Answering War

Many things occur to me out of the blue when I least expect them to strike. It’s as if a part of me has been working on a problem, chewing on it, and when it reached a solution it gathers up all its paperwork and knocks on the front of my brain and says “Here, we’ve done all we can do, frontal lobe, here’s this for your consideration.” And I stand there in the middle of something really mundane and I’m stuck. I stop moving and much like when you open your door and find a brightly colored box with a bow on top, you spend all that time forgetting about what you were doing and stand in shock at the box. So it was with me earlier this evening.

Apparently a part of me was working on military strategy. Turns out part of the paperwork also included a method to cause a cease of conflict and effectively short-circuit a war, going from conflict, skipping over death, and moving to resolution. How you ask? I  was myself shocked at the answer and it comes from mother nature herself.

If you grow a very large amount of Cannabis Sativa, dry it out thoroughly and then set it on fire, then blow the resultant smoke out onto the battlefield, saturating every square inch with a thick white fog in about 15 minutes time all combatants will spontaneously stop giving a damn about whatever it is that they were fighting about and put down their weapons and sit down on the ground, some may lay down, others will likely lean back on their elbows. The key here is that every combatant will stop caring about killing and just want to “hang out” and “take in the majesty of this place, maaaaan” some may fall asleep and the rest will be overcome with feelings of euphoria, laziness, and extreme hunger.

Then, once you’ve smoked both sides until they have stopped fighting, you roll in hot dog carts, pizza carts, falafel carts, whatever. They go ding-ding-ing onto the battlefield and since everything is free (it’s war, this is what you pay for…) everyone is calm, feeling just fine thank-you-very-much, and the idea of getting a gun and killing someone else is about as far from anyones mind as humanly possible. You’ve just eaten five pounds of whatever and really all you want to do is take a nap.

Those that might be wearing gas masks will see the beatific joy and happiness on their fellow combatants faces and perhaps they’ll be encouraged to take off their masks. If not, then you still have to contend with an angry army, however if you continuously smoke them eventually any gas mask will saturate and stop working and people have to breathe. Over time, those that hold out with masks will just stop caring and get hungry like all the others.

This method would work perfectly for a peacekeeping force between two belligerent sides, so, for example, Americans versus Iranians – the United Nations peacekeepers cultivate millions of tons of dried cannabis sativa and start working on a smoker-gun and then we drop them into the middle of the battlefield and they just sit back with a beer in their hands, on a folding chair, making sure the machine chuffs out smoke nice and evenly. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, what you are fighting about, or anything. Once exposed to this smoke, nature will take its course. The course is not war, killing, or death – but rather just relaxing, taking in the sights, and wondering where the nearest falafel cart is.

I dare anyone to challenge this idea.

Jindal Says He Won’t Implement Obamacare – ABC News

Jindal Says He Won’t Implement Obamacare – ABC News.

The Governor of Louisiana has effectively declared that he is going to defy the Union!

That’s fine. Louisiana has really just declared their full intent to be considered in rebellion against the Union and this amounts to secession. The last time we saw this particular bluster it was 1861 and South Carolina.

So all that is old is new again. If Jindal is serious, he is going to take his state into open rebellion and this will initiate the Second Great American Civil War. This is such an outrage! To throw away the Union because you don’t want your poorest citizens to have health insurance coverage! It boggles the mind!

So, what is to be done? If Louisiana is in open rebellion it is time to establish a new border for the remaining states, establish trade tariffs, discontinue all federal services to the rebellious state of Louisiana, place barricades on their Interstates, militarize the border and eventually occupy the state, depose it’s state government and force it to submit to the will of the Union.

The last time states were in open rebellion the North burned Richmond Virginia to the ground to simply prove a point.

So, Governor Jindal, are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to take your entire state down this path? Your political bluster HAS CONSEQUENCES Governor!

My advice to you and the people of Louisiana, tread very carefully. Very carefully. You are being watched and evaluated.

Eduardo Saverin is shameless and should be banished!

Reading an article on Google Plus, about one of the Facebook executives, Eduardo Saverin who renounced his citizenship to dodge his fair tax burden. A burden that we all share so that our society can function!

This man, Eduardo Saverin is shameless. He is not alone and that is a huge problem in our modern world. Nobody feels shame any longer. They know they should, but they simply do not care. They are greedy for greeds sake and unwilling to take part in what it means to be an American, and a big part of that is to pay what your fair share of tax to pay for the basic services that we all take for granted.

There is a lot wrong with our world. We are plagued with the lazy, the criminal, and the shameless. They spend absolutely no time considering how their actions will affect anyone else. Contrary to popular opinion, every single American is interdependent and each one of us has an obligation to work and pay taxes for those services that we all take for granted.

I find people like Eduardo Saverin to be a clear example of what is horribly wrong with our society. People unwilling to act responsibly and be a proud citizen of our great country. So what is to be done with people who do this sort of thing? I’ve got a great idea, at least in this case, and that is a punishment befitting the crime: Banishment.

Mr. Eduardo Saverin should not be welcome in the United States. He should be banned from any future dealings, his entry should be rejected at whatever port he attempts to gain access through and if he is discovered here illegally he should be deported. If you have the temerity to make a distastefully large sum of money on the backs of your fellow countrymen and then turn around and flee to avoid your tax burden then you should never come back. If you flee, stay that way!

We really ought to bring banishment back. We should banish Mr. Eduardo Saverin.

International Day of Lying

People need lies. Lies are good.

At least when it comes to your online identity. I’ve been reading a few things here and there with people who are quite upset that Mark Zuckerberg is seeking ways to dodge his fair share of paying taxes and these people are very upset that Facebook is making money off their personal details – their lost privacy.

So how does one regain lost privacy? Simple, lie. Lie right through your teeth. Make lying an art form. Create a fantasy life out of pure whole cloth and make it as bombastic and marvelous as you have creative chops to make it!

In fact I think everyone should do this. Right now. We need a international day of lying. Everyone needs to log in to Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter and go to town. Change the years, fiddle with the places, come up with schools you didn’t attend and live in cities you have no idea about beyond their brief entries in Wikipedia. Make it all random, make it monumental, but above all else, make it a lie. A big beautiful fantastic fabrication!

To that end, I’m going to edit my Facebook to this end. It’s going to feel good. Oh so good. Why don’t you join me? Nothing says pleasure more than wrestling power away from those that do not respect you, like Facebook. And Google. And Twitter. And well, anywhere else really.

Monetize that bullshit. I DARE you!

Of Clouds and Stones

The early 21st Century will be known for the era of cloud computing. Just a little bit of what the cloud can do I’m actually taking advantage of right now as I write this blog post.

Google provided a huge space for people to upload their music and created a handy tool to upload their iTunes music up to Google’s storage system on the network. I took advantage of this offer and copied my entire iTunes library up to Google. That’s of course just half of what I needed to cloudify my entire music collection. I also need a client to play the content on whatever devices I want to use them on. Unfortunately the Google webapp for their Google Music service doesn’t work well on my iOS device, however there is an app called Melodies which does work fantastically well!

This has saved me so much time, expense and bother. Instead of having to buy a device with a big storage unit for my music I can simply stream my music off the network, using Google and Verizon (and Wifi if I have it, and that is almost universally ubiquitous in North America anyways) so now I have nearly universal access to my music, in a way having my cake and eat it too.

This wasn’t always easy, the Melodies app did have an issue with not being able to shuffle properly but after I contacted the app support staff and telling them what was wrong they fixed the app and it updated on my iPhone in a few moments. From that point I have realized something I never thought I’d be able to do, but play my music right off the network. It’s just one more way that devices, storage, computers, all of it are becoming increasingly abstracted away from my computing experience. I expect that sometime soon the notion of a computer will start to erode and evaporate as more and more of my life becomes cloudified, or perhaps the right word is enclouded? Going to have to work on the terminology.

Of course, people who I’ve spoken to about the cloud come up with very familiar complaints as to why they don’t want to join me. Mostly it comes down to a question of privacy, and that they feel the cloud would endanger their sense of privacy. I’ve thought about that point for a while, trying to come up with a position on it. I’ve honestly never really given two shakes about my precious privacy. What value am I coveting? So what if Meijers knows what I buy and when I buy it? So what if Google knows what music I enjoy? So what if I’ve been categorized and indexed? Where is the hazard? People regard privacy as some sort of grail-object. They protect it beyond all rational sense and I don’t think that any of us can maintain any sense of privacy any longer, at least since social networking became a mainstream part of our lives.

But then again, there is the fear. Where does that come from? People hiding who they are, what they think, what they buy from others because we’re afraid of, what exactly? Isn’t it a more comfortable life to simply be who and what you are and let the chips land where they will? A life exposed is a non-issue for those that are proud of who and what they are. I admit to having a definite cavalier attitude when it comes to my privacy, but what the hell do I have to hide? Or any of us? To me it has always been my argument that if I reveal elements of my life to strangers that somehow they’ll take advantage of that information and somehow misuse it or attempt to hurt me. Well, first and foremost they’ll have to endure the social awkwardness of being the ones to expose my “secrets” to everyone else. The key here is to own everything about yourself. Own your passions, own your foibles, and own your mistakes. Nothing about the past means anything, regret is a dull nothing. For example, Anthony Wiener’s crotch-shot being publicized lead to the end of his political career. WHY? I respect people more when they stand up and own whatever it is that others find outrageous. Here’s the thing, none of us are pure. None of us really have any place to stand and throw stones. Even Jesus Christ spoke on this very point. “Let him who hath no sins cast the first stone!” Well? So you have a picture of your tenty underwear out there? OWN IT. BE PROUD OF IT. In fact, go on a Playgirl shoot and show the world your junk. This idle and meaningless outrage is stupid and lame. I would pay real money to anyone who could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that any random other human being isn’t a sexual pervert loaded with monumental loads of kink. All it takes is a shot of whiskey to get a man to drop his shorts and do highly entertaining things with his body.

So what it comes down to? Privacy bent to protect the image that we’d like to impress upon other people that we are all pure as driven snow? How silly is this, when we are as pure as driven-over snow! At least have the fortitude to stand up and say “Yes, that’s my junk shot! Do you like it!?!” Because in that, lies respect and honesty.

To people that feel differently than I do, I have a one word question to ask you:

“Really?”

Faith

I wrote this as a response to a comment on one of my G+ status updates. I’m quite proud of what I wrote. This text will bother some people, so I’m going to put it behind a MORE tag, and if you click on it, you will likely not like what you are about to read. I will not be upset if you elect to not click on the MORE tag. If you do, and what I have to say makes you feel bad, well, that’s your own problem. I’m not going to carry that weight on my shoulders, I have to deal with enough of that as it is…

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Chicago Police Say: "Your First Amendment Rights can be terminated."

The Chicago Police Department has a problem. One of their officers was videotaped stating “Your First Amendment Rights can be terminated.”

Here’s the article and you can watch the video for yourself. I wrote a little bit about it on Google Plus:

First Amendment rights can be terminated? That’s the first I’ve heard of that! Here’s the text of the thing: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

There are exceptions that the Supreme Court has installed which bear on this text, but nowhere does any of it bear on what I saw in this video.

This video is just Chicago Police acting shamefully. Perpetuating the stereotype that the police are paid thugs with no regard to citizens basic constitutionally-guaranteed rights. How can we petition the government for a redress of grievances if the central right that backs it up can be “terminated”.

Chicago has a problem on it’s hands. The police need to be put back under control before they think of themselves as somehow better or more than the rest of us.

Trampling on our rights, and worse yet, being recorded to trample over citizens rights is only going to lead to future unrest and a mounting pressure from citizens to reject these officers of the law as absurd simulacrums of what they are intended to be: To enforce laws, to serve the citizens and protect them.

The first step? Protect us from yourselves, Chicago Police Department. You are hazardous to our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

LJ – Fear Itself

From 11/26/2003


ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey (Reuters) – Saying the threat of another terror attack remained high, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge urged Americans Tuesday to be vigilant as they set off on their travels for the Thanksgiving holiday.

So, what form should this call for vigilance take? Should I react as my government wishes, cowering under the covers before the big bad terrorists come to sucker-punch us all? Should we invest in plastic sheeting and duct tape, perhaps buy more canned goods and shotguns? And exactly which terrorist should we fear – the remote Osama-like one that we no longer really care about or the one much closer to home Bush, Cheney, Ridge >cough< ? Should my vigilance enable me to set random foreigners on fire with BBQ lighter fluid and a match or should I just let the air out of their tires and report their suspicious breathing habits to my local SS Officer FBI Officer (>cough<) ? While I'm wallowing in the new shiny Fear EverythingTM Module provided to me by my government, my vigilance will be keenly felt by all around me as I refuse to change my behavior just because some be-suited moron tells me to be afraid.

As a people, we’re supposedly more terrified than our founding father’s slaves ever were… it’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragically sad.

I can imagine that both George Orwell and Eugene McCarthy are spinning in their graves, in opposite directions, of course.

LJ – I Hate George W. Bush A Lot

From 10/14/2003


I started on a particular jag in this post here about our wonderful selectident. This got me thinking about what we’ve pretty much come to accept as the truth when all you see is a kaliedoscope of lies coming from our government, that eventually the lies show fault lines and one can piece together bits of a roadmap to the truth.

I think everyone can agree that the entire campaign in Iraq was driven by two primary factors, the first being Greed, the lust for money stored as oil underneath Iraq; the second being Pride, the fact that our Selectident is a A-1 class wimp just like his father and to prove his masculinity needed to exercise his will upon the people of Iraq. We’ve watched as US Military Servicemen are killed, blown up, commit suicide, or go AWOL for this meaningless sandbox exercise. What first had the inklings of Vietnam is now just a REALLY expensive Vietnam – one could call this Vietnam II – more expensive and lacking in a ready supply of reason to fight.

We went to war in Iraq, at least in the adverts for the war, because Iraq wielded Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Nearly every civilized and industrialized country has WMD’s including the US, France, Britain, Israel, Pakistan, and India. We were told that Iraq had WMD just after Dick Cheney wrote up his still-obfuscated Energy Policy which upon lots of digging turned up analysis maps of oil reserves in Iraq shortly before the war. We were able to dupe ourselves that we are in Iraq to “Win the hearts and minds” and “Remove the WMD threat” and over time these threadbare lies started to show their seams – now we’re there for the oil and we’ll bleed as much as we need to to start the pumps and hook our Hummers up to the tap. Turns out that Iraq didn’t have any WMD at all, therefore there was zero real threat, just Saddam gallivanting around. We could have with our immense and well-paid Intelligence Services discovered the truth behind WMD, but instead we had allegations of WMD and a false report of Yellowcake from Africa. So we know we are literally dying for Iraq’s oil.

Now we’ve seen North Korea rant and rave about having WMD, in fact they have jumped onto the world stage and admitted to processing weapons-grade plutonium! To hell with Yellowcake from Africa! What are we doing in regards to North Korea? Absolutely nothing. I think it’s because there isn’t any easily exploitable natural resources in North Korea. We can’t find a hole to rape so why bother? Because our entire point was to unmask Saddam’s WMD (Which don’t exist) and that led us to an invasion and hostile occupation of Iraq – we are failing to invade and occupy North Korea.

I think our Selectident has sent hundreds of Americans to die, and impovershed the rest of us so that he could line the pockets of his profiteering oil-swine friends, to make them squeal with abject delight knowing that cash will be flowing like a mighty river. The inconsistency is the rub here, we go after Iraq for allegations of WMD, yet we ignore North Korea when they *admit* to having WMD. If logic is to persevere then we must plainly attack North Korea and then rebuild that country. I suspect we shall do no such thing. I would go on to suspect that we would have gone after Saudi Arabia much earlier if they didn’t have the necessary cash to buy us off – we won’t rape that hole, even if it’s gushing with crude oil.

So what is the bottom line? Bush, our selectident wasn’t popularly elected, he ruined the American Economy, he plunged us into an unwinnable war, he ordered American Servicemen to their deaths for personal profit, he defaced the American Flag, which is worse than burning it and it is a FEDERAL CRIME TO DO SO, he completely botched our relationship with The United Nations – he set an entire soverign country on fire – and committed each and every one of us to an atrocity of genocide against the Hussein family and more generally, anyone in Iraq who doesn’t lick our feet.

How to resolve this? The Selectident must be recalled. He must be impeached. He simply must not be allowed to acquire any more power whatsoever and he absolutely must not serve another term in office. He will ruin the United States and with his concentrated cowardice, fear, and lust for blood he will render unto the Earth a new kind of Corporate Hell – with fire and suffering for each and every American Citizen. Anyone who votes for Bush in 2004 is clearly voting to ruin whatever is left of our nation, our way of life, and our liberty.

LJ – What A Fool

From 9/26/2003


Our selectident is installed without the popular vote, he ruins the economy and plunges us into Vietnam II: Electric Bugaloo, tells us we’re there for Weapons of Mass Destruction then we find out there aren’t any. Then he says that Saddam Hussein is a vicious and horrible tyrant, one for which the United States loved while he was at war with Iran and for which we sent Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq back in the 80’s to have his picture taken shaking Saddam’s hand. Then the selectident declares genocide on the Hussein family, has Saddam’s sons perforated for their troubles and then saddles our beleaguered economy with supporting Iraq in the post-war “end of hostilities” era… only to find out that it costs a lot of money to put Humpty Dumpty Iraq back together again. Then our most esteemed selectident goes to the United Nations, the governing body that was declared irrelevant before the war, suddenly becomes frighteningly relevant after the war – our misleader walks up to the UN podium and instead of apologizing for a huge mistake, namely, mass-scale murder, he swaggers up to the podium and declares “If you aren’t with us, you are against us!” then walks off the stage.

Today I saw a headline that just made it all worth it:

Blow for U.S. as UN Staff Quit, Iraqi Leader Mourned

A U.S. army soldier guards the front of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, September 26, 2003. Mourners gathered in Baghdad for the funeral of a U.S.-appointed Iraqi leader Akila al-Hashemi assassinated by gunmen, as the United Nations pulled more staff out of the country following two suicide bomb attacks. (Ceewan Aziz/Reuters)

So, our selectident not only angers the world at large, but also pisses on the UN, then demands they help – and they leave. I can’t see any big surprises here at all. I can’t wait until they ask for another $100 Billion dollars for Iraq, and toss in the kicker, that it’ll take that same amount every 6 months for 5 years to give the poor Iraqi’s what they deserve.

Don’t get me started on what the poor Americans deserve… after all, we live in the lap of luxury and nobody is homeless, hungry, or out of work.