February 2006 Archives

NASA discovered a significant gamma-burst explosion "nearby" our galaxy this week. NASA is at a loss to explain the explosion, and some people have said that perhaps it's the Vogons finally making their hyperspace bypass, and one of my friends suggested it's the Cylons, but it's obviously the Elder Gods returning to rule the Earth again. Given their imminent arrival, I'd like to suggest the top 10 people Cthulu should eat first, in no particular order:

1. Jerry Falwell - This should be no surprise to anyone who reads my blog that I would nominate him for this list. His religious and political bigotry is unbearable, alon with the second entrant to the list
2. Pat Robertson - The beautiful thing is that we would probably get to see Pat Robertson's demise live on TV while he decried Cthulu as working for the gay jewish liberal Hollywood elite, which is silly, because we all know that Cthulu voted for Bush in Florida in 2000.
3. Michael Moore - While always thought-provoking and eye-catching, like a monkey in a tuxedo dancing with a water buffalo, his mud-slinging and truth-dodging make him an ideological equal to people like Karl Rove, only Karl Rove uses TV commercials and phone banks to spread his lies. Michael Moore's been given a larger soapbox to spew from. That makes him a bigger target.
4. Fred Phelps - As the man who leads his entire extended buck-toothed and cross-eyed family to protest at funerals of gay people and American soldiers, holding up signs praising the insurgency in Iraq and praising the 9/11 terrorists, this nutjob does nothing but sow hatred and anger in America. When he arrives in hell Satan has a job waiting for him to be the jizz mopper at the All-Night Suck-And-Fuck Bone-A-Rama Movie Hall in Hades' gay district.
5. Osama bin Laden - A man given all of the best in his youth through his father's hard work and pious life has turned it towards so much despicable evil. With all his vast resources and know-how, he could have commanded an army of volunteers to dig the muslim faithful out from under the rubble in Kashmir after the earthquake this fall, or saved the lives of children trapped under 20 feet of mud in an elementary school in Leyte. That would have truly been God's work. Instead he left it to the "great Satan": the US. I actually hope he gets trapped alive in the teeth of Cthulu and is slowly ground to death.
6. Michael Brown - Former FEMA chief should have known that he wasn't cut out for his job as the head of the agency in charge of first responding to the worst disasters one of the largest nations in the world would have to face but he tried to fake it, and when the mini-apocalypse happened, he ignored all the reports, all the indications, and all the pleadings of people on the ground in the middle of the shit and LET PEOPLE DIE. While Brownie was complaining, through his assistant, that he had to wait 20 - 30 minutes to get through traffic to eat dinner, his response was "I just ate an MRE [military rations] and crapped in the hallway of the Superdome along with 30,000 other close friends so I understand her concern about busy restaurants." (Link)
7. David Mayberry - An HIV-positive Boy Scout leader who admitted to having sex with children and soliciting children online to have sex with, KNOWING he was HIV-positive. WTF? In fact, maybe the first thing we should do is empty the prisons of ALL of the guys like him and make a giant hamburger patty of them for Cthulu. (Link)
8. Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin - McKinnon (Link) and Dworkin (Link) worked hard to make all pornography a civil rights violation, saying that it's mere existence was harmful to women because it made men into rapists, murderers, and in some extreme cases politicians (alright, I made that last one up). The fact remains, however, that they perverted the real meaning of equality and feminism from something that means men and women are to be treated both the same and are equally responsible for what happens in their life into something where feminism meant that women are always the victim even when they don't think they are. True, Dworkin's dead already, but I advocate Cthulu eating what remains.
9. Louis Farrakan - The "civil rights leader" is another person, like McKinnon and Dworkin who took a position that originally stated true equality and twisted it so that equality mean the right to be a constant victim. He has worked nonestop to turn every event in history as part of some grand conspiracy to keep black people down. Doing that, with as loud a mouth as his, has stunted and deformed and derailed race relations, making people in two generations of black America even more unduly put upon. With his charisma and speaking ability he could focus on the real problems black people face in America and around the world, but instead he travels around talking about secret holes dug in the levees to wipe out the black population of New Orleans, or praising Hitler for killing Jews. So, into Cthulu's mouth you go.

There are so many other people that could go into the mouth of Cthulu that just couldn't fit on the list: the president of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, most of Hammas, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, but seriously, I'm hoping that by feeding Cthulu the shitheads I've listed above, he'll get such a bad taste for humanity that he'll decide we're not worth the trouble and just leave the rest of us alone.

Navy Vet gets hassled at work for having an anti-Bush bumper sticker on his truck. (Link)

VA Administration Nurse was charged with sedition for writing a letter to the editor criticizing the Bush Administration's handling of Katrina. (Link)

The CIA is trying to reclassify thousands of documents, some dating back to 1948, as secret again to remove it from public view. There's no direct link to the Bush Administration, but given the secretive nature of the president and his administration, it's not surprising that the CIA would use this time to start pulling documents it wants to hide. (Link)

Mayor Daley in Chicago wants to force any businesses open past 4am, and all businesses open 24 hours (bars, taverns, convenience stores) to have police cameras in them. (Link)

I wrote about the Canadian family that decided not to return the camera they found in Hawaii. Boing Boing is where I and others picked up the story and now said Canadian family sent their imaginary lawyer against Cory Doctorow and Boing Boing.

Cory responded with logic and fact-checking which is usually harmful to lawyers, especially the fake kind.

The latest commercial to catch my eye is the Avis commercial done up to look like a hip-hop video with DMX's "Ruff Ryder's Anthem" but with old white people driving the fancy white vehicles.

Quite a tasty treat.

I'm looking for a copy now. Anyone have any pointers? Who's Avis' ad agency? Anyone know? This is a very different direction from their "What If We Didn't Try Harder" campaign from last year, and I like it.

It turns out that I was wrong (ha, not the first time and not the last). It was not a disgruntled insider to PACleanSweep that founded UncleanSweep.

It was instead created by Bob Nye, a Republican staffer in the PA House of Representatives. Worse yet there is evidence that the Bob's bosses, namely a PA State Representative is helping him with the site.

PACleanSweep has fired back by filing a lawsuit claiming libel. Good for them. I think it's despicable that some Representative would sink so low to attack a whole citizen's political movement by trying to take out its head. Good to know that the politicians in Harrisburg have heard and are afraid.

Some folks lost their camera in Hawaii and were despondent because they lost all their pictures. Recently the park ranger called them and said that a family from Canada had found the camera and gave the original owners their phone number so they could call and get their camera back.

The family in Canada isn't going to give the camera back because their son likes it. Read the whole story here.

Someone registered UncleanSweep.com in response to the PA Clean Sweep movement that's afoot.

For those not in Pennsylvania, last summer the lawmakers in the middle of the night voted to give themselves large pay raises in the form of what's called "Unvouchered Expenses", which amount to them going to the treasury like a teenager going to mom and dad and saying "I need another $1000 to buy some new jeans" and the state not requiring any proof what the money was used for.

Worse yet, the Commonwealth's Supreme Court declared the matter Constitutional under the PA Constitution, so journalists found their balls and started complaining and so did the people. Pretty soon the lawmakers vowed to give back their payraises, and then a Supreme Court Judge was voted out of office and suddenly the lawmakers passed a new bill repealing the pay raises. All fine and dandy but the anger hasn't really subsided.

PA Clean Sweep is the largest of the active citizen organizations working to start voting out incumbents in Harrisburg and replace them. Now I certainly do support getting some new people in Harrisburg, and shaking things up, and I think that PA Clean Sweep's activities are noble and good in the sense that they're keeping lawmaker's feet to the fire for doing something really eggregious, but I'm not active in PA Clean Sweep.

I do think that UncleanSweep's attempt to attack Russ Diamond, the guy in charge of PA Clean Sweep, comparing him to Enron Executives, and defaming him is pretty despicable. Especially given that on one page the owner of UncleanSweep attacks one of the candidates endorsed by PA Clean Sweep for making ad hominem attacks against Bush while making the same fallacy against Diamond.

The fact of the matter is, the site seems to be run by someone disgruntled with PACleanSweep and probably disgruntled with Diamond personally, and he's set up this site not as an attempt at good civic duty, but in an attempt to shame Russ Diamond.

I feel that that's a shame, because if there's something we should do, it's focus on making real reform happen in both Harrisburg and in Washington DC. If Russ did take money illegally from PA Clean Sweep then he should answer to that charge, but otherwise, this site is nothing more than a distraction and an unnecessary one at that.

I got an email that appeared to come from EBay sent to a non-existant address on my domain that asked me to please go to www.savetimothy.net and give them money so they could fight neuroblastoma.

Neuroblastoma is a terrible disease, and for someone who lives in SouthGate, MI to pose as the struggling family in Russia fighting to save their toddler is despicable.

I've contacted EBay already because the guy's spoofing their domain to send emails and they'll probably shut it down right away but in case you feel like it, the guy's information is available here.

I'm not one to usually publish this type of information, but something about this is just so bald and ugly that I want to spit on the man who's doing it.

WebRoot recently released their report on State of Spyware in 2005 and said that last year was the worst year for spyware yet. They catalogued 130 security breaches due to spyware that exposed 55 million users and their data in the United States alone.

I'd believe it. In a year when even large companies like Sony are busy trying hide spyware on people's systems so they can "prevent theft" the threat to people will only keep growing.

The first step is vigilance, and knowing who's making the spyware.

Luckily, people like webroot, Avast, even Microsoft make good tools available to use to protect your system. Download them and use them often. It's your personal data on the line.

I've started learning how to invest. I have an interest in starting to sock away money for the family and for myself. Currently, my company pays no match to my 401(k) contributions, which is fine, but that makes me wonder how much benefit I get from doing a 401(k). Usually they're considered beneficial because you get the one-two punch of tax-exemption and "free" money from your employer, but I can get tax exemption by just throwing the money in an IRA and then I get to pick the funds and stocks that I want to invest in....

So I've started the process of learning. I know that a lot of people think I'm an almighty screw-up (and they'd be right, a lot of times I am) but I do believe that I'm being smart about this. I'm not rushing into anything, I'm saving little bits of money here and there so I can open an account with someone like Scottrade or ShareBuilder and I'm reading reading reading.

I feel like I'm looking down the barrel of some huge financial need soon and I don't want to get flat-footed. So I'm doing something about it...which I guess means I'm not such a screw-up after all.