the nation magazine, and mother jones magazine are all progressive democrats, as is people for the american way, the air america radio network, and the center for american progress think tank. now some people, especially fox news, think that michael moore and moveon.org and the daily kos are all left-wing extremists or some crap like that. but really, we progressive democrats are proud to be associated with such forward-thinking people, who are certainly a lot better on policy matters than most of the people we have in office. now ned lamont may be a wealthy businessman, but we do not hold his background against him, because he shares our beliefs, and he is one of us. he is one of those wealthy individuals who actually wants to give something back to society and make the world a better place, not the greedy type who only care about themselves and nobody else. now some people might be thinking george soros right now, and all i have to say is, george soros is a wonderful man, a humanitarian, a progressive thinker, who simply wants to make the world a better place, and is willing to spend his hard-earned money to help out other people without expecting anything at all in return. in fact, he expects to have to pay higher taxes in return, but does it anyway. now that is what i call unselfish. he is a hungarian refugee, who survived nazism, and since i am half-hungarian, i have a special affinity for george soros and am outraged whenever i hear people in the media or on blogs blithely attack him for his good works. another billionaire i think is a wonderful man is ted turner, although i am sure there are many people who would disagree. to them i say, shut up, because ted turner is awesome! he is an environmentalist, the largest private landowner in the country, spending his own money on buying up wilderness to preserve it for future generations. and he is an anti-war internationalist, who has donated a billion dollars to the united nations, to help it fulfill its mission that it established in its charter. but ted turner’s biggest concern is the survival of the human race as a species, and that is the issue he has devoted the most time and energy to, which i think is very admirable. he is a true progressive. but anyway, my point is, joe lieberman is not a progressive. joe lieberman is a close ally of the wealthy and powerful, but not the good wealthy people like george soros and ted turner; joe lieberman is an ally of the bad wealthy people, who just care about tax breaks and getting corporate welfare and having free-trade agreements that let them ship jobs overseas. he is a corporatist, and an ally of the military-industrial complex. he is a war hawk, and an unapologetic advocate of the use of military force by the united states and israel. he was one of about half of the democrats in congress who helped out the lending industry and the bankers by passing the republican bankruptcy bill into law; that law makes it much harder for ordinary people to become bankrupt, but actually helps wealthy people shield their investments if they declare bankruptcy. the lending industry mails out credit cards to anyone at all, even shopaholics with no income, and then they come whining to congress after people with bad credit behave as expected, go deep into debt, and declare themselves bankrupt. if you are running a bank, and you issue credit cards with huge credit limits to joe blow off the street despite his bad credit, why the hell should you be surprised when he goes out and spends a lot of money he can’t afford, becomes bankrupt, and is unable to pay back his debts to you? it is just common sense. if businesspeople are so stupid that they do not know how to make money, it is not the job of the federal government to bail them out. capitalism only works if you let the bad businesses fail, so that the good ones can succeed even better. but joe lieberman is one of those corporate welfare types who dole out money to reward poorly managed corporations for their inability to make money. and in defending his record to the people of connecticut, all he has to defend his career in the senate is 18 years of getting wasteful pork barrel spending projects for his home state, the wealthiest state in the nation. it is not the business of the federal government to do wasteful pork barrel spending, when there are more important things to spend money on, like health care and education and the military. why do politicians always brag about how they got spending for such-and-such a pork barrel spending project, and then keep getting re-elected? it is mind-numbing madness. now, the best crusader against wasteful pork-barrel spending is republican congressman jeff flake of arizona, but he cannot even get his own party to go along with him, much less the democrats. quite a shame indeed. but ned lamont has said that he does not support these stupid pork-barrel spending projects, or corporate welfare, or any of that other bullshit joe lieberman has done while in office. so yeah. the republicans are all saying how horrible this is, what we democrats are doing to joe lieberman, how it is like an inquisition or something. but guess what? we democrats are just showing that we have standards, and if one of our elected officials is not good enough, we give them the boot. something the republicans had better re-learn, as they certainly seemed to know it in 1994, but they have forgotten it since then. and the current leaders of the republicans in congress are nowhere near as good as newt gingrich was. you gotta give the guy credit, newt gingrich was a genius. if he were still in charge in congress, there would be no deficit. but instead, the republicans chose corruption, bad policies, bush administration mismanagement, and tom delay. in short, they have shown themselves completely incompetent at governance, just like joe lieberman. ned lamont promises to be a real progressive senator, like russ feingold or the late paul wellstone. if more politicians were like that, our government might actually work the way it is supposed to. which it will... once we take over. the party bigwigs might not like it, but the revolution is on, and they can either join the team and be a part of making this country a better place, or get left in the dust and replaced the next time they are up for re-election. replacing joe lieberman is only the beginning; even politicians we enthusiastically support today can become potential targets for replacing tomorrow. it is a complicated world, and the issues are changing all the time. who knows who will be next to incur the wrath of the blogosphere? know this... we in the blogosphere, whether we are right-wing, left-wing, or whatever, are not to be trifled with. if you are a politician, i would highly recommend having your people monitor the major blogs, to keep track of what people say about you, or else you could be in for a nasty surprise, just like joe lieberman. but if you do keep track of what the major bloggers say, you should be able to figure out what to say in order to pander to us, and keep the threat at bay. you have been warned.

comedian in chief

wow, dubya thinks he’s a comedian now. heh heh. here’s a pretty funny video of prez o. dent doing his schtick in front of the press, hosted on rush limbaugh’s website. ya know, it’s good to see that bushie poo still has a sense of humor. and i finally get this guy now. everything is just one big joke to him. and guess what the punchline will be at the end? nukyular war! boo ya! on a more serious note, aw hell... i can’t be serious at a time like this! the world is going to hell in a handbasket and all i can do is laugh my ass off cuz humor is the only way to cope with this shit. that is why the best news shows are the daily show and colbert report, and the best news website is theonion.com. reality is far too depressing for anyone to actually deal with, which is why 100% of the human race create our own internal mental fantasylands, and expel the evil reality from our brains. there is not one person who is able to deal with reality without at least rejecting some small part of reality and believing in some nonsense instead. that is why most books are fiction, why we watch movies, to escape reality, even though there is no escape, only self-delusion in the short term and death in the long run. but humor is the antidote to the foul poison of reality. jokes are the only way to preserve sanity and avoid believing in complete absurdities. so it is an excellent sign to see the president treating everything like one big joke. hopefully, joking around will help introduce some critical thinking into his mind and help him question things a little more, so he gets more of a handle on reality. i know that for me, nothing is more enlightening than comedy, and this president, being quite low on any sort of understanding of reality, could really use some enlightenment about it. if someone you disagree with makes an argument seriously, you just get angry and look for holes in the argument and try your best to prove them wrong. but if they tell a joke to make their point... well... that is how you win people over. i propose humor protests and joke-ins. comedy is the most honest form of communication. there is no political correctness. once somebody gets offended by comedy and expresses outrage, they have gotten all serious, making them uncool in the eyes of comedy. the proper form of response is an even funnier ridicule of whoever offended you. comedy lets you know how someone really thinks, and not the front that they put on all the time, the fake persona they adopt. comedy doesn’t even require a comedian. you can laugh at someone else’s misfortune. that is better than feeling sorry for people. then, whenever something bad happens, at least someone will be happy. according to the utilitarian philosophy, then, since we want to maximize everyone’s happiness, nobody should ever take anything seriously, and everything should be one big joke. so how is this post comedy? isn’t it serious, despite talking about comedy? no... look closer. this entire post, in fact, everything on this entire blog, in every post, it is all one big joke! even my name is a joke! numinous ubiquity! what the hell does that mean? well, if you look up the 2 words in a dictionary, you’ll see it doesn’t make a lick of sense! but you want to know why that is funny? the reason the joke is so funny, is because nobody ever gets it! the real joke is on the reader! the real joke is on you, for reading this drivel! and yet you continue, despite knowing that you are being a retard by reading this crap! maybe you think it is good? even more laughable! some of my recent posts have provoked some pretty hilarious responses. after i dissed on mel gibson for hating the jews, some people dissed on me and said how great mel gibson was, and how awful jews are. what a joke! i can’t believe people dumb enough to say that shit exist! when i look at the comments on my blog, they are all so retarded! sure, everything i say is retarded, but the comments are always even worse. i have tricked you all into making fools of yourselves, by goading you into saying stupid shit on the internet. one recent comment was about my bad grammar and lack of capitalization, and about how the person who left the comment is anal retentive and obsessed with grammar. what a joke! i use bad grammar on purpose, just to get a rise out of people like that! and why do i write in lowercase? that is to de-emphasize everything i say, to let people know not to take it seriously. i mean duh. so yeah, bush... greatest president ever! i salute you, you silly ape, you anti-intellectual ivy leaguer from connecticut who pretends to be from texas and even has the accent! you really did a great job flying planes for the military during the vietnam war, you dope! won any elections lately? funny how the new electronic voting machines don’t leave paper trails... are they evil robots from the future? at least your twin daughters are hot, cuz they are dumber than rocks! hey good job bringing democracy to the middle east... hamas and mahmoud ahmadenijad say thanks. and as for hezbollah? who would have thought killing hundreds of people over 2 who were kidnapped was a fair trade? fuzzy math! the 2 who were kidnapped must be super-human, to be worth so much in terms of regular human lives. so why don’t they use their super-human super-powers to escape from their captors, eh? our bush baby president has been bushwhacked, bush league. better shave laura’s bush. how come the most powerful person in the world is the biggest loser in the world? imagine what that means for the rest of us, since that makes all of us even worse losers, for living on the same planet as him. at least we weren’t male cheerleaders at yale, and don’t play dress-up on aircraft carriers to pretend to be gi joe when we are really pansy-ass pink boys. bush not only tells jokes, he is a joke himself. he is the alpha and the omega of comedy, the beginning and the end, the funniest man who ever lived. when the fema director is incompetent, it is a scandal, but when the president is incompetent, people take pride in it. let’s just give our ports away to the people who attacked us on 9/11, put the terrorists in charge of port security. genius! now as one last exercise, i want you to watch the next few times bush is on c-span giving speeches, and listen carefully to each of the speeches, and each one of them is a treasure trove of comedy, full of misstatements, switching around two words, hilarious inconsistencies, and side-splitting ironies that totally go against how his administration behaves. if you look at the gap between his rhetoric when he talks, and what his administration actually does, it is enormous, which is what makes his speeches that attempt to be serious end up sounding ridiculous. like when he talks about democracy... classic! or when he talks about fighting terrorism.... brilliant! if only he could put his money where his mouth is, or, failing that, his foot.