The "so called" Election
Sunday, October 26, 2008, 08:07 AM - Political Science
The current financial situation has brought a few interesting things to the surface which weren't obvious before.

1. Clearly, McCain (or perhaps merely his very expensive advisors?) was never expecting to win this election. How else does one explain (a) is idiotic campaign (b) is even more idiotic choice of running mate (c) the HUGE difference in the way the media is treating him as opposed to previous republican election cycles.

Originally, I thought the republican national committee had been browbeat into accepting a Palin like character because they've spent so many years taking money from the far right mega-churches who've seen none of their wishes met for so long.

Now, I see that the point of the current round of republican smearing, republican election fraud and misdirection and the invented financial crisis will create a world which looks a bit like this:

1. Barak Obama will preside over the complete dissolution of the United States Government, brought about by the current (engineered) financial crisis.

2. The current levels of vitriol are only a prelude to the howling we will hear post election, no matter which way the actual count goes, allowing the current chimp in the whitehouse to declare martial law and cancel giving power to somebody else.

3. Even if that doesn't happen, as folks all over the world get hungry and angry and start jumping up and down and running around with pitchforks and torches, the austrians (who started the last international currency mess in 1933, btw) will again call for a One World Currency and they'll have the resources (which Paulson, et al has now furnished) to pay off us all enough to quell enough descent to implement this new system.

What it is, I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine.

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The so called, "Economic Crisis"
Friday, October 3, 2008, 07:30 AM - Academics, Politics
As I understand it, Paulson, et al. insists that if we do not give him lots of money, somehow, the US economy will suffer.

As I understand it, this alleged suffering is due to the habit of apparently all, or at least most, medium sized and larger businesses to regularly borrow money to pay their debts and stay in business.

Yet is it not precisely these business practices, over the past 30 years who have successfully wiped small businesses out of existence in our cities? Didn't we used to have corner drugstores before Walgreens? Didn't we used to have mom and pop hardware stores before Ace and Home Depot? Didn't we used to have friendly neighborhood bookstores before Barns and Noble and Amazon.com?

In other countries of the world, what small businesses there are work the way small business used to work in this country. They'd start business, grow, buy stuff they needed with cash (not credit) and grow some more until they reached an optimum size for their liking and then they would remain that size for many years (or, perhaps fluctuate) but NOT be run out of business by corporations with unlimited access to cheap loans.

I feel strongly that our country should be more like it was in the 1970s when, if you wanted to grow your business, you had to actually pay for stuff. If you couldn't make payroll, YOU WENT OUT OF BUSINESS. And that left opportunities for others to take over.

There should be NO bailout or rescue plan which would further inflate the currency anyway. We should allow investment banks to FAIL for being reckless and those people working there should find work in OTHER FIELDS better suited to them. This model of capitalism has too much inherent moral hazard. All politicians who were duped into thinking we need this need to be voted out of office. Starting with Ms. Wilson.

Sure, a few products will be more expensive. Sure, business will be "Less Efficient" but that way, we can actually get local culture back again and these fat cat bankers can just go crawl back into the hole from which they came.

But hey - that's just my opinion; worth every penny it costs you to read.

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A great new succinct definition for Sexism
Thursday, April 24, 2008, 06:48 AM - Politics, Gender Politics
So I was reading this morning about an interesting incident.

It appears that, in the beginning, quite spontaneously, a woman in a hallway at a hotel at a convention told a bunch of guys, "Feel my boobs! It's okay!" and therein began " The Open-Source Boob Project". Quoth the Ferrett :



At Penguicon, we had buttons to give away. There were two small buttons, one for each camp: A green button that said, "YES, you may" and a red button that said "NO, you may not." And anyone who had those buttons on, whether you knew them or not, was someone you could approach and ask:

"Excuse me, but may I touch your breasts?"

And if you weren't a total lout - the women retained their right to say no, of course - they would push their chests out, and you would be allowed into the sanctity of it. That exchange of happiness where one person are told with gropes and touches that they are desirable and the other is someone who's allowed to desire.

For a moment, everything that was awkward about high school would fade away and you could just say what was on your mind. It was as though parts of me were being healed whenever I did it, and I touched at least fifteen sets of boobs at Penguicon. It never got old, surprisingly.

Some women didn't want to. That was fine. We never demanded anything of anyone. And if you didn't want to put yours up for the Project but you wanted to touch, well, that was fine, too. It was simply for folks who felt like being open.

It was a raging success at Penguicon.... And there haven't been any hookups that I know of thanks to the Open-Source Boob Project. It is, as I said, a very special thing. (Though I wouldn't rule it out if two single people exchanged a moment.) And we'll probably do it at other cons, because it's strangely wholesome and sexual at the same time.

...





Reactions to this caused the originators to backtrack somewhat on their admittedly adolescent male utopia and clarify.

Reactions to the reactions included this wonderful piece that contains one of the very best most succinct definitions of racism and sexism I've ever encountered. See the second paragraph.

I love free speech. (within limits, obviously).

This reminds me of my own story of asking what shouldn't ever have been asked. But you'll have to ask me directly for the details of that. It shouldn't be published.

Meanwhile, back in the victorian era, we have idiots like John McCain doing the same sorts of things. Sigh.



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Well, the computer is back up now
Thursday, April 24, 2008, 06:35 AM - Macintosh
So this would've taken 1 hour and a few mouseclicks if I had only stuck to using the Leopard disk. But it didn't boot up the first time I tried it so then I tried to copy the backup from the Time Machine disk to the Mac Pro internal hard disk using Tiger's Disk utility. It renamed it on the first pass (so they were both the same name and then REFORMATTED THE WRONG DISK!!!

The moral of the story is never use Tiger's disk utility on Time Machine disks.

So I've lost a year's worth of email and receipts. No backups. Sigh.

I've lost all my photo organization (I've spent $300 on disk recovery software and managed to actually find all 35,000 photos -- I think). But I've lost all sorting and filtering of them.

And I've lost about $500 worth of purchased software.

Grumble.




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Ooops!
Saturday, April 19, 2008, 02:40 PM - Academics, Macintosh, Website
My Macintosh hard disk died. I've spend the past few days working on trying to recreate it. Sigh. My backup didn't work. :(

I can still get email on my phone at some of my email addresses, but if I don't get back to you, try phoning instead.

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