Beer Goggle Dreams

21:31 PM 02/19/2011

So once again I forgot that I can't touch my eyes after visiting my friend's house because he has cats. Hours later after flushing them and taking a nap the right eye is finally useable again. Y'know maybe goggles will take off as a trend. I'd love a pair like Atrus from Riven has. Maybe it's time to send in my cheap chippers for custom lenses. (My daughter's new glasses come first though.)
( Itchy Irrigations... )

March 13, 2009 11:04 AM 3/13/09

Our Freedoms Goodbye - ttto American Pie by Don Mclean

============================

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How the signals never reached my brain.
And I would often take the chance
To lose my tinfoil hat and dance
And, maybe, just be happy for a while.

But the government made me bitter
With every new emitter.
Signals on my cortex;
I had to take the next step.

( More behind the cut... )

The song is tongue-in-cheek but far too many Americans feel this way unfortunately...

February 11, 2009 10:18 AM 2/11/09


So I see that Congresscritter Fiendstein is trying to put anti net-neutrality stuff into an economic stimulus/spending package.

Those of you that elected the SOB should feel proud that she seems poised to represent the special interests behind closed doors where people can’t see what she’s doing.

Yeah. That’s important. It’s important to protect our corporate interests and put that in A PIECE OF LEGISLATION THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEALING WITH THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IN THIS COUNTRY!!!!!

NO MORE RIDERS! DO YOU HEAR ME CONCRESSCRITTERS?!? NO! MORE! RIDERS!

If you can’t do the job we _will_ vote you out. We’re awake now you assholes so watch where you step.

( *ahem* )

January 15, 2009 10:56 AM 1/15/09

It was a balmy negative 14 degrees when I drove into work this morning and as of a couple hours ago my home weather station was registering minus 12.

And my friends in warmer climates think they have it bad because they dropped into the 60’s. Bah! It’s days like this when I wonder why I didn’t call in and use a vacation day.

In other news...once again I will highly suggest that the laws be changed to allow physical harm to people running full-time spam servers. And I’m not talking about the average zombied PC or firms that do legitimate mass-marketing to their customers. I’m talking about the annoying servers that are sending out billions of SPAM messages that take up my miniscule amount of bandwidth and require me to add whole subnets to my firewall rules to shut them down.

( Their spammy spamm ways and a cut due to wordyness... )

October 13, 2008 11:13 AM 10/13/08

So I’m looking at the news online yesterday and notice an article that says the National Debt Clock has rolled over and they had to sticky-past a dollar sign on the front so that they could use the original dollar sign display to display the one.

That doesn’t bother me - clocks roll over all the time. But this is the clock that tracks our National Debt.

The article stated that a new clock will be installed in 2009 and it will be able to display a considerably larger number.

Okay. Fine. Wait...WHAT?

So here in the US we’ve got a debt that rivals most debts in the known world (I honestly don’t know if it’s the worst or not) and instead...instead of figuring out how to lower that number...instead of using the broken clock as a talking point to rally the people to make the government fix the problem...we are going to fix the clock.

Talk about curing the symptom and ignoring the disease!

Every single person who hears about this should be screaming, literally screaming, at their congress-critter to find a way to lower that number.

WHY AREN’T WE SCREAMING!

Well...frankly...because we’re not sure it would help.

I mean look at what happened with the bailout. People did a wonderful job of calling their representatives in Washington to prevent pushing that crap through. And we stopped it - once. It was then amended and pushed through anyway.

And while I can’t speak to the changes I’m of the opinion that any part of that bailout should not have been done.

But what a fucking slight of hand that was. “Oh we’ve changed it! It’s not the same bailout plan as the first one!” And people bought that and the corporate losers who’ve been greedily sucking up all the wealth got their cash. It’s disgusting to me and it should be disgusting to most US people but for some reason they don’t seem to care.

If I let my tinfoil speculate I’d suspect something in the water supplies but I don’t think they’re that organized. The truth is that we’ve gotten lazy and apathetic. Partly because we’re not used to controlling our government and partly because we’ve been the fat cats for so long that we just don’t remember how to do anything else right now.

Add to that we’ve been taught to trust the government and the media and doctors and lawyers and...well you get the picture.

Things could be made quite a bit better if we didn’t trust anybody in authority except perhaps emergency personnel and even then only guarded trust.

You know what I’d love to see? I’d love to see every member of our government’s private vehicles papered with the latest national debt number. Nothing damaging but use a big messy splotch of rubber cement so it’s annoying to remove but not difficult.

Plant lawn signs in their yards stating “Due to the national debt and your corrupt government actions we the people feel that your property could better be used as a homeless shelter and we claim it under eminent domain.”

We need more civil disobedience. Nothing nasty. Nothing damaging. Nothing dangerous. Just stuff they have to work to clean up. Stuff that the media can’t ignore if there’s enough of it.

Hang banners from every window that you can that says “Our national debt and our economy is what it is because of corruption and large corporations.” Or something like “Trust no one in congress or the White House.”, and maybe “Your government is lying to you.” Simple statements that everyone can understand. I’d love “Your government is no longer YOUR government!” but I think that would confuse people.

It’s still not quite too late to change this with words and deeds. We’ve still got a little bit of the other boxes left to stand on before we choose the ammo box.

And I’m really hoping that we don’t have to pull out the ammo box...

October 7, 2008 11:13 AM 10/7/08

So I’m listening and watching to as little political stuff as possible. To me the arguments are one-sided and unfortunately for any third-party candidates our current system only really allows two choices for president.

But here’s the thing - it allows a buttload of choices for other representatives. And those representatives are often MORE important than who becomes the president.

I’m all for voting an incumbents out. Period. The problem is that there seems to be no complete list of them! It’s a lot of work to check hundreds of names to find out how long they’ve been in office. And if it’s one thing the American people don’t want it’s more work.

But that’s what it’s all about people. Maintaining a government that has your best interests at heart _IS_ a lot of work. People just two generations before the current one knew this. The fact that we should and _HAVE_ to work this hard for _OUR_ government has been long glossed over by the media and large corporate interests.

“Well the government will do something about that.” - Not unless you do so yourself because you ARE the government.

“I don’t need to protect myself the government will.” - Yes. They’ll protect you by taking away your rights. You’re awfully safe in a small box with the door shut and police on the other side. Until a criminal sneaks in the window that is...

“But the terrorists!” - Who’s more a terrorist? The people who killed thousands or the people torturing millions.

“Well I don’t mind privacy invasions because I have nothing to hide!” - Umm...okay...so you’re the modern equivalent of Gandhi or Mother Theresa then? Not likely. I’d think about all the things you hide from other people and if you want them all exposed. How many of you have illegal music? How many of you have “medicinal herbs”? How many of you practice a religion which is unpopular? Let us all share the deepest, darkest, horrible secrets of our souls....you first.

There is NO excuse for not running your own government - and even less for not even voting.

“But that’s so HAARD!”

Sorry - them’s the breaks.

Hey America! Remember when you used to be young and thin and nothing in the world mattered more than you? Nothing could stop you from anything you wanted to do and you were so proud! What happened?

Well like most people you sat on your butt and let time pass you by. You ceased to care about doing anything but sitting in front of the TV or the computer. The government people all run by corporations said “Don’t worry about it! We’ll take care of everything for you!”

And we believed them - myself included.

So what happened is the same thing that happens to anybody who parks themselves in front of the TV. We got lazy. We got fat. (Myself included.) The government kept whispering in our ears that they’d keep us safe and handle everything.

And the government too grew fat and lazy. And as a result things began to break down. Laws began to break down. Infrastructure began to break down. People began to break down.

And that’s where we are now - broken.

We need to get up off our collective asses and fix our broken country. It’s not going to get fixed by who’s in the government offices because they are only one part of the government - we are the other part.

And we’ve not been involved in the mechanism for quite some time now.

So what’s this come down to? Well it comes down to the fact that you should at least vote. I won’t try and sway your choices - that’s up to you.

But I’ll tell you one thing. There is one thing and only one thing corrupt government people fear.

It’s you.

When you and those around you are organized and informed and active you are the one thing that can stop them from spending more of your money on useless things or taking away your rights or hiding in the halls of power ignoring what you want.

Raise your voices people. Tell them that enough is enough and you will no longer be trapped by their whims.

You’re better than that people and I have a great amount of faith in you.

September 12, 2008 11:27 AM 9/12/08

Can we get off this planet now? Or at least out of this country?

Let’s see....

The Republicans are trying to disenfranchise voters in Michigan who are involved with or have been foreclosed upon. (They’re also thinking about doing this in Ohio among other places as well.) This removes a portion of the population that is angry against the current government.

The Senate Judiciary Committee just passed EIPA which basically puts the DOJ as the lapdogs of the media industries to pursue lawsuits against anybody even suspected of sharing copyrighted content. That law also removes many barriers to seizure of possessions in those cases.

The war in Iraq shows no signs of ending.

The war in Afghanistan shows no signs of ending.

We’ve recently told our military that we can pursue and fight into Pakistan without their permission. (There’s another war waiting to start.)

We’re still trying to start a war with Iran.

Our economy is sliding downward regardless of what anyone says. We’re trapped in our own mire.


And we’re sinking rapidly.


Someone elsewhere mentioned the phrase “arranging deck chairs on the Titanic” and it sure does fit. Right now we’re sinking badly and it seems that all but a few people are part of the band playing in the background waiting for the end.


WAKE UP PEOPLE!


Don’t know what to do? Well here’s a list...

VOTE!. It may not make a difference but it can’t help but make a change.

CALL YOUR CONGRESSCRITTER! Do not let them put you on hold for any length of time. Do not accept taking a message. TALK TO THE PEOPLE INVOLVED DIRECTLY. Inundating them with physical phone calls is the only way that I can see that the thoughts of the average man or woman will be heard.

CALL THE MEDIA! Once again - inundation from physical phone calls about a given set of subjects will cause them to sit up and take notice despite how much money they’re getting from their corporate sponsors.

E-mail gets deleted. Faxes get trashcanned. And if the phone calls ALWAYS go to voicemail then THAT is something you can tell the media when you call them.

And if they don’t answer either?

GET YOUR BUTT INTO THE STREETS WITH SIGNS AND LOTS OF THEM. AND VIDEO CAMERAS.

No feces. No urine. No fake blood. Nothing to throw. Just your voices and the signs and the cameras.

Start no fights. If they hit you DON’T hit back. This will force them to show their true colors.

The problem with active protesting is that once you swing a fist or throw an object then THEY BECOME THE MARTYRS AND YOU LOSE ANY CHANCE OF SHOWING THE TRUTH OR MAKING YOUR POINT.

*sigh*

I’m out of time here today but please people AT LEAST DO SOMETHING!