Category Archives: Rage

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

LJ – Network Hell

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From 5/20/2003

Now so much in the Arrgh department but in the Duh department I just discovered that some of my UA shirts that I like so much for my workouts are starting to show some erosion from the label on the shorts I’m wearing when I work out. The label is rough enough to really rub the surface of my shirts making them marred. This irks me.

What really gets me is something I came across while helping some people over at OIT install the new Groupwise system on our servers. The one tech complained that he couldn’t get files over to our DEV_1 server at all. I thought that was strange so when I got back to work I checked out the server and in 190 days of uptime it recorded 6 million alignment errors, 6 million frame errors, and 7 million collisions. At first I thought it was the drop cable, so I found another drop cable, tested it, tested good, then put it in. The server saw nothing different, still logging alignment and frame errors and collisions aplenty. I then took my handy-dandy Fluke NetTool and plugged it in between the server and the Cisco 2900XL switch. Klump-perthank-perklunk. The Fluke instantly started recording frame errors, collisions, and alignment errors on the left RJ jack, the jack heading to the switch. At this point I thought maybe I had a bad port, but I was a little leery about that because it was a brand new Cisco switch, to have a port go from hunky-dory to completely floppy like this was something I’ve never seen happen. I wandered about my Fluke tool’s display for a short bit to see if there was anything else I could notice and voila, there it was, small and out of the way, but I found that the switch (while capable of full duplex) was only set for half duplex, while my server was set for full duplex. What irks me is that this switch didn’t automatically shift from half to full as I thought all switches were designed to do, but just sat there for all this time piling up the errors I didn’t know were piling on because nobody complained. I think what really irks me is this fancy-dancy Cisco 2900XL switch is a *managed* switch, which means they can control the ports activities from remote. I would think that setting full duplex would be something so brainless that turning it to half-duplex would be a challenge. I can’t wait for what tomorrow brings, because I have a work order to have them fix it. One of the little things that I’m not allowed to do anymore is touch the networking gear on my own – that’s all handled by the university. God help us all.

Can you hear me now?

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When infrastructure fails, it takes an absurd amount of legwork to compensate. This is my story of this absurd compensation. I’m writing this now because I might as well, it’s not like I have anything I can actually do without this particular infrastructure.

My work computer used to be on the internet, now, not so much. No sites are really accessible so now I have to find another way onto the network, as my employer can’t manage. Although to their credit, they are trying to fix it, but this problem has plagued us for months if not years, so I’m not holding out much hope.

So, Ethernet is a complete loss. What else can we use? I have an unused 4G Verizon Pantech USB card here, so I plugged it in. Turns out I need VZAccess Manager to make it work properly. Still can’t access the network however! What is a geek to do? I set up my iPhone for Personal Hotspot and connect that way. It’s slower but I’m actually on the network now downloading VZAccess Manager from Verizon.

Then once that’s downloaded I’ll close my Personal Hotspot connection, install the software, then get the 4G modem up and running. A part of me laughs bitterly that I have to go to these lengths just for the basics of my job, but that’s the nature of this place. I’m not going to cast any aspersions on Western, I’m done with that. You only complain when there is some glimmer of hope that things may get better.

So that got me thinking, if we’re all having these problems and there are 42 of us, and these 4G cards cost 42 dollars a month, that’s $1,764.00 dollars a month for internet services that are more reliable than the local network at this University. So, do we pay a hefty monthly fee to Verizon to replace our network? Of course not! We’ll continue to struggle and make do with the network we have here, as useful or not as it is.

I just find it hilarious how far I have to go to access the network. I would laugh if I wasn’t crying so hard. Oh well.

LJ – Shrublet In Hell

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From 3/17/2003

Here we all sit, on the brink of war… and all I can think of is “We are a Nation of Peace” as a flying image, colliding with the notion that we are essentially going to flood the Euphrates and Tigris rivers with blood. We’re going to most likely bomb Iraq into the stone age – so much for being a nation of peace. I see Dubya’s new anti-war stance not as some honorable position but rather it’s the “Get the Hell out of Dodge” policy, that it’s just about Dubya and Saddam. Why don’t they simply just sit down like civilized people and try to bludgeon each other to death with their own hands? I’d go so far as to say that this may very well be Generation Y’s Vietnam. Our proud soldiers go off to fight some foreign battle and what of them when they come back? How many Vietnam Vets came back to a chilly America? How many “Rumble in the Sandbox” troops will come home facing a public that doesn’t believe in them because they fought a war against one single man and an idea? Where is good old fashioned 20th century thinking? Ah yes, right here in the enlightened 21st Century. I suppose it’s better to bomb Iraq into the stone age and create thousands more little Saddams than it would be in pursuing a more peaceful and more lucrative solution, say, flooding the middle east with American goodwill. Hah, fat chance of that happening now. The best way to battle terror is to blindly lash out, that way you can create destroy it with a war.

I sit back and think upon loftier thoughts because all of this depresses me, and I find my mind wandering towards what Jesus Christ said, that the solution was to not kill, but rather to forgive and to love. I find it quite engaging to hear Dubya invoke a God he is currently plotting on rendering moot. What footing does any good Christian have if they in good conscience allow this war to proceed, knowing that they have turned away from the teachings of their God because of laziness? It’s far easier to bomb and kill and murder than it is to forgive. I can just imagine the knot in the pit of the Pope’s stomach when the first bomb falls on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

In brighter news, the Yahoo! main page is a cavalcade of good news items:

  • Bush Says Saddam Has 48 Hours to Leave or It’s War
  • U.S. Raises Terror Alert Level Due to Iraq Crisis
  • U.S. Sees Signs Iraq May Use Chemical, Bio Arms
  • Turkey to Debate Helping U.S. on Tuesday
  • Annan Orders UN Staff Out of Iraq
  • Deadly Pneumonia Defies Global Health Experts
  • Charges Delayed in Elizabeth Smart Case

The part that particularly drew my attention was this one: * Deadly Pneumonia Defies Global Health Experts. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

Show Me Your Nuts

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Bolt

At work I have an older red hand-truck that has been used hard and left abandoned when it lost too many parts to be useful. My heart went out to the poor thing, unused and hated because it had only one quarter of the bolts needed to keep the deck together and the other side was supported by one of those little metal clasps that you often times see holding a stack of punched paper together.

This past week I resolved to repair this poor hated thing that was left ignored in the supply room here at work. I brought it into my office and removed the only real bolt that was holding the deck together and it was loose. The bolt itself turned out to be a square carriage bolt 5/16-14. Getting the bolt off was a bear because while it was very loose people still tried in-vain to use the hand-truck to lift objects and so the threads of the bolt were all mashed flat and dug up beyond recognition. I was able to grab the nut and bolt with pliers and wrench the two apart freeing the deck from the main body of the frame. Replacing the bolts was easy after I found the right kind and size. I even went so far as to get lock washers and place them on while tightening the nuts onto the bolts with the deck in place.

Everything worked well and I was able to fix the deck, as well as the axle since on the left-side the cotter-pin that held the hub onto the axle fell off and was replaced with yet another one of those circular paper clasps. The only other thing I had to fix for this were replacement casters so people could use the hand-truck as a standard hand-truck or flip the handle around and turn it into a kind of cart. I ordered replacement casters from Amazon.com and they arrived a few days ago. I went back to Lowes and tried to size out the casters because they weren’t 5/16-14.

As I stood there, in front of the mass of fasteners that Lowes carries it struck me how stupid all of it was. I stood back and marveled at the inclusion of both “english” and “metric” system bolts each with their own thread counts which only made things more murky. I was gratified that Lowes carried a 7/16-14 supply of nuts and lock washers. The logical part of me railed silently against all of this. Why the hell are there still “english” measures when not even the English use the “english” system?!? It’s just us, daft stupid Americans who cling to the concept of an inch, which means NOTHING to ANYONE except dullard Americans who refuse to adapt to the better metric system! I also railed against the various thread counts. Why the hell make the same size bolt but cut in different thread counts? IT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. Why not just standardize on metric bolts and say 5 threads per centimeter and leave it at that! I’m sure there is a mechanical engineer who might come out of the woodwork to tell me why higher thread counts are important. I call bullshit. Why not standardize on one singular measurement system and within that, one standard thread count density?

While standing there in front of all the fasteners I silently exclaimed “This is why we can’t colonize space, we’d die for a lack of 7/16-14 bolts!”

I paid for my parts and assembled the rest of the pieces of the hand-truck together and that’s it. I will likely never need to buy nuts and bolts again for years since very few things in my life actively use nuts and bolts. Computer parts are different. But it doesn’t mean that I find the stupidity any less outrageous!

Stop Fear, Stop Hate

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http://t.co/DRY1lzF9

This is what comes of blind obedience to religious dogma. Your children are GAY and your children are DYING!

We will never know who they might be. They might have cured cancer. Now nobody will know.

Your faith in the Bible is killing your children. They just want love and instead all they get is hate. Hate that kills.

Stop talking about Jesus Christ. He would have never accepted one child to die by THEIR OWN HANDS! If you love Jesus so very much then love your gay children and leave Leviticus to the JEWS!

It is time for an end. An end of hate, an end of suicide. You do not understand. GOD CREATED US GAY FOR HIS DESIGN! You are destroying children. There is no penance earnest enough to relieve the shame of a needless death.

So, if you hate gays then FIND ONE and hug him or her. See that we are not evil. We are your children, your friends, your loved ones. What do you think your GOD would say to you, upon meeting him or her? Would he or she congratulate you on your defending a book written by 2000 year old men with sexual maturity problems, or would your GOD weep at your bigotry, your hate, your baseless ignorance of the truth of your children’s lives. Well?

It is self-evident. Dead children are WRONG. WIll you all just wake up and get over your fears and grab your gay child and tell them that you love them permanently. Would you etch it in stone and carry that stone on your soul for the rest of your life? Your children are DYING and THEY DON’T HAVE TO!

Grow up and stop making God cry.

So Rude!

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Today at our local Meijer’s Market I witnessed something that set my teeth on edge and nearly had me speaking out. We were going down the cookie and cracker aisle and I witnessed a mother of two little girls pull up in a cart to where the wafer cookies were, the mother grabbed a cellophane-wrapped Meijer-brand version of the cookies, tore the wrapper off and handed the cookies to her puling children.

This isn’t the first time I’ve witnessed such behavior in Michigan. I’ve never in my life witnessed it in New York and I don’t know if it did happen there and I was just not cognizant enough to notice or if this is indeed a Michigan quirk. People have absolutely no qualms about grabbing a product off the shelf at the supermarket, opening it, and before they have checked out and paid for it, they begin to consume the product! I find this a very rude behavior and it drives me to distraction. You didn’t pay for it, at least not yet, so what gives you the right to just chaw into something? Can’t you wait until you leave the market before you feel the urge to shovel matter into your gaping maw? It doesn’t help that some of these people make that disgusting crunch-munch-gasp-goopy wet sound that comes with people who masticate in public. That alone drives me crazy! Please, for the love of god, either learn how to eat with decorum or eat somewhere else! Anyways, I witnessed this and I instantly thought that that mother was perpetuating two very bad things. First, that you can open a container in a supermarket and just go to town on it without paying for it and second, that her children will grow up spoiled rotten on instant gratification. They put their little prissy hands on their hips and screech and carry on and someone hands them a pack of wafer cookies to shut them up. It ruins the children and sets a bad precedent for normal behavior at the supermarket.

I don’t know if anyone else has witnessed this atrocious behavior where they are. I find it abhorrent and repellent. I can’t stand loud masticators and I really can’t stand such rudeness. Perhaps it has more to do with the idea that I don’t prefer to think of my fellow man as a rude lout with absolutely no manners at all – despite the notion that not everyone can have the same sense of decorum that I was raised with. I think what bothers me is that my sense of decorum shouldn’t be remarkably strict, it should be common!

I didn’t approach the mother and chide her for her bad parenting. I can attribute that to MY sense of decorum. At least one of us has it. Filthy rude loutish proles. Gah!